ANC provincial chair Oscar Mabuyane tops the party’s provincial list for its preferred public representatives – which serves as the strongest indication yet that he could become the province’s next premier.
On Sunday the party convened its list conference at East London City Hall to vote on the names on the list after branches, since September, consolidated their preferred candidates.
At the time of writing on Sunday voting had not yet commenced.
Mabuyane tops the province-to-province list, with a count of 424 out of 471 branches giving him the nod to serve as the party’s MPL come the 2019 elections, which promises to be hotly contested.
Although topping the list doesn’t necessarily mean that he automatically becomes premier, ANC provincial secretary Lulama Ngcukayitobi said the branches’ nod for Mabuyane showed that people had faith in his leadership capabilities.
“This means an affirmation of his leadership as the provincial chair. But the premier’s position will be a matter of deployment after the list conferences,” Ngcukayitobi said.
The party started its list nomination branch general meetings (BGMs) on September 25 and they ran throughout the province until November 29.
Speaking to the Daily Dispatch yesterday Ngcukayitobi said: “This is a meeting of delegates from branches and structures of the alliance to consolidate the list from branches. We have 148 names on the province-to-province list and 150 names on the province-to-national list.”
He said each delegate voted for 26 people for province-to-national and 63 for province-to-province.
“This process is a further demonstration of the ANC culture of transparency and openness in dealing with its internal processes,” Ngcukayitobi said.
“It is a further affirmation of participatory democracy within and among our ranks.” After finalising the province-to-province list, 25% of the top names remain as they are on the list and for province-to-national the top seven remain.
“With the others, we check to ensure that ANC principles apply in terms of gender balance, generational mix and representation of all regions, among other things.
“We are not starting a new term, we are continuing from the past 25 years in governance, that is why we have to look at those,” Ngcukayitobi said.
He said the list would be scrutinised to ensure there were no candidates with “scandals” and criminal records...