Comrade Chairperson, President and fellow comrades, we have been reduced to a less than 50% party by South Africa's foremost legitimate process to test political support of any party. South Africans are sending a message that we should today respond to, the message is, we have a less than 50% approval to govern them. If we add the voters who did not vote, and we treat them as having voted, but for none of the parties that contested, our support has plummeted to dangerously low levels. In fact, if we were a matured enough leadership, we would have all started resigning and calling for an early national election.
Comrades the question will always be, what went wrong, what could we have done, and how do we go forward. The most consequential of our questions is, if we go into coalitions, with whom do we do so, what are the principles that should guide us, what are the balance of forces in the coalition building space and market, and what should be the threshold guideline to go for coalition. Let me deal with the consequential questions, as the other questions might reduce this NEC into a 'blamestorming' occasion.
Comrades we have to accept that the DA has been growing its hegemony over South African politics by claiming the liberalist space we left unattended for far too long. We need not have become too liberal ourselves, but we were supposed to have diagnosed that the middle class we were building, the Constitution we negotiated and adopted for the country, the economic policies and implementation trajectories we followed, and the government posture we took was at best liberal and at worst Neo-liberal. This we must swallow the bitter pill and accept this is what has defined us.
In it growth strategy the DA focused on the urban towns, it paid attention to communities that we took for granted because they are our people. They created Cape Town as a laboratory of government excellence, even if it meant continued hardship for "our people" in those parts of Cape Town. In cities they governed, they focussed on back to basics. This makes them to be hegemonic in any discourse on coalitions. They have already issued a public discussion document on what will guide their negotiations, the conditions put therein sounds like our pre-1994 ready to govern documents. The EFF document also reads like our policy statements, more acutely the Resolutions of the last ANCYL Conference Julius Malema presided over, the Economic Freedom in our lifetime themed Conference.
Comrades, before I venture to directly answer some of the consequential questions, let me deal with our posture towards 2024 as we respond to 2021 Municipal Elections. How we are going to deal with the message from the voters will be telling as to whether we are returning as the governing party enjoying outright mandate from South Africans. The truth is that we are a divided party, we are entering our own in-ANC elections season that MUST culminate into one of the most consequential ANC review Conference in the history of the liberation movement. Truth is we have demonstrated in the 2016, 2019 and now 2021 elections that we are unable to regroup and focus on the tasks at hand. In fact, we have mastered the art of focussing on how bad predecessor in-ANC coalitions or factions have been, instead of saying what do we take forward from where they had left.
In this phase, where our infighting mean nothing as the opposition will consolidate and deliver better for our people as we cannibalise each other, our factional circuses will only serve to confirm to voters how correct the may have been to repudiate us, if not puke us out of controlling organs of state. To cite a developing sewer plant resembling side show, the Buffalo City Stench should be decisively dealt with as it will make voters to regret why the did not go with the national trend.
Our coalition negotiations must be managed away from a 'saving jobs for pals' context, but should be elevated to a national interest issue. We should make the country realise that it is too early to imagine our democracy without the ANC as part of the governing architecture. We should emerge as a national movement whose interest is to save and sustain this democracy. Internal ANC battles should as far as possible be put into the back burner, as we allow those amongst us that can operate in conditions of a coalition to ascend and rescue South Africa as a democracy. The pre-Polokwane strategy and tactics document, which I submit is now part of the opposition's strategy and tactics, should be invoked to provide authority to act.
Agreeing or disagreeing to any coalition will be weaponised against the Cyril Ramaphosa Presidency purely because the ANC is in an election season. This therefore means pragmatism and a focus on national interests should instruct how we posture in these coalitions. We should remember that there are voters who simply did not vote because they were disappointed at the ANC, the opposition now has the opportunity to showcase that they can be an option as we saw in Cape Town and Midvaal.
Comrades, let me now deal with the questions.
- Should we go into coalitions? Yes we should, we have a responsibility to those voters that gave us the right to be considered as a coalition partner. Only when the conditions of the coalition are compromising our posture towards 2024 can we select to be opposition. This is a State deconstruction space we still have abundance of skills to deploy.
- What should be the threshold? On this one I want to copy and paste what Dr Thabo Mokotong wrote on a BPI chat group "I don’t think the ANC as the dominant party in our national politics can politically afford to be in coalitionc where they are a junior partner. I therefore think they will, or at least should, only consider coalitions where they have close to a majority (40% or being below they must at least be the highest polling party) and become opposition everywhere else. This will create the conditions for a new kind of ANC cadre who hone their skills on the minority benches. unencumbered by rent seekers these positions might again begin to attract true activists. If the party develops a program to assist all opposition counselors with a well co-ordinated strategy where from coast to coast the message is the same the people might begin to resonate with the movement again. The post-liberation free lunch is over. Get rid of the deadwood patronage salary earners in Luthuli house and employ strategists with degrees in political science. The ANC now has to earn the right to ‘lead society’ because society is no longer going to ‘allow ourselves to be led’."
- What are the balance of forces in the coalition space and market? Truth is most independents are members of the ANC who did not agree with our factionalised list processes. Now that they have won the support of 'our people', we should get off our political ego horseback and invite those comrades back into the ANC and start increasing our thresholds. Secondly, in the big cities stakes are high, we polled better, getting into a coalition with the DA might be a better bet. We have the wards in most of these cities, we seem to have lost the proportional vote. This gives us the anchor to deliver in the wards and restore confidence. This will require a separate strategic discussion once we are at that point.
Lastly Comrades, our past Presidents should be rained it to repression the movement as a unit themselves. We should have handled the President Zuma Matter differently. We saw how the mess done in handling President Mbeki after Polokwane created a cognitive opposition within the ANC whose ideas were bought and 'handled' by hostile capital to weaken the ANC. We cannot afford to lose the election machinery we know President Zuma still commands within our ranks. We lost because we worked hard to send the message that they are not involved, in fact, in some towns an argument can be made that their loyalty to the ANC made the situation to be better.
We need a special NEC resolution on former Presidents as a background of permanence we should curate to the benefit of the organisation. We could have applied for the relaxation of parole conditions of President Zuma and allowed him to crisscross the country and garner support, at worst we should have Zoomed him out of Nkandla to talk to voters that wanted to hear him.
Thank you Comrades, Amandla.
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo tivulavulela
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