A court case challenging the election of Loyiso Masuku as the ANC’s Johannesburg chairperson has been struck off the court roll.
- The Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg has thrown out Stanley Itshegetseng’s bid to have Loyiso Masuku’s election as the ANC Greater Johannesburg chairperson overturned.
- Judge Wilhelmina du Plessis ruled that Itshegetseng bypassed the ANC’s internal processes, and struck the matter off the court roll.
- Itshegetseng plans to escalate the matter to the Constitutional Court.
An attempt to have the December election of Loyiso Masuku as the ANC Greater Johannesburg region chairperson overturned has fallen flat after the Gauteng High Court struck the matter off the court roll.
According to Judge Wilhelmina du Plessis, Stanley Itshegetseng, who is also Mayor Dada Morero’s advisor, did not invoke any of the formal dispute mechanisms as prescribed by the ANC’s constitution and guidelines.
“The ANC constitution provides a multi-tiered internal dispute resolution architecture (moving from branch to regional to provincial to national structures, with dedicated dispute bodies). The applicant is an experienced party member who, even on his own version and papers, is familiar with the constitutional scheme.
“Yet, he did not invoke any of the formal dispute mechanisms as prescribed by the ANC constitution and guidelines,” Du Plessis wrote in her judgment.
Itshegetseng approached the court on an urgent basis earlier in March to block the regional executive committee (REC) from exercising its powers. At the time, speculation was rife that the REC had moved to recall Morero as the mayor.
The ANC later made it clear that the REC had no such right.
In his court papers, Itshegetseng alleged that there were serious irregularities in the way in which the conference election was conducted.
He claimed there was a conflict of interest on the part of the EMCA (the elections agency), that there was a failure to announce the results at the conference, and that there was a post-conference alteration of the results to give effect to gender parity.
He also cited the subsequent discovery of opened ballot papers from the conference at the home of one of the EMCA officials.
Itshegetseng told News24 on Tuesday that he was consulting with his attorneys on the way forward.
He said he conceded that he had not exhausted the ANC’s internal dispute resolution mechanisms as he reported the matter to his branch, skipped the REC, and copied the party’s provincial bosses in his complaint.
He added that his complaints were ignored.
Itshegetseng added:
It cannot be justice, this thing. It’s a travesty of justice and believe you me I am part of this ANC. I’m not going to allow that nonsense and leave it. I will pursue this thing to the Constitutional Court.
He also said the costs order was not a problem because he had prepared for it.
In her judgment on 27 March, Du Plessis wrote that instead of exhausting internal ANC processes, Itshegetseng addressed correspondence to the party’s secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula, followed by a letter, through his attorneys, to a provincial office-bearer.
“While those letters reflect his dissatisfaction and the seriousness with which he viewed the alleged irregularities, they did not trigger the dispute-resolution machinery contemplated by the party’s rules.
“The applicant’s explanation that he did not use the prescribed structures because his letters were not acknowledged or answered cannot assist him,” she said.
She added that he had not set out any steps to formally lodge a complaint in the manner required by the ANC’s rules, and did not show that any competent internal body refused to entertain it, unreasonably delayed it once seized with it, or otherwise rendered the internal remedies ineffective.
“In my view, in this case, it is not sufficient to merely state that no internal remedies need be pursued. To hold that a member may side-step the carefully designed dispute structures by writing to an inappropriate functionary, waiting for a relatively long period, and then effectively declaring those structures unnecessary by launching an urgent application, would undermine the internal constitutional order of the voluntary association that the courts are required to respect.
“I therefore find that, on these facts, the applicant has not exhausted the available internal processes and has not advanced cogent reasons why those remedies were unavailable, inadequate, or futile. The application is, in that sense, premature,” Du Plessis wrote.
However, she accepted that Itshegetseng had acted out of a genuine concern for the integrity of his party’s internal democracy and electoral processes.
“That concern, however sincere, cannot override his obligation to adhere to the internal dispute-resolution mechanisms prescribed by the ANC constitution and guidelines themselves, to which the applicant bound himself upon becoming a member.
“The matter, therefore, must be struck from the roll. The application is struck from the roll, with costs on the ordinary party-and-party scale,” Du Plessis added.
