We will discipline Zuma after the elections: Mantashe

ANC national chair Gwede Mantashe says disciplinary action will be taken against former president Jacob Zuma — who has launched the MK party while claiming he remains a member of the ruling party — after the 2024 national and provincial elections.

Zuma announced last month he will not campaign or vote for the ANC, though he remained a member of the ruling party.

Mantashe said this week Zuma was playing political games and knew his time with the ANC was over by working for a different party.   

“He knows he cannot be a member of the ANC and vote, campaign for something else. He knows he was the president of the ANC,” he told Radio 702.

Mantashe cautioned that taking action now couldaffect the party’s campaign. 

“When people ask me for advice on this issue I say, ‘let us focus on the work of the ANC. If you put life into that [disciplining Zuma] it can derail you from the campaign of the ANC,” he said.

“Record [the] activities of Zuma; at a correct point you call him to [a] disciplinary, basically to formalise that he has walked away from the ANC. Zuma took action and he knows he has broken his membership of the ANC. The ANC will have to formalise that. It will be attended to later. He will be disciplined later.”

While the ANC leadership believes that Zuma’s MK party campaign marked his exit, the former president insists he remains a member.

Zuma addressed a crowd in Pietermaritzburg earlier this month and said: “I will vote for MK, but I will not leave the ANC, I will die there. The ANC is different from other political parties. It was built by our ancestors, religious leaders and intellectuals as a party opposing white people who did not want us to have rights.”

Not long thereafter some ANC members attending the ruling party’s founding anniversary at Mbombela Stadium in Mpumalanga paraded a makeshift coffin bearing the words “RIP Zuma”.

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