ANC rejects Sunday Times article on NWC visit to KZN

25 August 2024

The African National Congress (ANC) has noted a Sunday Times article making misleading claims about decisions of the National Working Committee meeting with the KwaZuIu Natal Provincial Executive Committee on 19 August 2024. The headline and first paragraph of the article make a categorical claim about the meeting to the effect that the National Working Committee "stripped the Provincial Executive Committee of its powers."

This claim is a serious falsehood and should not have been the running headline of that article. There was no stripping of any powers of the PEC by the NWC. The justification relied upon for this false claim in the article is the word of so-called "insiders who attended the NWC's meeting with the PEC on Monday."

Some four paragraphs later, after having made this categorical claim, the article belatedly reveals that "however, some NWC insiders said the PEC was not necessarily stripped of its powers..."

If two sets of so-called insiders are giving contradictory claims about the same meeting, all of them claiming to have been inside the same meeting, it is difficult to understand why the journalists elected to go on the word of the one group of claimants against the other — especially without checking with the Secretary-General's Office to ascertain which claim is any closer to the truth than the other.

The ANC has standardized a practice of issuing written memoranda to its structures on decisions made and supplementing such memoranda with press statements. We are also generally forthcoming to colleagues in the media about political and organisational decisions, once taken. We appeal to journalists to protect the integrity of their work by not running with falsehoods without verification.

Issued by Zuko Godlimpi, acting national spokesperson, ANC, 26 August 2024