ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba has said the party will only hold its elective conference after next year’s general elections, and the elected provincial chairpersons will appoint their leadership teams, not the organisation’s branches, reported News24.
Mashaba added that ActionSA aimed to launch branches in 60% of South Africa’s 4 468 wards by next year’s elections, before heading to an elective conference to choose the party’s leaders.
ActionSA’s senate empowered Mashaba to recruit and appoint the party’s nine provincial chairpersons, including selecting the people who he believed would be premier candidates at next year’s polls.
ActionSA decided to hold its elective conference next year because the 2024 national polls were the party’s priority before electing its leaders.
He said the party would elect its president and nine provincial chairpersons, who would all select their own teams. These would be endorsed by the party’s senate.
‘We don’t want to sit with a situation where you are the president, and the branches elect your adversary – someone you know very well that you’re not friends [with], they elect that person as your deputy or your secretary-general’, Mashaba added.
‘The senate and our current [interim] Constitution gave me the powers, as the president of [ActionSA], to look at quality [and] ethical people to be provincial chairpersons.
‘And [the] senate has also endorsed the president to be responsible for headhunting premier candidates’. Mashaba said it was a ‘rigorous process’.