THE ruling party’s iconic Luthuli House headquarters, located in Johannesburg, may soon become offices for Ezulwini Investments after the ANC failed in its court bid to prevent the Ezulwini marketing company from seizing the party’s assets over failure to pay debt.
The Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) has upheld a decision of the Gauteng High Court which ruled against the ANC in a R102 million election banner dispute with KwaZulu-Natal-based Ezulweni Investments.
Dismissing the party’s appeal, Judge Trevor Gorven said the ANC’s version that it had no contract with Ezulwini Investments was “utterly untenable”.
This follows two previous lower court rulings – in 2020 and 2022, allowing Ezulwini to seize assets worth more than R102m from the ANC after the party stubbornly refused to pay their hefty debt to the company.
Hours after the SCA ruling, Ezulwini’s attorneys wrote to the ANC and informed the party that the company would execute the court’s order if the money owed was not paid by noon on Friday.
“As conveyed to you in our telephonic discussion earlier today (and indeed, forewarned in our informal telephonic discussion yesterday) our instructions are to proceed forthwith to execute in the absence of immediate satisfaction of the judgment debt in full by your client.
“To this end, we are having the writ of execution re-issued and have the Sheriff on standby to proceed with the attachment, beginning with your client’s various bank accounts.
“We await proof of payment of full satisfaction of the judgment debt into our trust account, the details whereof are enclosed, by noon today, failing which we will, without further notice, proceed with execution,” read the letter from Sarlie & Associates.“
ANC national spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu Motsiri did not respond to questions from the Sunday Independent on whether the party would pay the debt.
Asked if Ezulwini would sell Luthuli House, the company’s chief executive Ranash Radams said: “Why sell when we can move in and turn it into Ezulwini head office”.
Despite the party being led by the former business mogul and billionaire President Cyril Ramaphosa, whose presidential campaign saw his campaign raising more than R2 billion from the private sector, his party has struggled to pay salaries of staff employed at Luthuli House.
In October last year, some Luthuli House staffers filed papers at the Labour Court in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, where they complained about not being paid on time or at all.
The party’s then Treasurer General Paul Mashatile, who is now the party’s deputy president, said: “For many reasons, it is, unfortunately, the reality that the ANC has been struggling to maintain its operations at current levels.
“The reasons include the decreasing share of public funding that the ANC receives from the IEC (Electoral Commission of SA), declining electoral support (between 2009 and 2019 it lost 34 seats in Parliament and 37 across provincial legislatures) and changes in the formula of allocating public funding to political parties as introduced by the Represented Political Funding Act.”
