Radebe warns against blind loyalty in the ANC

The minister in the presidency and the organisation’s head of its national disciplinary appeals committee, Jeff Radebe, has warned ANC members against blind loyalty where members do not question anything in the party.

Radebe says that while late ANC president Oliver Tambo demanded loyalty from former liberation movement members, he despised blind loyalty.

“As one of the cardinals that we learned from OR Tambo, it was that we must be leaders of unquestionable loyalty, but we must always avoid blind loyalty without questioning,” Radebe said.

Radebe, who was delivering the OR Tambo lecture to members of the ANC Midvaal Zone in Vereeniging on Sunday, warned that members should evaluate the state of the ANC today against the values and principles that Tambo and many other leaders espoused.

He described the former ANC leader in exile as a “colossal figure” who had wisdom and was a “selfless cadre”, a “man of integrity”, a “loyal cadre” of the movement and a “leader who listened and valued even diverse opinions”.

“He was the glue that held all the various strands of the National Democratic Revolution together,” Radebe said.

As a visionary leader, Tambo was to anticipate the kind of challenges the ANC was to face as a governing party as opposed to a liberation movement.

“He wanted us to be ready for transition and confront the challenges of governance. He sounded the alarm bells to the ANC cadres in Angola in 1977 that it would be more difficult to keep power than to wage a liberation struggle war,” Radebe said.

“Tambo gave us the forewarning that political freedom is meaningless without economic freedom. It is for this reason that we need all hands on deck in our endeavour to promote inclusive growth and transform the South African economy for the benefit of all, not some people,” Radebe said.

He said Tambo, who died after a few years of suffering a stroke, was wary of those who joined the ANC to pursue their own parochial interests at the expense of the movement.

– ericn@citizen.co.za