JOHANNESBURG - ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula has spoken publicly for the first time about the events leading to his collapse at the Constitutional Court last Thursday, saying the strain of a seven-week legal battle had weighed heavily on him.
Speaking at Luthuli House on Sunday, Mbalula described the pressure he had felt as the ANC fought to have 181 candidates reinstated on its lists for the November local government elections.
“I had carried something heavy for seven weeks,” Mbalula said.
“The thought that people in six municipalities might be handed a ballot paper that did not carry the party they had chosen … that thought sat on my chest every night. When the court spoke, the weight came off all at once, and the body did what the body does,” he said.
Mbalula collapsed during a media briefing at the Constitutional Court after the ANC won its legal battle against the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) over its candidate lists.
The court upheld the party’s appeal against the exclusion of 181 candidates, paving the way for them to appear on the ballot in the November polls.
Mbalula said he had been given a clean bill of health and was ready to return to work.
“The doctors have examined me thoroughly and I’m fit as a fiddle. I have rested. Now the ground is calling my name,” he said.
He also thanked those who had supported the party during its legal battle.
“In this country, we do not fight only with papers and arguments. We are carried by our people, and we felt them,” he said.
Mbalula maintained that a failure in the IEC’s electronic system had prevented the ANC from completing the submission of its candidate lists.
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“Before 5pm on 28 August, the ANC placed the names of its candidates on the Electoral Commission’s system. Every name, every document, every deposit paid in six municipalities. The final step on that system did not complete. Not a form, not a document,” he said.
He argued that the 181 candidates had effectively been treated as though they had never been nominated.
Mbalula said the ANC’s argument was that the party had complied with the law and should not be penalised because of a technical requirement in the IEC’s system.
“Our argument was simple. The law says what a party must do. A button inside a computer programme is not the law. It appears in no act, no regulation, no government gazette. A blood our people bled for cannot be taken away by a screen design,” he said.
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