The implementation of the African National Congress’s (ANC) National Conference, and later NEC, step aside resolution has put the governing party onto the most consequential review of its consequence management systems as they apply to its leadership and senior cadres deployed at various strategic centers of state management and government. This has elevated this resolution to a condition precedent for anyone to trust the bona fides of the ANC in all its pronouncements about corruption and promises of renewal. This condition that the ANC finds itself requires a response that is etched on a leadership mindset that leaps away from the current context instructing to power contestations. It requires a realism that includes acting in a manner that has an eye on the future of the country more than what may electorally be at stake. It should in fact unearth from amongst its leaders and members cadres who would be chiefly concerned about national interests as substrates for building a strong and capable state. It should raise leaders and functionaries who should be more threatened by a possibility of a failed state and a beyond junk economic status South Africa than a narrow focus on retaining a hollow political power with which they cannot effect any change if they remain the way they are.
In this renewal process, the ANC needs leadership that must be concerned with realities confronting South Africans and dislodge itself from sloganeering and “vague dreams of a perfect future” beyond past liberation struggle rhetoric. It should ground its view of South Africa on a sober look at the evidence presented by data and visible manifestations of what is really happening. They should spend more of their time dealing with what is obtaining in society before they venture into what ought to be. In this venture, the ANC should in its entirely inculcate new virtues into its leadership and influence core, particularly virtues of prudence and courage. If, and only if, there is an area that requires “prudence of judgment” and courage by the ANC, it is that of economic transformation without vitiating the centrality of incumbent captains of industry to be catalysts to that transformation, a strategic mission history seems to be demanding from a Ramaphosa Presidency.
If the ANC’s National Executive Committee does not have leaders from amongst its ranks that are going to wake up to the exigencies of economic transformation, and by extension the bulging youth unemployment, they will have to deal with the catastrophic reaction of the unemployed youth brigade that has nothing to lose, but their livelihood. The time for spin-doctoring the economic woes of the country into a sieve of its apartheid past without tangible alternatives being in the horizon has passed. The era of bringing together experts to deal with vexing challenges of society outside sloganeering and continuous ‘we need to’ statements at successive State of the Nation addresses by the President has arrived. It is a known fact that the ANC has for a long time enjoyed the status of “leader of society” for reasons attached to the eradication of apartheid and struggle credentials. In this ‘leader of society” status, the ANC mastered the art of deconstructing the apartheid state and invested very little time in capacitating its cadres on how to construct a post-apartheid state anchored on the promises that the achieved enfranchisement-based liberation made. This might be the reason the ANC is still struggling to come up with an attractive and compelling thesis of a post-apartheid state cognizant of how the apartheid state was created.
As one author observes, South Africa and more acutely its governing party might be “suffering from a severe case of what has been called residual elitism. A condition where governing or ruling groups, and if you like including the economic establishment, were shaped in particular historical circumstances, to meet particular sets of challenges and opportunities, and find it difficult or impossible to adapt to new circumstances and to change to meet new challenges and opportunities”. This he argues is occasioned by a truism that “the more successful and long-lasting a particular ruling order has been, the greater the difficulty it is likely to have in changing itself”. From the foregoing is clear that either the apartheid state system ruling order that has been long-lasting from 1948 is stubbornly refusing to let the new order ascend, or the new order that has ascended has been in a long-lasting transition state that it has allowed the erstwhile order to resuscitate itself as its non-negotiable appendage. Because the new post-apartheid state continues on a system established by apartheid, the system’s default positions might in fact be a definite return to erstwhile apartheid machinations including the return to what the system knows best.
This condition explains the enthusiasm with which the new political elites of a post-1994 South Africa have embraced the idea of a “new South Africa” that was de facto operating on a template of the old South Africa without due regard and focus to its templates of sustainability. This enthusiasm created figments of transformation that produced a significantly large number of transition-management-specializing bureaucrats that could not be institutionalized as person-based-organs of state within institutions of government. The tragicomic thing about the exaggeration of a ‘new inside the old systems’ is that it still robs the country of focusing on what its newness in government terms means. In fact, there seems to be a sponsored project to discourage a strong state bureaucracy to catapult South Africa to a weight befitting its development size in global comparative terms. Compounding this is the fact that a generation of leaders and thinkers that conceptualized the new democracy left the government stage, most of them got absorbed into an economic establishment whose historical circumstances dictate defense of the status quo, thus making them, and arguably so, a cohort of somewhat unconscious defenders of a system those outcomes negate what the new about South Africa is.
The residual elitism condition further explains why leaders within the governing party are so easily provoked to mount protest campaigns against a government they have a majority mandate to direct. In this circumstance, economic transformation and its adjuncts have systematically been drawn away from affairs of government thus relegating the state into a ‘watch-institution’ of monopoly capital in its polyvalent character. The governing party has in this circumstance increasingly become a stranger inside the government it has won as the ultimate prize of politics. The system that undergirded the apartheid state found a gap through which it could not only drive a wedge between the state and party in a democracy based on a party system of voting but also successfully defined the ANC outside government notwithstanding its majority status.
To prevail over this condition, a very powerful, attractive, united, and evidence-based movement within the ANC is required. A return to the basics of running a political party in a capitalist economy needs to be embraced by leadership. A definition of what is in the national interests of all South Africans by the ANC is a non-negotiable that must instruct all its social compacting activities, including a comprehensive revision of its ideological leanings often highjacked by a disjuncture in how left they want to be versus the right that they are becoming. Its activists need to appeal to the common interests of South Africans and make its political duty to the country clearer and morally valid. Failure to define how ANC conduct as an index substrate of the South African political would in fact be a betrayal of the country’s national interests. In this endeavor, the choice for the ANC has ceased to be between moral principles and the national interests devoid of moral dignity as recent revelations of corruption from amongst some in its ranks have shown, but between one set of principles, but between one set of principles divorced from political reality and another set of principles derived from political reality.
