* Deep ANC rifts pulling party apart – opposition leader
* DA gaining steady ground
* Zille says Zuma second-term “sewn up”
By Ed Cropley and Peroshni Govender
JOHANNESBURG, Nov 4 (Reuters) – South Africa’s ruling party
will fracture before the decade is out, pulled apart by tension
between big business and labour that was laid bare by three
months of mining unrest, opposition leader Helen Zille said.
In an interview with Reuters, Democratic Alliance (DA)
leader Zille said the unprecedented mining turmoil, including
the police killing of 34 strikers at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum
mine in August, had exposed unsustainable contradictions in
Nelson Mandela’s 100-year-old African National Congress.
She attacked the veteran liberation movement that has ruled
South Africa since the end of apartheid as “essentially a
patronage-driven party”, with those at the centre keeping power
by controlling access to lucrative government contracts.
It would be impossible for the ANC to keep organised labour
and communists under the same roof as mega-wealthy
post-apartheid industrialists such as Cyril Ramaphosa, a top ANC
decision-maker and one of Lonmin’s biggest shareholders.
“The next five, six, seven years, up to 2019, will see the
ANC come apart. It can’t encapsulate and hold together those
divergent ideologies in one coherent political party,” Zille
said in the interview late on Friday.
Continued…
