KwaZulu-Natal African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) secretary Thanduxolo Sabela on Sunday lambasted members of the party who were still wearing campaign T-shirts for Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa.

The T-shirts were popular during the election campaigns of the party's presidential hopefuls before the ANC's national elective conference in December last year, where Ramaphosa was eventually elected leader over the former AU commission chair.

The campaign T-shirts for Dlamini-Zuma had "NDZ17" written on them, while Ramaphosa's had "CR17".

Speaking at the annual ANC January 8 statement celebration rally in Pietermaritzburg, Sabela said: "The ANC is ours, we should wear ANC T-shirts. Ramaphosa is not the president of a particular faction, but the ANC."

The ANCYL in KZN was one of the party's structures that strongly backed Dlamini-Zuma to succeed Zuma.

"As the ANCYL, we had a view that we pushed very strongly... that Dlamini-Zuma was elected the next president of the ANC during the recent conference. But before the conference, she was the one who taught us that we must welcome the outcome of the NEC," he said on Sunday.

Sabela said they welcomed the outcome of the conference and "because we are not sore losers, we will not go to court".

He also said the party's new secretary general Ace Magashule - who was on Dlamini-Zuma's slate leading up to the conference, "is not a secretary general of a faction, but of the ANC".

Painful outcome

Provincial ANCYL chair Kwazi Mshengu echoed Sabela's words.

"We had a preferred candidate. The outcome of the conference was painful at first, but we have accepted that Ramaphosa is our president. We are reminded every time that we didn't support Ramaphosa, it is not a sin.

"We've lost conferences before, but we've never gone to court," he said.

Mthandeni Dlungwana, the Moses Mabhida regional chair, said: "We will deal with those still wearing such T-shirts. We only got one president of the ANC - Ramaphosa, and Zuma as president of the country. There shouldn't be any confusion."

Dlamini-Zuma urged members of the ANC in the province to support the interim structure that has been set up by the ANC national executive committee to organise the provincial elective conference in April.

The interim structure was set up after the suspension of the provincial executive committee by the party's NEC last Monday, following the KZN High Court's decision to nullify the results of the 2015 conference.

"Support the task team as it only has three months to go to the conference. Work with it so that in three months we go to the conference and elect new leadership. We're going to the national election in 2019. We can't go to that election without the leadership of the province. Over the past two elections, this province has contributed more votes in the ANC," she said.

The interim structure's co-ordinator Sihle Zikalala said the NEC's decision for the KZN ANC to go to conference gave them "a rare opportunity to unite".

"We must consolidate unity in the organisation because disunity will render us dysfunctional. Let's unite the ANC towards the 2019 election," Zikalala said.