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 National
General Council (NGC) that was supposed to create a mandate template with which contesting
leaders would have naturally used to galvanise support for themselves is fast becoming a new and yet losable
opportunity again. Issues of service delivery and ‘serving the nation’ are not
foregrounded in favour of personalities, factions and cliques organised around nefarious
criteria either than ideology and ‘promise for change’. Nostalgia is emerging as a new terrain to justify certain of the voices. Veneration of the past has also emerged as new criteria to create in-ANC coalitions to influence succession 'for the sake of our future' and yet by those coming from the past.
The construct of the national
electoral process to coincide with the various political conferences, elective
or policy-making, remains lauded as the best substructure to defend the South
African 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 conference 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 path to leadership selection has thus been concretised as a key component of being ANC and ANCness; properly constituted structures of the ANC remain thus supreme.
The NGC as part of the ANC policy
architecture conferencing mechanism was supposed to have decisively pronounced
on all matters where substantial differences existed thus giving the upcoming elective
conference an opportunity to adopt as 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 has 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 in-ANC 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 or the future of South Africa if you are not a NDR enthusiast. 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’ has received little to no
theoretical attention, whence it is now becoming the context of the ‘new
ANCness’, which is unfortunately becoming the context of all political contexts
in today’s ANC, and unfortunately SA.
It has been very much un-ANC to
fail in such circumstances. The emerging DlaminiZuma-Ramaphosa divide that look
set to surpass the 2007 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; electoral loss becomes an inevitability in 2019.
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 formations will in the short term be dependent on that entity’s
preparedness to shed from its mobilisation arsenal, tendencies that defined its
legitimacy at particular contexts; race as a vector of analysis in matters political has been downgraded to a 'just above junk status' thus not attractive to 'political investors' also called voters. 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 ‘the 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. Understanding of this bequeathing will go a long way in changing the ANC's attitude towards voters as the primary mandating constituency to govern South Africa incorporated. Elected leaders will, through such an understanding, balance their in-parliament voting with what is good for the country as opposed to what is in the interest of the ANC.
The ritual of invoking struggle
history to justify all manner of behaviour and discourse should thusbe 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 next elective conference 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 legality of the ANC.
Parallel to the dangers of ‘ruling
partyness’ and incumbency is the emerging ‘breed’ of social segregation,
propelled by somewhat ‘in-party class’ realignment around opposition to genuine
pro-poor aspects of being ANC. ANCness that seeks to rebalance, in a non-racial
sense, the pornographic socio-economic inequalities has lately grown to become
an inconvenience to the post-apartheid developmental consensus. True South
African citizenship is fast concretising around the ‘equal opportunities for
all with definite and defined unequal outcomes for society’. The fact that true
SA citizenship is coterminous with anti-blackness has in recent times, and
particularly within the context that has foregrounded leadership succession
above any programmatic imperatives of the national development agenda, eroded
the pro-poor champion status of the ANC.
Watermarked in these conditions
is an in-party driven reversal of transformation gains at the altar of morally
justifiable reasons that are presented as viable and robust opposition. The
unprecedented ideological and political scrutiny of black leadership during the
prevailing brutal succession wars is ‘breeding’ a sense of ‘less worth’ amongst
would-be future leaders. Politics and political leadership will, if the ANC
does not manage its succession properly, be a career option to the ‘new youth’
if it is outside liberation politics. The advent of a MDC type of youth
politics that is at present arrested by the ingenuity of the in-ANC youth has
found a strange platform in the ‘new ununionisable’ youth that decorated the
Marikana episode of post-Apartheid South Africa; eish!!
As an African proverb warns, ‘he
that does not obey cannot command’, the ANC succession debate and contest
should thus be conducted in a manner which does not send a message to society
that some leaders of the party should not be obeyed as they fail to take their
own commands. The first form of command is to respect basic systems of
organisation design, planning and management. The construct of the ANC is of
such a nature that its supreme command is rooted within its members, thus
making its organisational power one of the most diffused. 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, or even so to
create certainty of in-party voters long before conferences.
The reliance on archaic systems
of membership registry makes the country to question the extent to which the
party has embraced information technology at the most basic aspect of its
existence, membership. The current systems of conference preparation makes the Govan
Mbeki statement that ‘jail was built by us…with our own hands, we dug the
stones, dressed them and laid them…we built a veritable fortress, an
ultra-maximum security…for our own imprisonment’ relevant and revealing. In the
clear absence of a broad cadreship that is still enthusiastic about the
possibility of a National Democratic Society, the succession discourse needs to
be conducted on a publicly accessible platform in order to match the current
in-party ‘turmoil’ with knowledge of the organisation’s history and policies as
well as the nature of ANCness as a necessary adjunct for a true South
Africaness.
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 55th conference of the ANC should thus not
only settle the succession challenges of the ANC but should once and for all
bury the ideological vacuum that has characterised ANCness. ‘Wolves in
sheepskins’ and the many ideological prostitutes that are trading on ANC
platforms will have to decide where to ply their ideological trades. The South
African state needs such a certainty.
Dr FM Lucky Mathebula
The Th!nc Foundation
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