The ANC has dismissed the possibility that mounting allegations of corruption, bribery and inappropriate conduct against Deputy President Jacob Zuma will damage his standing at the party’s national conference.

“The ANC will not discuss these allegations and it will not have any impact on the deputy president,” ANC spokeswoman Smuts Ngonyama said yesterday.

“Deputy President Zuma’s record (in the ANC) is impeccable and such allegations are really a very minor thing considering his contribution to the ANC”.

Ngonyama said the sustained newspaper reports about alleged wrongdoing on the part of Zuma were “really just allegations”.

“They are allegations until they have been proven to be fact ... and reports in the newspapers don’t determine the position that the ANC hold,” he said.

ANC insiders said Zuma, along with the rest of the party’s top five officials, was expected to retain the deputy presidency of the ANC at its 51st national conference in Stellenbosch next week.

Meanwhile, the secretariat of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) has denied that it invited Zuma’s financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, to the initiative’s conference on the financing of Nepad held in Senegal in April.

The Sunday Times reported that Shaik had accompanied Zuma to Senegal on an official government trip five months after Shaik had been arrested and charged with being in possession of classified cabinet minutes which allegedly gave Shaik an unfair advantage over competitors bidding for contracts in the government’s controversial multi-billion rand arms deal.

Shaik’s lawyer reportedly said his client had been invited by the Nepad secretariat, but the secretariat has rejected this suggestion.

The spotlight has fallen on Zuma’s relationship with Shaik, who is a director of African Defence Systems, after the Scorpions investigation unit named the deputy president in court papers, saying they were probing the possibility that he had a hidden interest in African Defence Systems.

Scorpions investigators are also probing Zuma’s role in an alleged attempt to secure a R500 000-a-year bribe from a company which successfully bid for the R6-billion contract to supply the SA Navy with corvettes.

With acknowledgements to Jeremy Michaels and Cape Times.