Humiliating Zuma is last thing we want: Ramaphosa

ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa appealed to the ANC’s National Executive Committee meeting on Friday not to humiliate his predecessor Jacob Zuma‚ which paved the way for a consensus decision on Zuma’s early exit from office.

Ramaphosa repeated the statement he made public earlier just before the ANC’s NEC began a discussion on Zuma’s removal from office.

In delivering his political remarks to the meeting‚ Ramaphosa said humiliating Zuma was the last thing they wanted.

This set the tone for the discussion which eventually resolved that the ANC top six officials should manage a process that should lead to Zuma’s resignation from office.

“We have a number of challenges‚ but we have been given a lot of levers by our conference. The mood in our country is what we should capitalise on. We should use this mood to go forward‚” Ramaphosa said in remarks prepared for delivery.

He told the NEC that the party’s leadership must “quickly arrest the triumphalism of the few who wrongly believe that they won at Nasrec as well as the victimhood of the few who wrongly believe they lost”.

“If we have not done so already‚ we need to urgently disband any pre-conference groupings that had coalesced around certain candidates. We should not shy away from the reality that some in our structures are still holding on to their pre-conference identities‚ either as CR17 or NDZ‚” Ramaphosa said.

He pointed out that some leaders dislike each other‚ adding that they ought to stop this.