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Johannesburg – President Jacob Zuma on Thursday said the National General Council was a time for the party to reflect on how it had done in the past.
Speaking at a Presidential Gala Dinner at Gallagher Convention Centre in Midrand on Thursday, Zuma said: "So tomorrow we meet to say, where are we, where have we been and what have we been doing and what are we supposed to do?
"We will also be looking to ourselves and perhaps to a very large extent looking at our own..."
He said the NGC was a very important meeting for the ANC.
"In between national conferences of the ANC, there are few very important gatherings of the ANC, those are its national conference and NGC where we discuss the progress and review how we have implemented our resolutions and programmes and work out the way forward.
"This is also a policy conference where we sit and work our policy and then recommend the resolutions to the national conference.
Zuma re-emphasised the importance of the NGC.
"These conferences are conferences of the branches, where branches take the final decisions together with the leadership, so tomorrow [Friday] will say something about that.
"Tonight [Thursday] is not about that," said Zuma.
He said the party would this weekend discuss many issues including business.
"We will also discuss forces and where we are and what is it that we need to do to make sure that South Africa is well positioned in order to move forward.
"Part of the reason why we meet as we do is because we do not want to fail. We want to succeed, and I can tell you that we will succeed. When the ANC was formed no one ever believed that it would succeed...
"I can tell you now that our destination is a prosperous South Africa and we are going to reach that destination. We are making a lot of strides in moving forward to reach our destinations.
"One of the most important things that we need to do is to love this glorious organisation because it is reliable, dependable, experienced, has foresight, policies, plans, programmes and all you need to do is make it strong and powerful.
"Give it instruments to walk this long road. I have looked around and as a politician and have looked at policies of other parties and I haven’t found policies that can compare to the ANC. We are very clear. We are as clear about where we are going as we were in 1912.
"It’s so wonderful to be inside the ANC, we are warm, and when you are outside, you lose weight and people will ask you what is eating you up…
"We are an organisation that people want, it does not mean we do not make mistakes, we do and we want to be told when we have made a mistake so that we can correct those mistakes," said Zuma.
