Radebe says ANC will call 200 members named by Zondo to account

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The ANC must confront the adverse findings in the Zondo state capture report head-on and will haul its 200 members named in it before the party’s integrity committee, national executive committee member Jeff Radebe said on Friday.

“In the report from Chief Justice Raymond Zondo there are about 200 names that look familiar to the ANC, so we are now doing a verification process in order to ensure that we provide these names both to the SG’s [secretary general’s] office as well as to the integrity committee,” he told journalists at the party’s 6th national policy conference.

“I actually expect that the topic will be widely debated in this policy conference because it affects the ANC directly.

“As we have seen in the Zondo report, the ANC is also mentioned in very unsettling terms, so our responsibility and duty as leaders and members of the ANC is to confront this issue frontally and come out with proposals as to how we can improve our situation,” Radebe added.

Zondo found that the governing party enabled state capture by turning a blind eye to grand corruption that bled the state dry under the Jacob Zuma administration.

Among those named in Zondo’s six-part report are key allies of President Cyril Ramaphosa, including Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe and Deputy State Security Minister Zizi Kodwa, who accepted gifts respectively from companies Bosasa and EOH.

Ramaphosa’s claims that he resisted state capture from within while he was Zuma’s deputy in government did not fully convince Zondo, but he is not accused of impropriety and it is expected that a resolution to act on the recommendations in the report will survive the conference where he is fighting to contain the fallout of the Phala Phala scandal.

Analysts said this week support for the state capture commission was a relatively easy part of the president’s ANC renewal drive to maintain, although they do not expect the party to act at speed to implement its recommendations in the run-up to its national elective conference in December.

Ramaphosa earlier this week appeared before the integrity committee, as he promised to do to account for the so-called farmgate scandal around a 2020 theft at his Phala phala game farm in Limpopo.

But, according to insiders, he declined to answer questions on the subject and the tense meeting was adjourned.Committee chairperson George Mashamba told the Mail & Guardian: “The committee will meet after the policy conference to discuss a way forward and if we need to call him again.”