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The minister has been caught in a social media dispute with MKMVA spokesman Carl Niehaus after describing those demonstrating earlier in the week as bullies.
Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula speaks in the Western Cape lekgotla taxi in Cape Town on October 15, 2020. Image: @ MbalulaFikile / Twitter
JOHANNESBURG – The member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) and Transport Minister of the African National Congress (ANC), Fikile Mbalula, said on Friday that he “had no other choice but to attack.”
Mbalula, during a virtual engagement with the ANC in the Moses Mabhida region of KwaZulu-Natal, said that it could never be that members of the ANC or Umkhonto we Sizwe asked for the arrest of a minister sent by the party to the government.
The minister has been caught in a social media dispute with MKMVA spokesman Carl Niehaus after describing those demonstrating earlier in the week as bullies.
He went to call Niehaus a thug and MKMVA president Kebby Maphatsoe a suspected criminal.
During his evening talk on Wednesday, the minister said that he understood that some would disagree with him, but that he had no other choice.
He said he saw himself as “a man in the eye of the storm” after a week of making headlines in what some have described as a collapse on Twitter.
He told attendees of the virtual engagement that he was attacking a trend and had no choice but to respond.
“And I attacked harder from where I came because they attacked me from where they deployed me.”
Mbalula, who held back very little and joked about sounding like US President Donald Trump during the engagement, told participants that this storm would still continue.
The minister said he did not have a personal agenda, but was simply carrying out what the ANC wanted him to do.
“If people want something from me, they should talk to the ANC and that will solve it. That’s.”
Niehaus has indicated that he will go the legal route to challenge Mbalula’s statements.
SA UNDER RESOLUTION NASREC
Mbalula added that South Africa was experiencing a Nasrec revolution.
He said the latest action by law enforcement and the state capture commission was part of the party renewal project adopted at the 2017 Nasrec elective conference.
This is where President Cyril Ramaphosa narrowly defeated Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to become the party chairman and ultimately number one in the country.
A long, hard look at the ruling party has left Mbalula certain that it is some of the party’s leaders who were destroying the ANC.
Without mentioning his general secretary in whom Mbalula expressed lack of faith, he warned members to separate people from the party.
“If Mbalula has faced difficulties with the law, support Mbalula but do not bring the ANC.”
Mbalula said the ANC set high standards for itself at the 2017 elective conference, but it seemed like it was starting to back off from that somehow, again warning that it would rather have people treated and the organization left alone.
“And if that means we have to deal with each other and save the ANC, let it be.”
He also recognized that attempts to suppress corruption are part of the ANC’s great mission to renew itself.
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