A complaint by several branches of the ANC in the Buffalo City region has cracked open the lid of a membership rigging scam within the ruling party.

The branches, who have complained to the organisation’s highest office, have all identified regional boss Pumlani Mkolo as the man masterminding the scam.

Behind him is a network of loyalist branch secretaries, who work closely with an employee of a major South African bank.

Together they run a sophisticated scam of backdating membership forms, forging signatures, doctoring bank deposit slips and inflating branch membership using names on the voters roll.

During the process huge sums of money exchange hands.

The joining fee of all the “new members”, whose forms are filled in by the group and without them knowing they are joining the ANC most of the time, is allegedly paid for using money from Mkolo.

When this was reported to Luthuli House, the party’s headquarters in Johannesburg, deputy secretary general Jessica Duarte, was dispatched to East London and Mthatha to investigate.

Last month she spent about a week listening to complaints from branches from BCM and OR Tambo region. By the time she went back to Johannesburg, Mkolo had been suspended. The party said he had gone on voluntary leave.

No reasons were ever made public. But today the Saturday Dispatch can reveal that he was suspended because of the seriousness of the membership rigging allegations and the extent of the scam.

The First National Bank yesterday said it was investigating the involvement of its employee in the scam.

ANC provincial secretary Oscar Mabuyane had not yet responded at the time of going to print.

Mkolo dismissed the allegations as part of a smear campaign by those who want to contest him in the coming regional leadership elections. “I do not know the basis of the allegations. However the allegations are not new. It is just conference fever.

“I understand they generally have to do with the fact that there is a conference coming,” said Mkolo.

Allegations of membership rigging are nothing new in the ANC. This time though leaders of the ANC have spoken openly about what they called “the manufacturing of membership in the ANC”.

The Dispatch has seen letters written by some of the branches and addressed to Duarte and Mabuyane.

One of these letters mentions how an FNB Mdantsane Highway branch employee uses her position at the bank to doctor bank statements and deposit slips.

This employee, whose name is known to the Dispatch, backdates the stamp on the membership by at least six months – making the “new member” eligible to vote when his or her branch sits to elect new leadership or to be nominated as a voting delegate to regional conference.

The ANC policy does not allow someone, whose membership is less than six months, to be a branch delegate at a conference.

When joining or renewing membership, a member is required to fill in the membership form, pay a joining fee and the form must then be taken to an FNB branch. After payment is made, the deposit slip is attached to the membership form before a membership card is issued.

The Dispatch was shown one of these doctored forms. It shows that the new member, whose name is also known to the Dispatch, joined on November 11 2014. But the date the member supposedly paid the joining fee is October 21 2014 – almost a month before he joined the party.

This has raised questions as to how he paid for membership a month before he could even sign his application form.

One of the complaints which led to Mkolo’s suspension came from Washington Bongco branch, in King William’s Town.

In a letter to Duarte, branch executive committee member Xolani Nontshinga details how:

lThe bank stamps were backdated in order to accommodate people, who would not have been in good standing during the audit of their branch membership.

This after their forms were captured late and failed to make the cut-off date for audit purposes.

His branch secretary paid for the new members’ joining fee from the money given to her by Mkolo.

People were made to take up ANC membership without their knowledge using names on the voters roll. His branch secretary filled in the forms before forging the signatures.

“Our worry is that the BGM will be a foregone conclusion as these members would have been bought to think and act in a particular manner in favour of their funders,” Nontshinga writes.

Another branch member from ward 2 in Duncan Village, who asked not to be named for fear of victimisation, also accused their branch secretary of forging signatures on new members’ application forms. He said bank stamps on the application forms and deposit slips were also backdated.

“They just take people that they know will support their faction at the conference, fill forms for them and go and pay the joining fee at a Mdantsane FNB. They have an accomplice there and she backdates the bank’s stamp.”

All the forms seen by the Dispatch from different branches in KWT and East London including wards 20, 2 and 40 had the Mdantsane City mall FNB stamp. It is not clear why the deposits were made at this FNB branch.

But people with knowledge of the membership rigging scam said this was because those behind the scam had someone at the branch working with them.

FNB national spokeswoman Patty Seetharam said. “We have escalated this to the top management, because we would need to follow proper processes and investigate this.” — siphem@dispatch.co.za