Load shedding and the tampering of delegate lists were blamed for the delays at the ANC's 55th national elective conference, which kicked off at Nasrec, south of Johannesburg, on Friday.
Nominations of candidates who were to contest for the new leadership of the party had not taken place by Saturday afternoon, despite having been scheduled for the first day of the conference.
Delegate registration had not yet been completed by Saturday afternoon, and some could not be part of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s opening address or the organisational report that was delivered by ANC outgoing Deputy President David "DD" Mabuza.
The ANC’s deputy head of organising, Dakota Legoete, blamed load shedding and "chance-takers," who were accused of tampering with delegate lists.
"The glaring challenge for all these delays would have been the national crisis of load shedding, because of Stage 6 we had to lose four to eight hours of our production time that was eaten by load shedding.
"But besides that, some of our provinces were disorganised because some of them were tampering with the master list of the delegates. We had to do an audit and re-audit to check against the BGM reports including what we had on our i-cloud system of the ANC in terms of who is the actual delegate,“ he said.
Legoete said some delegates "took chances" by trying to sneak into the conference without having been accredited.
"There were chance-takers. Somebody would come masquerading as a real delegate. When they realise that the real delegate is not here, they would bring a copy of the delegate’s ID with a letter that that particular delegate cannot attend, but when you do a verification process with the real delegate, you find out that the real delegate was not even informed," Legoete said.
He added that even though some members were not part of the conference, reports that were already delivered would not be adopted until the adoption of credentials was completed.
"For any report to be properly adopted, properly discussed can only be done once credentials are adopted," Legoete said.
Pretoria News