In constructing the South African democratic order, the ANC, and South African, leadership cohort upon whom the historical task of defining the South African State through a Constitution anchored the new state on, and amongst others, the supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law. In this enterprise the then leadership, I argue, sought to anchor South Africans into the jurisdiction of the general law, administrative and general courts. Their object has thus far been proven to have been about establishing a society whose guiding principle of political administration is justice, and its law is applied in the circumstances of the individual case, the purpose being to achieve justice and not political objectives. The wisdom that was concentrated within this leadership cohort was not oblivious to the truism that the political sphere is in fact a vacuum as far as the law is concerned. They understood that in post-liberation and/or conflict democracies, and if these democracies are not circumscribed by legal instruments, the political sphere has been found to be governed by neither objective nor subjective law, and neither by legal guarantees nor jurisdictional qualifications. In fact, studies have over time proved that arbitrary measures, in which dominant officials exercise their discretionary prerogatives tended to be the currency with which government is conducted.
As the ANC toil to reverse these woes it might need to reopen the closed discussion of the national question so that the national in South Africa can find expression, beyond it being choked inside the ‘volk concept’ and the ‘national in the ANC as a constructed community. Evidence in other societies indicates that nationalism seems to be the most powerful source of collective effort. In South Africa, our nationalism, if perfect, should have resolved our racial past to a condition of being truly non-racial. Our non-racial posture should have a national identity through which national interests can be developed to inform societal value systems and general respect of state assets. In this journey, the ANC should craft a path that recognizes the reality of “how the absence of a strong state nationalism cripples the ability of a state to pursue successful development – and in the worst case destroy the state altogether. There are no prosperous societies in weak or failed states”.
The suspension of the ANC Secretary-General and others is, therefore, a convergence point from which all dysfunctionality tributaries that defined the dislocation of the ‘better life for all’ post-apartheid enfranchisement-based liberation could be funneled into a new struggle system to reverse the looming path towards a failed state. The struggle system that defined most politicians leading in the/the ANC like any system with its always fragile ensemble character will, and as a result of the suspensions, lurch the ANC into anticipated chaos given the accumulative factors that preceded the event. The breaking point this event would provide for a decisive disembarking with the closing of ranks with your own outside due regard to the integrity and reputational costs associated thereto, start mortality of corrupt in-ANC officials notwithstanding rationalizations of ‘I am not the only one’. The attempts at unifying ANC members against malfeasance by elected and appointed officials by a Ramaphosa Presidency will find traction from this event as integrity as the new index of public sectors executive management and South Africa in general gains density in society.
The question, therefore, is what is next beyond the step aside turmoil. In Riker’s parlance ‘at any point in institutional development, humans start with some pre-existing customs that influence new departures.’ In respect of the ANC, there is a preponderance of pre-existing customs to deal with the scourge of corruption, including stepping aside when you are in a position that may compromise the integrity and reputation of the organization. Towering these customs is an elaborate policy and dialogued ‘eye of the needle document’ that works into the conscience of ANC membership without progressing to any sanction, save that it is implied. It is the inner morality of the eye of the needle suggestions and pronouncement that may have led the ANC to ignore the institutionalization of anti-corruption as a way of being ANC that what has been observed in the recent past. The normative architecture required to weed out the ANC malfeasance based on the strength of your influence and power inside the organization and state was so weak that the prerogative discretion of dominant officials grew to become substrates of its value systems, only regulated by instruments outside its in-party-judicial control. There was a time when a member sought independent adjudication outside what regulates the ANC, which would naturally be the courts of law, was considered as an act of volunteering yourself out of the organization.
The Ramaphosa Presidency’s anti-corruption drive arguably etched on the supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law, is one of the towering dividends of our constitutional democracy. What this presidency still needs to do to anchor all other actions that will flow from the suspension of the SG and others event is to and as bare minimums,
- Institutionalize the step aside resolution as part of the in-ANC disciplinary process by cleaning it of its vagueness as most rationalizations against it have demonstrated.
- Ensure that its application is prompt and is stripped of any retroactive application thus allowing it to show its bona fides in terms of taking the ANC and country forward.
- Chronicle internal ANC disciplinary measures and how they may affect conduct in government in a clear and concise manner. This might include a separate manual referred to in the constitution as an operating procedure in the event of malfeasance impacting on the integrity and reputation of the organization.
- Ensure that what the disciplinary code and practice advocates is not contradictory to the life of members as citizens of a country the ANC exists in terms of its constitution. Members of the ANC should in fact be treated first as the country’s constitutional beings before they are ANC members, in that way any challenge to in-ANC internal processes would have been disabled at the inception of any disciplinary process.
- Without vitiating the cardinality of the rule of law on any corporate person or legal entity existing in terms of the laws governing South Africa, in-ANC processes should be consistent with the character of the organization the ANC is or has become; it is a Political Party, a conglomeration of competing interests whose achievements might attract means that border to systems manipulation. Its codes of conduct should therefore not demand the impossible from members.
- In implementing these broad suggestions, there needs to be a dedicated focus on being congruent with the laws of the land. In fact, the Constitution and rule of law should be elevated to a strategic pillar of advancing the existing objects of being ANC.
FM Lucky Mathebula
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