The ANC veterans and stalwarts group will on Friday hold their much-awaited National Consultative Conference at Johannesburg’s Constitutional Hill, with more than 700 people expected to attend.

The group has been calling for President Jacob Zuma’s removal from office after the ANC’s loss of three metro municipalities, the Nkandla saga and the release of the State of Capture report.

The stalwarts and veterans say there’s an urgent need for introspection, as the governing party finds itself in a crisis.

The group’s Murphy Morobe says, “We have been trying to persuade the ANC since the Constitutional Court judgment last year, when we established ourselves as a veterans-and-stalwarts platform, to highlight the importance of an approach, to dealing with introspection that is really genuine that would allow ANC members the space to fully engage with the issues that affect them and that are actually destroying the organisation. So, it’s always disappointing when those who are in leadership fail to see an opportunity and capture the moment even for opportunistic reasons.”

Earlier this week, ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe distanced the party from the conference saying it was not the official one organised by the mother body.

“The African National Congress has no consultative conference. It had two of those. It was in 1969 in Morogoro; the second one was in Kabwe in 1965, and President Oliver Tambo explained why those were consultative conferences. And the sense was this can be a consultative conference because only a section of the ANC was out there. We are all here now. We are going to a conference in December. The ANC has no national consultative conference. Anybody who organises that, takes the initiative they can do it. Anybody who goes there, you go there as an individual member of the ANC. It is not an ANC national consultative conference.”