Western Cape ANC’s much-awaited conference could not commence on Friday as party leaders were tasked to sort out accommodation issues. But a number of delegates were unhappy claiming the failure to proceed on Friday was political and meant to collapse the gathering. At about 10.30pm, provincial convenor Lerumo Kalako announced that some delegates didn’t have accommodation as their hotel rooms were occupied by the so-called “friends of delegates”.
In the ANC, friends of delegates are party members who are not necessarily conference delegates but hang around conference venues lobbying support for their preferred candidates. Delegates of the three-day conference only arrived at the conference venue just before 9pm for dinner and moved to the conference hall around 10pm for the expected start of the programme. Instead after about 20 minutes of singing, Kalako addressed the gathering announcing that, “Comrades are sitting in hotels. The problem they are creating is that some of them are friends of delegates”.Kalako said he was confronted by voting delegates from the Boland and Overberg whose rooms were occupied by other people.
Kalako said ANC staff had told him that no hotel keys had been distributed to candidates.“The problem is why are there others inside there?”
Kalako called on regional secretaries to walk with him to all the hotel rooms “and take everybody in the room down and sort them out with the hotels’ staff”.
A number of delegates heckled him, objecting to his statement and waving keys to their hotel rooms.
He did not entertain their objections saying he was busy with housekeeping issues and that the conference hasn’t officially started.He then postponed the opening of the conference to Saturday morning.
TimesLIVE
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