Institutional Leadership and The Remaking of the ANC

The resilience of an organisation is a function of its systems. The more an organisation introduces in its working systems what can be repetitive and scaled beyond its centre, the better a resilient entity it will become. The African National Congress was formed in the wake of a deliberate exclusion of Natives from the post-South African War arrangements on how to govern the then Union of South Africa. In the main, the ANC was, and arguably still is, a systemic and organised (Native and/or abaNTU) response whose moral legitimacy appeal stood the test of time. 

Into its various phases of struggle it experienced the worst of what defines status quo challenging organisations. As a construct, it was premised on the unity of abaNtu ('nations', 'tribes' and/or ethnic groups), later the unity of all races, and ultimately included the ambitious unification of the most antagonistic of human sectors, 'unity of classes'. But what has made the ANC to 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 crime against humanity, apartheid. 

Answers to these questions should be able to 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 social investment capitalists. Capitalists, of any kind, are by their very nature driven by a pursuit of returns on investment. Their focus will always 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 investors scenario planning. As social capital it would either be subjected to a media onslaught to discredit it when it threatens the non-social and political capital accumulation intents of the dominant in the economic establishment, or be projected as a darling of the establishment when it advances capital accumulation interests of the dominant. Its policies and ideological leanings will be a subject of continuous change and analyses, and where feasible 'capture' by monopoly capital. Its brightest, and leaders, would be coopted, if not captured, 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. The concept of corporate social investment has in South Africa found the greatest of expression as Corporate Political Investment, if the combined benefits of the post 1994 capital accumulation by the dominant economic establishment are computed as a return to private sector involvement in the transition to democracy and beyond. 

At the apex of ensuring better returns would be the capture of those that lead 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 always have in order to leverage the capitals most capitalists don't have in South Africa; social and political capital. Herein lies the significance of the ANC as an institution of leadership and not of individual that happens to be leaders. It will be the institution that the ANC has been and becoming that will be a resource to its capability to survive the 'somewhat legitimate' advances to its enviable brand as a social and political capitalist of note in the African Continent and beyond. 

Before we enter into it institution of leadership analyses, it would be prudent to posit meaning to institutional leadership. It is leadership that concerns establishing and protecting institutional values in 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). Institutional leadership is based upon a notion of embedded or constrained agency, influence or negotiated power, and typically uses a backward-leaning vision meaning that the vision is there to remind the organization of the core values. To institutionalise leadership into an organisation is to 'infuse with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand'. As leaders, persons, come into organisations they leave value imprints derived from their habits, some of which get institutionalised as values to stay with the organisation beyond such leaders. It is the sum total of these values that distinguish organisations from institutions of leadership.

Selsnick submits that 'an institution is a natural product of social needs and pressures – a responsive, adaptive organism’ (1987: 5). He argues that 'these pressures produce administrative ideologies useful as communication and self-defense techniques, the creation and the protection of elites, and the emergence of contending interest-groups'. Invariably, 'the diversity of forces in an institution should have a unifying effect in that these define the ‘commitments of the institution and give it a distinctive identity’. Institutional leadership is therefore about; the 'development of supporting mechanisms' to maintain the existence of an organisation and sustain its (social) acceptance; and, the pursuit for a wide spread social acceptance of the organisation through the eradication of stigmatise-able practices that erode the principles out of which an organisation was established. 

In a nutshell, institutional leadership can be summed up as  being concerned with the embodiment of values in an organisational structure through the elaboration of commitments, ways of acting and responding that can be changed, if at all, only at the risk of severe internal crises. It operates at the interface of Influence and negotiation. It is profoundly reliant on the creativity of persons found in these institutions to continuously imagine the institution beyond themselves, they should be indebted to generations beyond them as they shape what they would have otherwise inherited from past generations. Reconnecting the institution to its original values should preoccupy incumbents to a level the organisation takes over from them. 

Since its inception as an organisation the ANC was founded on a set of values and character that stood as themes along its struggle system. These values were the glue that kept all its internal contradictions focussed on the cause it has 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 out of which its policies, decisions, and leadership ethos could be referenced. Rising to its higher ranks would thus include, of course over and above own social and political capital as a person, having served at it various levels of leadership. As a early 19th century organisation, its first leaders were in the main 'Victorian educated' elites whose socialisation was of a Wilberforcean liberalism with a Garveyist touch of black civil rights movement. As a consequence it attracted a particular class of individuals, sons of Chiefs and Kings, Kings, Religious leaders, business persons, land and property owners, and in the main mission school and foreign university educated 'natives'.

This foundational architecture of organisation created therefore certain institutionalisms that define the ANC to date;

1. The ANC was established in terms of a Constitution whose amendments could, and 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 is 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 therefrom.
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 internal democracy it required to model and defend the democracy society needed.
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 election sanctioned dominant substrate.
8. In Consolidating itself the ANC further developed policies to guide itself through its phases of existence including the phase of being government. 
9. To meet its obligations at national and sub-national jurisdictions established by the Constitution, its institutional architecture has been attuned to fall in line to Demarcation Board determinations of municipal wards and related boundaries.
10. At the apex of its institutional architecture it has established the National Executive Committee which makes decisions in between Conferences, the National Working Committee that processes matters for NEC decision making and processing, and the Top Six officials who are its 'public officers' and 'intermediaries of general interests of the organisation with society. 

These institutionalisms were designed in a way that members of the ANC will come into them, live and work in and for them, 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 a institutional command architecture whose enforcement is embedded in the extent to which you are loyal to it. They are designed as an immortal system whose life is dependent of the political or otherwise mortals, otherwise also referred to its members. 

The current challenges that the ANC is facing may be new in their nature, but their character cannot withstand the architecture institutionalised to deal with them. In instances where the architecture does not provide a mechanism or sieve within which their newness as a challenge could be managed, its National Conferences have always 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 of leadership. The in-National-Conference response to this matter has now separated the consequences of individual actions of members from those that can be collectively carried by the ANC as an institution. 

Conference has for the first time determined that whilst policies of the ANC and the ANC itself are a collective construct, individual actions within the very collective complex and vortex carry consequences that are individual. Personal integrity has been elevated as one of the substrates determining the desirability of your continued association with the ANC when occupying an office of influence and authority.

It is the disrepute to the organisation that individual actions of members will be evaluated against. The integrity management mechanism is one of the latest manifestations of an ANC that is 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 institutionalism defining the ANC as a system and an organisation. As a claimant to the leader of society role, the integrity management system should also be seen as one of the interventions en route to the socio-economic transformation of South Africa.

In fact, the in-ANC disciplinary process, which has been its only facility with teeth that could deal with malfeasance, was enhanced by the new individual member-based integrity management system. The system encourages a 'volunteered' or 'self-submission' to the integrity commission whose role is to determine the 'desirability' of a member's continued involvement in a position or role as leadership or 'deployed' with either 'executive or accounting authority'. The essence of the system is to insulate the reputation of the ANC from potential haemorrhage by integrity-based political conflagrations. 

Yes, institutional leadership is what will keep the ANC alive. In another instalment of these renditions, the concept of institutions of leadership was elucidated further. 

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