The resilience of organisations is a function of their systems. The more an organisation introduces systems that can be repetitive and scaled beyond its centre in its workings, the better a resilient entity it will be. The African National Congress was formed after deliberately excluding Natives from the post-South African War arrangements on how to govern the then Union of South Africa. It was a systemic Native response whose moral legitimacy appeal stood the test of time.
It
experienced the worst of what defines organisations in its various phases of
struggle. As a construct, it was premised on the unity of tribes, later the
unity of all races. It ultimately included the ambitious unification of the
most antagonistic human sectors, the 'unity of classes'. But what made the ANC navigate
this journey to date? What about the ANC kept it resilient to forces that were
systematically designed to destroy it as a liberation movement? What made it to
survive the onslaught of one of the most organised state-sponsored crimes
against humanity, apartheid?
Answers
to these questions should assist the current phase of ANCness to dislodge from
the quicksand of corruption-induced collapse. Being the foremost brand that
enjoys legitimacy for leading struggles against discrimination, racism,
institutionalised poverty, and many other chauvinisms, its social and political
capital value has attracted capitalists. Capitalists are, by their very nature,
driven by a pursuit of returns on investment. Their focus will be on those
aspects of capital that would yield the most return.
Exposed
to the best strategists and with the resources that they command, the ANC, as
South Africa's enterprise with the highest concentration of social and
political capital, would be prioritised for any business or investor scenario
planning. As social capital, it would either be subjected to a media onslaught
to discredit it when it threatens the capital accumulation of the dominant in
the economic establishment or be projected as a darling of the establishment
when it advances the capital accumulation interests of the dominant. Its
policies and ideological leanings will be a subject of continuous change and
analysis. Its brightest leaders would be coopted into spaces whose
socialisation would ultimately reduce the risk of continued thinking about
rearranging the templates of dominance defining the unequal society that South
Africa has become.
Ideational
institutions such as think tanks, universities, civil society organisations,
and state-sponsored research bodies would be galvanised through funding and
legitimacy, garnering incentives to sustain narratives that guarantee
particular returns on social and political capital investment. At the apex of
ensuring better returns would be the capture of those who led this August
movement whose history was chiselled into the human spirits of South Africans
by struggle and loyalty to a cause up to a point. Leaders of the ANC will thus
be a critical resource to leverage the capital most capitalists don't have in
South Africa: social and political capital.
Let
us now look at what has institutionalised the ANC to its position.
Before
we do so, it would be prudent to comment on institutional leadership. It is
leadership that concerns establishing and protecting institutional values
and character. Its orientation is argued to be more towards self-maintenance
and less leaning towards a future or change orientation (Washington, Boal,
& Davis, 2008). Since its inception as an organisation, the ANC was founded
on values and characters that stood as themes along its struggle system. These
values were the glue that kept all its internal contradictions focused on the
cause it had defined for itself and the humanity objects it pursued. Towering
of these values would ultimately consolidate around non-racialism, non-sexism,
democratic, anti-tribalism, non-violence, and moral high ground.
As
an institution of leadership, the ANC was modelled to have its core strengths
from within its structures. It institutionalised the African lekgotla system
into branches from which its policies, decisions, and leadership ethos could be
referenced. Rising to its higher ranks would thus include, of course, over and
above its own social and political capital as a person, having served at its
various levels of leadership. As an early 19th-century organisation, its first
leaders were the main 'Victorian educated' elites. Their socialisation was of
Wilberforce liberalism with a Garveyist touch of the African American civil
rights movement. Consequently, it attracted a particular class of individuals,
sons of chiefs, kings, religious leaders, businesspersons, land and property
owners, and in the main mission school and foreign university educated
'natives'.
This
foundational architecture of the organisation created, therefore, certain institutionalism
that define the ANC to date;
1. The
ANC was established in terms of a Constitution whose amendments could and could
still only be done at its national elective conference.
2. Apart
from its constitution, the ANC's policies emanate from its conference
resolutions, which are either constitutionalised or packaged as policy
documents guiding its system of existence
3. In
its constitution, the ANC has rules that regulate the discipline of its
members. It has specialised structures that deal with disciplinary matters.
4. It
has recognised the diversity of its members and established a chaplaincy whose
role is to coordinate the spiritual aspects of its members and ultimately learn
from inherent values and lessons emanating from that place.
5. The
ANC established itself as an institution whose ultimate price is the control
and prudent management of the state through its agency government. In this
preparation, it understood the democracy it needed to model and defend.
6. As
a consequence of the cause it pursued and the opposition it received from
colonial masters and apartheid colonialists, it had to be engaged in a struggle
to claim its legitimate right to govern at the behest of those that mandate it
or periodically borrow it, through election, the power to do so.
7. In
this struggle, the ANC still defined the end state of its struggle system in
Imvo za Bantu, 1949 ANCYL Program of Action, The Freedom Charter, The Harare
Declaration, and ultimately the South African Constitution as a collective will
of all South Africans with the ANC as a dominant substrate.
8. In
Consolidating itself, the ANC further developed policies to guide itself
through its phases of existence, including the phase of being a government
These
institutionalisms were designed so that members of the ANC would come into,
live with, become, and ultimately leave the ANC with them. They stand as
signposts on how to be an ANC member without being preached upon by anyone.
They provide an institutional command architecture whose enforcement is
embedded in the extent to which you are loyal to it.
The
challenges the ANC faces are only new in their nature, but their character
cannot withstand the architecture institutionalised to deal with them. When the
architecture does not provide a mechanism or sieve within which a new challenge
could be managed, its National Conferences have consistently demonstrated a
capability to rise to the occasion. We have seen how this in-ANC facility was
called to duty when the integrity of members as persons was eroding the
collective integrity of the ANC as an institution. The response to this matter
has now separated the consequences of the individual actions of members from
those that the ANC can collectively carry as an institution.
It
is the extent of disrepute the organisation has to deal with which actions of
members will be evaluated. This integrity management mechanism is one of the
latest manifestations of an ANC consolidating itself as a governing party with
a responsibility beyond its membership base. Read as part of facilities
available to ANC members in the institutional architecture spanning from 1912;
the integrity management mechanism should be seen as a thread in a continuum of
interventions en route to the socio-economic transformation of South Africa.
Yes,
institutional leadership is what will keep the ANC alive. In one of the
instalments to come, the concept of institutions of leadership will be
elucidated further.
Be
ngisho nje!!
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