Former President Thabo Mbeki campaigning for the ANC.
Former President Thabo Mbeki has sliced into his successor ex-president Jacob Zuma during his address in Freedom Park in Tshwane while reflecting on 30 years of democracy.
Mbeki who has been campaigning for the ANC has labelled Zuma a counterrevolutionary and a wolf in a sheep’s skin who sabotaged the country nearly to the brink of collapse with his allies who had also destroyed the South African Revenue Service (SARS). He said the State Capture Report suggested that Zuma was reckless and destroyed the country’s economy.
“This provides us with a conundrum. Here, according to the judicial commissions, we have a head of government (referring to Zuma) who joins a process to reduce the very revenues he needs to enable the government to discharge its responsibilities, up to the point of the possible collapse of that government. How do we explain this puzzle? The only logical way to explain this is, as challenging as it might be even to comprehend, here we are dealing with a wolf in sheep’s skin,” Mbeki said.
Earlier, Mbeki didn’t mince his words when lambasting Zuma and his new political toy uMkhonto weSizwe party.
He said you can’t campaign for the MK party then you say you are still a member of the ANC. Mbeki took a swipe at Zuma and his MK allies saying that these are the very same people who tried to bring the SARS down.
Zuma was fingered by the Zondo Commission for being the mastermind behind State Capture following his relationship with the controversial Gupta family who milked the State purse without trepidation.
Mbeki shared his concerns at the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs talk hosted by the University of South Africa.
According to Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, Zuma and his cronies captured SARS.
“It is a notable feature of the SARS evidence, in contrast to the rest of the evidence which the commission heard, that this is one of the few instances where President Zuma was himself directly and personally involved in the activities and plans to take over a government entity, namely, Sars,” according to the report.
Mbeki urged South Africans to analyse the kind of people they’re voting for on 29 May in order to understand the kind of South Africa they will be living in after the elections.
“I think this is the distinction that we need to make, even in the context of voting on 29 May. I think we need to understand that context in order to understand who we are voting for. Who are these people? The Zondo Commission continued and looked again at the SARS issue, they looked at the Nugent Commission on SARS, in fact continued from where Nugent left off, and said "we agree with what that commission said, but we’re going to look at the same question again.”
“Among the conclusions, on the SARS matter, says: ‘One of the people who played a leading role in the efforts to destroy SARS was the president of the Republic of South Africa’. That’s a strange conclusion. Fortunately, I was not president at the time,” Mbeki concluded.
As tension mounts prior to the elections, President Cyril Ramaphosa also labelled his predecessor Zuma and his crony former ANC secretary general Ace Magashule losers who will not emerge victorious after the general elections this year.
Ramaphosa was responding to Zuma and Magashule statements insinuating that the ANC has been rigging the votes in order to remain the ruling party in the country. Zuma publicly threatened the ruling party that if his new political party uMkhonto weSizwe doesn’t get a two-thirds majority vote then the country will be subjected to instability which will give birth to calamity. His ally Magashule echoed Zuma as well, saying that there will be no “vote rigging” now that he will be contesting the upcoming elections under his own party, the African Congress for Transformation (ACT).
The two former ANC senior leaders' public spats raised eyebrows of the masses which questioned the credibility of the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC).
Magashule who was campaigning in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal who could not substantiate his claims when asked if the ANC had been rigging votes during his tenure as the party’s secretary general said: “We are going to win elections, we’re very confident. There is not going to be any rigging of elections. Our eyes are open because we know I've been part of the ANC, and we know what’s going to happen. We, as black parties, have learned and we have agreed that we are not going to allow any elections to be rigged.”
Ramaphosa said Zuma’s claims are unbecoming and he remains perplexed that the man who participated in various elections could utter such bunkum. He urged Magashule and Zuma to refrain from spreading false anecdotes because they know that the IEC processes and systems are transparent therefore it will be disingenuous to think that vote rigging is possible. Ramaphosa known to his supporters as “The Buffalo” also warned Zuma and Magashule that South Africa is not a banana republic that will allow anarchism to threaten the right of the people as a democratic nation therefore those who think they can enforce a two-thirds majority vote undemocratically they won’t succeed with their selfish intentions.
“It smacks of the type of talk that losers will always want to accuse the process because they know that they are not going to be winners or successful. We trust the IEC system that is enshrined in our constitution in our laws. We will accept any outcome because we know that it is transparent. The IEC system is one of the best in the world therefore we remain adamant that there is no vote rigging,” said Ramaphosa.
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