Durban — It is now open legal warfare between NFP leader Ivan Barnes and 15 party leaders, including eThekwini Deputy Mayor Zandile Myeni, whom he served with letters of intention to suspend earlier this month.
Of the 15 leaders, 12 have followed up on their threat to drag Barnes over the legal coals if he did not withdraw his letters of intention to suspend.
The Pietermaritzburg High Court found in their favour, ordering Barnes and members of his national executive committee (NEC) not to dismiss or suspend any party member pending the finalisation of the application of the 12 members.
The 12 NFP members are locked in a bitter legal brawl with Barnes, challenging him and the NEC not to suspend or dismiss members of the party without a disciplinary hearing.
This has been viewed by some as a political blow for Barnes, as his internal powers in the NFP have been abruptly curtailed by the court, much to the relief of his internal party opponents.
The group of leaders, including ward councillors and the Nongoma mayor, Mshangane Ndabandaba, also want the NFP constitution, cited as the second respondent, to be amended.
This would drastically cut down the powers of the party’s president and the National Executive Committee, the party’s highest authority between conferences.
For years, the NFP has been on the verge of collapse owing to internal leadership quarrels, which deepened after the death of its founder and former president, Zanele KaMagwaza-Msibi in 2021 after a long illness.
The court also ordered the parties to show cause on September 19 why the order should not be made permanent.
The first applicant in the court documents is eThekwini deputy mayor Myeni, Barnes’s rival, whom he asked to furnish him with reasons why she should not be suspended from the party after she failed to attend an NEC meeting.
If she had been suspended, Myeni would have lost the deputy mayorship position she got on the NFP ticket. Other public office bearers who had received the letters would have suffered the same fate.
One of the applicants, Sindi Dlamini-Nkambule, who was also in court, said she was happy with the court outcome. Nkambule is also a councillor in uPhongolo Local Municipality in the north-east of KwaZulu-Natal.
Nkambule, a long-standing member of the NFP, questioned Barnes’s intention of wanting to suspend or dismiss them now for things that happened in March.
Nkambule said Barnes called them to a special party meeting on March 22, which they could not attend because they were in a council meeting.
“We do not know what his motives are for doing this. It is even worse in my case with my fellow councillor, Lindani Sibiya. We wrote to him and asked to be excused from the meeting because we were already in the council’s strategic meeting when we received the invitations,” she said.
“Our council meeting had started on March 18-23, so we were already there when we received invitations. On top of that, we wrote letters of apology, which were noted and accepted, so we were surprised to receive threats of suspension and disciplinary action.”
Reacting to the order, secretary-general Nhlanhla “Teddy” Thwala said he was vindicated because he has always said that no clause in the party constitution grants powers to the president and the NEC to dismiss or suspend any party member.
Despite the internal power wrangling, the NFP got one seat in the May elections and became the kingmaker in KZN with no outright winner in the polls. The NFP is part of the Government of Provincial Unity (GPU) governing KZN alongside the ANC, IFP and DA. Barnes was yet to file his responding papers.
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