Women's League wants answers about axing of ANC leaders in KZN

ANC Women's League president Bathabile Dlamini has told President Cyril Ramaphosa that the organisation wants to meet the party's KwaZulu-Natal leadership over the removal of women from office.

This came just a few hours after the party in KZN announced the removal of eThekwini mayor Zandile Gumede. Without mentioning Gumede by name, Dlamini said she was not happy about how easy it was to remove women leaders.

She was addressing an event organised by the Women's League, dubbed Conversation with the President, held in Johannesburg on Tuesday.

Gumede is seen as a close ally of former president Jacob Zuma and part of the so-called "RET forces" faction in the ANC which Dlamini is also understood to be part of. RET is an acronym of Radical Economic Transformation.

"We are going to meet with KZN officials... [we are] very unhappy about the culture of making it easy to remove women [from] positions of power," said Dlamini.

She said women in the party were not demanding positions in the party because they wanted to be looked at as high flyers.

Dlamini said they wanted the ANC to be consistent.

She said it should not be easy for the ANC to ask women leaders to step aside while it did not do the same with male leaders.

Dlamini further warned the ANC about the new generation of women leaders, who, she said, were likely to form their own feminist organisation in the near future.

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