Patronage and factionalism in North West and Western Cape provinces have prompted African National Congress (ANC) top brass to disband the provinces' leadership committees, ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe said on Monday.

"So, this question of patronage and dispensing thereof is the negative impact of a liberation movement that becomes a party in power and we are raising it because we must be alive to it.

"We must deal with it, it will be everywhere and we must try to confront it everywhere we meet it," Mantashe said in Johannesburg at a briefing on the national executive committee's (NEC's) meeting over the weekend.

Mantashe detailed how factionalism went back a decade in the North West. He told of "strange tendencies and ill discipline", with business interests, control of resources and patronage at the centre of the rift.

"The province is deeply divided and factions are almost institutionalised in that they are known and openly talked about.

"In the same period of ten years at least, strange tendencies and ill discipline have developed to the point where individuals are more loyal to their factions than the organisation," he said.

In Western Cape province, the African and coloured divide was "serious" and needed "urgent organisational attention" Mantashe said.

Patronage and the control of resources were also central to the division in the province, which the ANC lost to the Democratic Alliance (DA) in the 2009 elections.

"These divisions make the ANC not to be proactive in dealing with issues.

"While the ANC is consumed with infighting, the DA is utilising available space by taking up the issues affecting our people."

The disbanding of both provincial executive committees (PECs) had been communicated to the provinces and a provincial task team, consisting of cadres from the provinces and three members from outside the provinces, would be set up in the next 14 days.

Provincial conferences would be convened in Western Cape and North West provinces in the next nine months.

In another problematic province, the Eastern Cape, the elective provincial conference was being moved from December to the end of August.

"... The outcome comes to the same results [as the North West and Eastern Cape]... the only difference is, that it was due for its conference and we took a route that was more close to the organisational route," Mantashe said.

A "number of things" were needed at local government level, said Mantashe in reference to the emergence of patronage as a problem in the appointment of councillors and allocation of jobs in municipalities.

He said ANC branches would audit councillors and municipalities' service delivery records in the wake of service delivery protests in recent weeks said.

"My starting point is that competence, and affirmative action are not mutually exclusive. But appoint black people for their competence because if you don't, you are destroying them forever."

Mantashe also spoke about the nationalisation of the mines, which sparked controversy when it was raised by ANC Youth League president Julius Malema.

While reiterating the ANC's position that the nationalising debate be opened, he cautioned against what he termed the "nationalisation of debt".

"I'm giving you a feedback of analysis that maybe when there is a financial crisis, sometimes people who owe, hope that bail-outs must constitute nationalisation of debt, and we say it should not be," he said.

"And, we raise that issue because it was raised in the context of the financial crisis and we say if it is a policy issue it must not be linked to the financial crisis, otherwise it is about nationalising the debt."

He had not heard of any mining company which had asked for a bail-out.