IFP moves Hlabisa to parliament:
Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) president Velenkosini Hlabisa has been moved to the National Assembly to take up the seat vacated by the death of party founder, Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
Hlabisa had previously stated that he preferred to remain in KwaZulu-Natal, where he had been serving as leader of the opposition, and be the premier candidate for next year’s national and provincial elections.
However the IFP’s national council on Monday decided to deploy Hlabisa to parliament, a move seemingly aimed at averting conflict between him and KwaZulu-Natal provincial chairperson Thami Ntuli over the premier candidate position.
The two had been vying for the candidacy for several months, with the subsequent tension causing a bid by 20 members of the IFP national council to force a vote of no confidence in his leadership earlier this year.
They failed, but the IFP appears to have taken heed of the tension, and its potential to derail the party’s election campaign, and removed both Hlabisa and Ntuli from the equation — at least until the party’s process to nominate who it wants to send to parliament and the legislatures early next year.
Ntuli will remain mayor of the King Cetshwayo district municipality, with IFP national chairperson Blessed Gwala, its chief whip in the legislature, taking Hlabisa’s place as leader of the opposition.
A senior IFP member, who asked not be named, said that the move was aimed at avoiding a battle over the premier candidate at a time when the party was making progress in the province.
“We don’t want people fighting over this now, when we should be focused on our campaign,” they said.
“This way the decision will be taken at the right time and through the proper process.”
The IFP member said that managing the process in this way would stop factions in the party from diverting their energies into campaigning for their preferred candidate now and “should” stop the tension from boiling over.
IFP spokesperson Mkhuleko Hlengwa announced the movement of Hlabisa and the reshuffle in the legislature in a statement on Monday, saying the decisions had been taken to “consolidate” the party.
“The NEC [national executive committee] has taken these decisions consistent with the party’s smooth leadership transition,” Hlengwa said.
The NEC believed the changes would “take forward the legacy and life’s work of Prince Buthelezi” and “entrench party unity and consolidate the IFP’s onward march to the 2024 national and provincial elections”.
Hlabisa’s legislature seat will be taken by Reverend Musa Zondi, the former IFP secretary general, once believed to be the natural successor to Buthelezi, who left the party in 2011 due to fears he would be assassinated.
The deputy chief whip in the legislature, Thembeni kaMadlopha-Mthethwa, will act as the IFP’s chief whip.
Zondi was co-opted onto the IFP national council by Hlabisa earlier this month, along with former MP Senzo Mfayela and Prince Ntuthuko Buthelezi and Sibuyiselwe Buthelezi, children of the party founder.
Their co-option — like the reshuffle — is aimed at consolidating the party both nationally and in the province, where it hopes to regain power in next year’s elections through a coalition with the Democratic Alliance.
Both parties are involved in the Multi Party Charter for South Africa, and have a bilateral arrangement in KwaZulu-Natal which has seen them take 10 wards off the ANC in municipalities across the province since the 2021 local government elections.
They believe they can take the ANC below the 55.47% of the vote it received in 2019 and collectively secure a majority in the province, once one of the governing party’s major strongholds, but one it fears it may lose next May.
Hlabisa told the Mail & Guardian the NEC had decided to move him to the national assembly to boost the party’s profile and to assist in ensuring its growth nationally matched the progress it had made in KwaZulu-Natal over the past four years.
“The IFP has set very clear targets for itself. When we made the assessment of how we have performed over the past four years, we were of the opinion that we are right on track to achieve our goals.
“We identified the need to elevate our performance nationally, to ensure that the party performs optimally at that level next year,” he said.
“Speculation” about tension between himself and Ntuli was being orchestrated on social media and was aimed at dividing the party ahead of the elections.
“They are the work of those who want to divert our attention and focus on the main goal, to prepare for elections next year,” he said.
The issue of the premier candidate and who was deployed to parliament and the legislature would only be decided by the party after it held its policy conference in December.
An extended national council meeting will be held on Sunday to prepare for the policy conference and to take reports on the election strategy. The IFP manifesto would only be released once the election date was confirmed, while the list process would also only take place next year.
“No decision has been made as to who will be the premier candidate in 2024. It is not something that is on the table right now. At the right time we will make the decision as to who goes where. Until then, the speculation is unnecessary,” Hlabisa said.
