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Oscar Mabuyane never had ambitions of becoming the ANC’s Eastern Cape chairperson, but was drawn into the leadership contest when Andile Lungisa’s supporters approached him, he says.
“Some elements” in the party spoke to him before formal lobbying started, ahead of the party’s provincial elective conference in October last year.
Lungisa denied this.
According to Mabuyane: “They came to me from Port Elizabeth, asked me to avail myself as chair, on condition that I agree that Andile Lungisa would be the secretary.
“I said that I don’t do those kinds of things and I have never done them before, and that it is regions and branches that elect leadership. They left and went to the other side and started something else to counter that.
“The only thing they wanted was for Lungisa to be secretary.”
Mabuyane said his troubles started after he rejected their proposal.
He denied claims that the provincial conference in East London, at which he was elected chairperson, was illegal.
Supporters of the ousted chairperson, Eastern Cape Premier Phumulo Masualle, have gone to court in a bid to have the conference declared invalid.
The event was marred by a brawl between the Mabuyane and Masualle supporters. They threw chairs at each other, leading to President Cyril Ramaphosa calling it a “a festival of chairs”.
Mabuyane said their preparations for the conference were meticulous and done by the book and that no court of law could change its outcome.
He said the Masualle supporters knew they did not have numbers to win the conference and, as a result, disrupted it.
He described Lungisa as rapacious.
Lungisa said Mabuyane did not know the meaning of the word. He said people who campaigned for Mabuyane in Nelson Mandela Bay were his (Mabuyane’s) friends.
Lungisa is currently out on bail of R10 000 pending the outcome of his appeal against his conviction and two-year jail sentence for assault.
He said Mabuyane lacked political substance.
“I have not heard his vision for the province. What I normally come across is that he is a person who is always complaining. Even when he was the secretary of the province, he always plays the victim.”
They were following the proper channels in challenging the outcome of the conference.
“If you are talking about us, the people who were not happy about the conference, we have raised our issue internally. We are not the ones who go around talking about ANC internal matters with the media. We are waiting for the officials of the ANC, as directed by the national executive committee (NEC), to come to the Eastern Cape and find a political solution, guided by the Sbu Ndebele report.”
After the conference, Masualle approached the NEC, which appointed Ndebele, a former KwaZulu-Natal premier, to investigate. In his report, he recommended that the Eastern Cape ANC’s executive be disbanded and that new elections be held.
Lungisa said he did not see anything wrong with aggrieved comrades approaching the courts. However, he and others unhappy with the outcome of the conference had raised their concerns with party structures.
Last month, the Port Elizabeth Magistrates’ Court sentenced Lungisa to in effect two years’ jail for assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm. He broke a glass jug over the head of former Nelson Mandela Bay mayoral committee head Rano Kayser during a fight in a council meeting in October 2016.
The court denied him leave to appeal his conviction and sentence. He then asked to approach the Grahamstown High Court for leave to appeal.
