The ANC’s succession debate has again taken centre stage in the analysis of all manner of discourse in South Africa. The contest for political power is now firmly within the ANC domain. Opposing factions have once again concretised around personalities and not ‘policy positions’ and ‘promises for change’ even within the ANC itself. The ANC policy conference that was supposed to create a mandate template with which contesting leaders would have naturally used to galvanise support for themselves is a lost opportunity again. Issues of service delivery and ‘serving the nation’ are not foregrounded in favour of personalities and cliques organised around nefarious criteria either than ideology and ‘promise for change’. Yes, Nkrumah was right “when a revolution has been successful, the ideology comes to characterise society…just as there can be competing ideologies in the same (ANC) society so there can be opposing ideologies”.
The construct of the national electoral process to coincide with the various political conferences is lauded as the best substructure to defend our democracy. The synchronisation of the ANC’s affiliate organisations, its alliance partners and its policy conferences to all lead up to its five-yearly elective conferences remains one of the policy-making architectures second to few, if any, in the democratic world. The capacity to discourse and chart a path for the development of South African society is thus chiefly serviced by this architecture. The founding fathers and/or early generations of ANC leaders should have had a vision about this construct which the current ‘breed’ of leaders, at all levels, and members seem not to have grasped and understood.
The ANC policy conference was supposed to have decisively pronounced on all matters where substantial differences existed thus giving the upcoming elective conference an opportunity to adopt organisational policy until the next conference. The leadership contest that has become the keynote of most policy interactions of the ANC has thus far robbed members of an established opportunity to influence the direction, pulse and soul of the movement. The intellectual potency and resolve that has been evidenced through past policies of the ANC have now become an exclusive reserve of non-in-ANC entities that shape the policy decorum of South Africa. Thinking as a native in ANC intellectual land has not only become a refugee but is fast growing into an alien attracting from a strange breed of majorities rejection and disdain.
In ANC parlance the divisive nature of the current leadership contests would have by now attracted a policy response that visions a stable South Africa as opposed to the dominant narrow factional interests. The price of government as an outcome of political contestations would have been theorised within a tradition that seeks to understand the balance of forces and how they impact on the national democratic revolution. The continuum of development as triggered by the 1994 democratic breakthrough would also have been a variable used to define the type and calibre of leaders suited for South Africa in the current context. The new and organised obligations of members to members have received little to no theoretical attention, whence it is now becoming the context of the ‘new ANCness’.
It is very much un-ANC to fail in such circumstances. The emerging Zuma-Motlanthe divide that look set to surpass the Mbeki-Zuma one, procures from thinkers within the movement to negotiate a compromise for the sake of South Africaness as a dimensional nexus of ANCness. In the thinking process members, and indeed leaders, of the ANC need to distinguish what ANCness is becoming compared to South Africaness, a conflation of the two is fast becoming one of the political liabilities the ANC may not be able to amass sufficient political capital to balance it out. The ANC’s social capital, with blackness as its biggest variable, is a contested space lacking visionary leadership from the ranks of those that defined themselves as being outside the ANC.
The balancing of the various capital shaping society (i.e. political, economic and social), to consolidate national influence is fast occupying centre stage in South Africa. The history of political formation will in the short term be dependent on that entity’s preparedness to shed from its mobilisation arsenal tendencies that defined its legitimacy in particular contexts. The African pattern of accessing opportunities via the political-social-then-economic capital duct has in South Africa been repudiated by the supremacy of the Constitution principle underpinning our democracy. The mere fact that the ANC bequeathed ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’ preamble of the Freedom Charter to the country via entrenchment in the constitution, makes part of its legacy a national one. Political capital as the context of all contexts can thus not continue to dominate South Africaness; in fact, it should be repudiated by all that envision a South Africa that drowns in equal opportunities with equitable outcomes for all.
The ritual of invoking struggle history to justify all manner of behaviour and discourse should be reviewed, particularly as we construct how the ruling party determines its in-party succession contestations. Since the ANC’s grip on the country’s politics is inextricably linked with how it conducts itself, the movement should thus know that its challenges of leadership actually mirror that of the country. As the murky road to December 2022 assumes a character of a ‘dog eats dog’ fight, unlike a pig that eats its offspring, the ANC needs to demonstrate that its known resilience is equally fit to withstand conditions of legality, ruling partyness and incumbency. Whilst incumbency is correctly identified as having the potential to churn out sins, ruling partyness breeds arrogance that can undermine the very legitimacy if there is still much of it left, of the ANC.
As the Gikuyu proverb warns, ‘he that does not obey cannot command’, the ANC succession debate should thus be conducted in a manner which does not send a message to society that the same leaders of the party should not be obeyed as they fail to take their own commands. In this space, the ANC is the precedence of how not being obeyed can be repudiated by organised society. The construct of the ANC is of such a nature that its supreme command is rooted within its members, thus making organisational power one of the most diffused, and potentially available for manipulation through all sorts of human incentivisation schemes. The institutional architecture required to manage such a diffused power structure demands from leadership administrative mechanisms that remove membership registration and credential issues as reasons for failure to finalise conferences. The reliance on archaic systems of membership registry makes the country question the extent to which the party has embraced information technology at the most basic aspect of its existing membership.
What makes the December 2022 leadership succession contestation cycle uniques is its relationship with evidence of decline support for the ANC
AG THINKING HEY!!!
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