By Tselane Moiloa
BLOEMFONTEIN – The provincial African National Congress (ANC) will start a political school for its members before the end of the year, newly-elected secretary William Bulwane has said.
“The political school was one of the resolutions taken by the Provincial Executive Committee at the first meeting we held on Monday, July 2. Our focus in this term will be to look at things we have not achieved in the past, and try to get that right. We will occupy those spaces we had not and a political education will be one of those aspects” he said.
Although the school is a concept the ruling party hopes to see to fruition, the logistics are yet to be determined. This includes the criteria of the members who are to attend, the curriculum and the people who will teach the members.
These finer details will be decided when a task team including deputy-chairperson and Executive Mayor of Mangaung Thabo Manyoni returns from a benchmarking mission in Kwa-Zulu Natal and Gauteng at the political schools in these provinces.
The two provinces currently have political schools. In 2010, the party said it would establish a national school in Parys, which at the time was expected to take three to five years to complete.
“The second approach is to develop a national ANC Core Curriculum, which can be implemented through different methods of delivery and adapted for different layers of the organization. The core curriculum outline was adopted at a national political education breakaway session in October 2009 and consists of ten modules: history; tools of analysis; economics; theories of development; organizational theory and practice; the state, governance and constitutionalism; African and international relations; and revolutionary ethics. A curriculum committee was established, responsible for the development of these modules,” the National Executive Committee (NEC) said at the time.
“We have a responsibility of politicising our 80 000 membership (in the Free State). All problems we have been riddled with in the ANC are because people do not understand the rules and laws of the ANC…Other people do not join the ANC, they join individuals and do not grow politically,” Bulwane said.
The ANC’s political schools came into the limelight late last year when former ANC Youth League president Julius Malema was ordered by the NEC to attend the party’s political school before he was finally suspended this year for insubordination charges against president Jacob Zuma.