The 52nd National Conference of the African National Congress (ANC) was held in Polokwane, Limpopo from 16 December – 20 December 2007. It elected Jacob Zuma and supporters to the party's top leadership and National Executive Committee (NEC), representing a significant defeat for Thabo Mbeki, then the party's incumbent president and president of the country.
The conference was significant as a precursor to the general election of 2009, in which the newly-elected leader of the ANC, the current majority party in the national parliament, is highly likely to become the next President of South Africa. (Thabo Mbeki resigned on 20 September 2008 and was replaced by Kgalema Motlanthe on 25 September 2008.) It was also the first leadership contest between two candidates at the national level since the 38th National Conference of the African National Congress in 1949, a watershed moment in the party's history when the moderate leadership was displaced by such figures as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu.
Read more about 52nd National Conference Of The African National Congress: Buildup, New Party Leadership
Famous quotes containing the words national, conference, african and/or congress:
“A good man will not engage even in a national cause, without examining the justice of it.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees. ... Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain ...”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)
“The sacrifice to Legba was completed; the Master of the Crossroads had taken the loas’ mysterious routes back to his native Guinea.
Meanwhile, the feast continued. The peasants were forgetting their misery: dance and alcohol numbed them, carrying away their shipwrecked conscience in the unreal and shady regions where the savage madness of the African gods lay waiting.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)