He said the IFP had gone into a number of elections without naming premier candidates in the past, and might do the same next year, if that is the route the party decided to take.
The IFP president said he was “very excited” about his move to the National Assembly, where he was sworn in as an MP on Thursday.
“This is a new journey with new challenges at a different level.”
The post IFP moves Hlabisa to parliament appeared first on The Mail & Guardian.
Makwana says he still has Eskom’s ‘best interests’ at heart:
Outgoing Eskom chairperson Mpho Makwana said he left the utility amicably and still had Eskom’s best interests at heart.
Delivering a keynote address at the South African National Editors Forum (SANEF) fundraising dinner on Friday, Makwana said he did not want any “noise” around his departure, admitting that he deliberately avoided giving media interviews to “avoid creating drama” and to afford his successor a seamless takeover.
“The task at hand is to ensure that a seamless transition occurs, so that my successor Mr. Mteto Nyati can lead the board and the more than 40,000 Eskom guardians to continue stabilising Eskom and staying the course of turning the tide towards 70% EAF availability by March 31, 2025,” Makwana said.
“Eskom will be best served by me stepping back from the media arena to allow the new chairperson space to settle in. I thank the minister for the positive, amicable manner in which we are concluding my tenure.”
“The idea is to ensure stability and improve the public trust in the entity,” he said.
Makwana spent a year as chairman of Eskom.
He said during his tenure, the load-shedding challenges had been addressed as lights are on more than before and the generation operations turnaround plan was showing green shoots.
“There is hope,” Makwana said.
He said he was proud to have served the country, having had two stints as Eskom board chair.
“Serving one’s country in this manner, as chair of a state owned company (SOC) is like a marathon relay. I have run my leg of the race as best as possible, now I hand over the baton to the next leader to run his fair share of this complex race.”
Speculation over Makwana’s resignation has been rife after Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan made the announcement earlier this month that the Eskom chair was leaving.
Makwana has kept mum about his resignation, refusing to divulge any information about it.
The Mail & Guardian has previously reported that tension between Makwana and Gordhan culminated in an investigation against him.
According to insiders who previously spoke to M&G, Makwana allegedly exerted undue influence in the process of hiring an agency to undertake the recruitment of a new CEO. An investigation, however, found no evidence against the outgoing Eskom chair, one insider said.
Makwana’s predecessor, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, has accused Gordhan of “meddling” and interfering with Eskom board members.
In an opinion piece published by the M&G this week, Gordhan said he made no bones about being an “active shareholder” in the context of his responsibility to hold SOE boards accountable, ensure good governance, demand ethical leadership, and judicious execution of mandates.
“But cutting through all the recent noise, one thing is clear: reform is ongoing and demands that we be continuously vigilant and assertive in ensuring that end. The Eskom GCEO will be appointed before the end of the year,” Gordhan said.
Makwana thanked the organisation for having invited him, saying jokingly that Sanef was, “brave to have someone who has been shown the door to be your keynote speaker”.
The post Makwana says he still has Eskom’s ‘best interests’ at heart appeared first on The Mail & Guardian.
Olive trees in Palestine become art:
Johannesburg-born artist Adam Broomberg, 53, took photographs of olive trees to his mother just before she died in December last year. She had been an ardent supporter of the state of Israel and a firm Zionist. Like many people in South Africa’s Jewish community, her family were Holocaust survivors. Both her parents lost 90% of their family in that pogrom.
Broomberg has been taking pictures of ancient olive trees in Palestine for the past 18 months — most of them were planted more than a thousand years ago. The oldest one, called the Al-Badawi tree, is over 4 500 years old. Every two years this tree still yields 800kg of olives. It is nearly 20m high and has a circumference of 25m.
“There is the sweetest man who lives there; at night he sleeps underneath the Al-Badawi tree just to protect it,” Broomberg tells me on a Zoom call from Berlin, where he is now based. The expression on his face and the tone of his voice is of someone talking about family.
“I was meant to go on 23 October, to take seven of my students to Palestine to go and pick olives from the Al-Badawi tree, because it is olive-picking season.”
But the Israeli war — many describe it as a genocide — on Gaza, about 75km away, has put a firm brake on that plan.
