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Thabo Mbeki speaking at the Veterans’ inaugural conference in Bloemfontein.
Former African National Congress (ANC) president Thabo Mbeki says he has called on the new leadership of the Umkhonto WeSizwe Liberation War Veterans to advise the party on how to deal with what he terms counter-revolutionaries.
He was speaking at the veterans’ inaugural conference in Bloemfontein.
Mbeki says the counter-revolutionaries had wrongly predicted that the ANC would cease to exist after the 2021 local government elections.
“You have a mayhem that happened in 2021. It was said that people were angry that the ANC … because the ANC had allowed the Constitutional Court to sentence Jacob Zuma, and he was going to go to jail … that was a complete lie; it was the counter-revolutionary testing its strength to see if they can destabilise the country. It then acted to cause that whole mayhem,” says Mbeki.
uMkhonto weSizwe Liberation War Veterans conference under way in Bloemfontein:
Meanwhile, the Electoral Commission is overseeing the nomination for the leadership of the veterans, which is currently under way.
The establishment of the veterans’ body is as a result of the disbandment of the Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans’ Association in June 2021.
The decision is part of a broader move to address factionalism.
Additional members are also expected to be elected after the formal voting for the top seven.
Comrade President Thabo Mbeki opened Day 2 of the MKLWV Conference with a reflective note, warning of counter-revolutionary forces and the active role they played in weakening and destroying state-owned entities as a strategy to disempower the ANC. His intervention reaffirmed the… pic.twitter.com/0Bwz1XdXeO
— ANCLimpopo (@ANCLimpopo) January 17, 2026
