The Democratic Alliance (DA)’s Helen Zille said that the African National Congress (ANC)’s sudden withdrawal of its Electoral Court application was bizarre and she’s demanding an explanation from the party.
The Democratic Alliance
The ANC petitioned the court to reopen its registration process after failing to meet the deadline for parties to register all its candidates for the upcoming elections.
Critics, including Zille, are questioning whether the party was tipped off about the Constitutional Court’s imminent ruling on whether next month’s elections will be postponed.
No one has provided any evidence to back up the speculation and the ANC has strongly denied being tipped off.
But Zille said that she smelled a rat: “They need to explain what that was so that South Africans understand why they did it. It’s important for a number of reasons: a deadline is a deadline, they didn’t have full a ward complement for 93 of 200 and something municipalities in South Africa. That is a huge amount and no matter how incompetent you have to be to miss a deadline for 93 municipalities but there you have it.”
Zille shared the allegation on her social media platform this week while commenting on an article published by the Afrikaans publication Die Burger.
“If information is leaking from the ConCourt to the ANC, it is nothing short of a constitutional crisis.
“If this is so, cadre deployment will have destroyed every institution, right up to the ConCourt, turning them into instruments of ANC power abuse, rather than protectors of the people against ANC power abuse. That is the crisis we are facing now. South Africans must wake up,” she wrote in a lengthy post.
Zille said the ruling party must explain what changed in the few hours between the submission of its application and its withdrawal if it wants people to believe they made a “good faith” decision.
Attempts to get additional comment from Zille were unsuccessful at the time of publishing this article. Any updates will be included once received.
Responding to the claims in a statement, ANC national spokesperson Pule Mabe said the claims shared by Zille were “malicious and baseless”.