“It’s heart-breaking not to be able to go there,” Broomberg says. He pauses and closes his eyes.
Since 1967 more than 800 000 of these trees have been either uprooted or burnt to the ground by Israeli authorities or by illegal Jewish settlers under the supervision of the military. Between August 2020 and 2021, more than 9 300 olive trees were destroyed in the West Bank, according to The Art Newspaper.
Olive trees are of cultural, totemic and economic importance to the Palestinian community. About 100 000 families rely on the olive harvest, which takes place yearly between October and November, for their income. This includes more than 15% of working women, according to Al Jazeera.
The Palestine Trade Centre says the sector is worth between $ 160 million and $ 191 million in good years.
Broomberg resumes: “When my mother saw the images of those trees, she understood what it meant, and she changed her mind.
“Anyone, it doesn’t matter what their ideological beliefs are, would conclude that nobody who loves a land would willingly destroy its oldest indigenous inhabitants. Only when that someone is led by hate.”
Broomberg’s activist work includes having developed Artists + Allies x Hebron (AHH) which he co-directs alongside the Palestinian human rights defender Issa Amro.
The interrupted project, Anchor in the Landscape, is an analogue survey of olive trees in Palestine on 8 x 10 film. It also involves training AI to read high-resolution satellite imagery of Palestinian and Israeli agricultural landscapes. The result will be published as a book in April 2024 by Mack Books.
It has taken four months to print these large images of the olive trees. During this period four of these trees were destroyed by settlers.
“Some of these trees you know intimately because to take one of these pictures you must go up with a light meter,” Broomberg says. “You have to touch the tree; you have to spend time with it because it takes an hour to take a picture.”
He explains why there is outrage when people hear of the destruction of the olive trees. “There’s a reason why many people plant a tree in somebody’s memory or there’s that famous saying that people plant a tree to give their children or their grandchildren shade,” he says.
“It’s something that you don’t do for yourself: it’s a selfless thing and I think respect for trees and the love of trees is something so embedded in us.
“So, my question is, what could possibly motivate people to act in the opposite way to want to willingly destroy something that is so benign and so beautiful?”
A few months ago, Broomberg brought some of the prints of the trees home and showed his 10-year-old son, Marlo.
“He spent a good half an hour with these prints,” Broomberg says. “Looking slowly, he said to me, ‘They’re very beautiful’ and I said to him, ‘Thank you, Marlo.’
“But he replied, ‘No, I meant the trees.’” This made Broomberg think.
“These photographs are not about the photograph because if they were I would be behaving just like many artists, which is using a kind of extraction.
“I go to Palestine, I take a picture of this tree. I then bring it back to the West where I show it in a fancy gallery. I then charge a fortune of money and it becomes about the art of the photograph, the art of selling the photograph and the art market.”
This is different.
“What Marlo said cut through all that bullshit. He said, ‘My God, those trees are beautiful’ and I think the only role of this project is to bring those trees into people’s lives and into their minds. Because it doesn’t matter what your politics is: you look at this tree, these trees, and you’re like, ‘These are magnificent’.”
AHH’s previous project, Counter Surveillance, zoomed in on the olive groves of the city of Hebron in the Palestinian occupied territory.
Described as one of the most surveilled places on Earth by The Art Newspaper, Israeli-owned security cameras dot the landscape about 90m apart.
These cameras use sophisticated facial recognition to capture the faces of the West Bank’s occupants.
But arch subversive Broomberg and AHH went one better in September last year. They installed their own illicit cameras in the Hebron olive groves, livestreaming to several European art galleries “revealing to their audiences the realities of life in the West Bank”.
Counter Surveillance will be resumed in April next year during the Venice Biennale in collaboration with the Palestinian art space, Dar Jacir.
“We are doing it in the hope that with the art world watching, it will give a little bit more protection to the trees and people,” says Broomberg.
“But you know, these guys don’t give a fuck, they don’t give a fuck, man.”
I ask him what role an artist can play in these turbulent times.
“I think to carry on making work, even if you’re painting watercolours of flowers. I think that’s a political act. Just to keep on being generative, making work and making beauty despite this,” he says.
The post Olive trees in Palestine become art appeared first on The Mail & Guardian.
Submit and get free exposure here: Showcase Your Business | Advertise Your Special Offers.
