WHEN questioned about the leadership crisis besetting his party at its launch and ever since then, Mvume Dandala said in a high-pitched voice that it was a "tired" argument.

He denied that there were any leadership challenges facing Cope. A day later Allan Boesak resigned, citing leadership crises within Cope.

His resignation closely followed that of elections strategist Simon Grindrod, who had resigned a week earlier.

Surely Dandala knew about the conditions that prompted these two senior leaders, one just days before he made this denial and the other only a day after he spoke on national radio, alleging issues over the leadership crisis were a tired argument.

Dandala has emphatically stressed the tired point that Cope was formed on the basis of integrity, yet there is no integrity from where we most expect it - Dandala himself.

How can he mislead the nation and those who voted for Cope about the leadership issues within Cope? Is it integrity to lie?

But there is a trend in all of this. The very foundation of Cope was the lack of honesty and integrity among its chief proponents.

Even those who innocently joined lacked honesty, because despite all the challenges facing the ANC, the movement has always been democratic and no leader could subvert this basic principle - or else there would be no ANC.

It was possible to change the leadership in Polokwane because the organisation is democratic, yet Cope proponents, licking the wounds of their political losses, cooked up lies about the actions of the ANC.

Phillip Musekwa, Leondale