The ANC Veterans’ League insists that it would not condone stupidity and corruption, nor accept the ‘unholy and unethical coalition’ with the EFF, according to News24.
The league’s new leadership was announced over the weekend during a three-day national conference in Boksburg.
They resolved that the governing party should break its power-sharing agreements with the red berets at the local government level.
The league’s newly elected president, Snuki Zikalala, said: ‘We must relook the unholy [and] unethical coalition with the EFF because it doesn’t benefit us as the organisation, and it doesn’t benefit our communities’.
Mavuso Msimang, who was elected deputy president, said the younger generation had to accept that the elders were not working out of self-interest when they spoke out against errant behaviour.
‘If we can’t deal with the corrupt among us, we will lose the confidence of the country – we’ll lose credibility. Ours will be a voice of conscience’, Msimang said.
‘But if [the NEC] continue not to heed [our advice], we have a responsibility to South Africans. As someone who joined the ANC in 1958, I don’t want to go meekly and follow something stupid because it is endorsed by the organisation. It is not going to happen at all.
‘We don’t want the public to think that we condone anything stupid or corrupt.’
Anti-apartheid icon, Sophie de Bruyn, is the sole survivor of the leaders who led the national women’s march on 9 August 1956 to Pretoria’s Union Buildings.
She said: ’You are the veterans – the backbone – of this organisation. As infirm as you are, as unsteady as you are, you are showing this movement… that you are still there, and you will always be there for this movement’.