Does renewal also mean exclusion?Responding to Mbulelo Musi.

     The African National Congress is facing a national elective conference in December 2022. The contestations for leadership of Africa's oldest 'liberation movement' have begun, interests will define new political fiends, factional templates will change, professional lobbyists will descend on our shores, and thinking will soon start reflecting encumbrances. In its recent history, 28 years to be exact, the ANC has sponsored the institutional structures and the patterns necessary for manufacturing a version of itself as an electing leaders party than a leader of society. This new role, which is in fact alien to what it is known to be, has displayed the egoism, arrogance, and general nastiness that we had in the past associated with liberation movements that have left their people behind. This year's conference, we hope, should be the most consequential to rogue elements that have captured its soul.

The strongest theme emerging from within the ranks of the ANC is Renewal and Unity. Renewal of the organization to its 'glory' days when it commanded the highest social and political capital. Unity of its members who have since begun to drift apart at the 52nd Conference of the ANC in Polokwane. The pursuit of a third term by Thabo Mbeki (hot on the heels of exemplary leadership by Nelson Mandela who served only one term and showed the world that when it is time to go, go) could arguably be isolated as the greatest of issues that divided the ANC. Out of these divisions, the ANC tasted the spoils of electoral victory as a faction, and never realized how easy such a victory could be weaponized against the social and political capital it had amassed.

The Polokwane putsch pitted, and it must be mentioned that this might have been unconscious, various watermarked factions of the ANC against each other. The fault lines of divisions of the ANC in exile, divisions between MK and Head Office cadres, divisions between developed countries (capitals) based and Africa based cadres, divisions between those that remained to face repression and those that left, and divisions that clamored for one ideological hegemony or the other, as well as divisions that were propelled by proxies of capital as a complex, became pronounced. As these consolidated themselves around personalities, sub-unities happened behind the Zuma-Mbeki, Zuma-Motlanthe, and the ferocious CR17-NDZ divide.

Never in its history has the ANC been divided along preferences of which 'personality' should lead than in the build-up to the 52nd and 54th Conferences. The substance of the divisions could not even find expression in policy commissions that finalized resolutions. In fact, conference delegates were seen leaving the conference after results were announced, thus leaving the policy prowess of the ANC to a predator elite, potentially funded to tilt the strategic scales away from accelerated economic transformation and related. Polokwane with its victory could not demonstrate any corresponding ideational victory in resolutions terms, and NASREC seems to have opted to be dampening or calming the radical nature of what the issues were. 

Notwithstanding, what has been brewing as a core issue about the ANC is the quality of its members, particularly those that end up making it to its conferences as delegates. This emotion is aptly articulated by a social media tweet to the effect that "it is really sad that our lives and the future of this country rest on ANC Branch Members who are illiterate, unemployed, and are often clueless on the implications of their vote on their own lives, who are used as voting cows to elect corrupt leaders". Condescending and patronizing as it is, this concern was, and according to Nelson Mandela in his book 'Long walk to Freedom', one of the sharply debated issues by leadership in Robben Island. In the preparation of the ANC's most ambitious document detailing its expectations of the human species called politicians, the eye of the needle document, accounts by leaders that were in those commissions indicate that the issue of the quality of members the ANC required to execute its post-liberation obligations was as thorny as it is today.

In mitigation of this risk, the mission in exile, particularly the manpower department set up a program to produce a cohort of ready-to-govern cadres around whom nodes of professional excellence would be established. These were encouraged to study and be members of discipline communities through which they could also influence, in a scientific and practice context, counterparts at home trapped in the then enemy camp. This process created the capacity that could match the apartheid state negotiators at CODESA and most of it went on to be the Mandela mandarins that managed one of the most complex post-conflict transitions to a new democratic order. It would be the exigencies of government and the opening up of new career spaces that sucked out this capacity from the ANC and created space for new and accelerated capacity armed with PowerPoint knowledge of issues to take over.

These capacity challenges were for a while being focussed upon as they were impacting the state. Sophisticated capacity-building innovations were devised to keep the state intact. What these comrades within the state apparatus were not aware of is the gradual capture of ANC branches by a sophisticated network of what Blade Nzimande defined as 'tenderpreneurs' and Vavi later characterized them as 'crass and materialist'. Branches of the ANC became entities with which ascension to power could be assured. The barrier to entry into the higher structures of the ANC became lower as political power was commodified and branches could be bought to sing 'twinkle twinkle star' in daylight. 

In his rant at the suggestion of reviewing the centrality of branches in ANC Conferences, Mbulelo Musi, a former MK Veteran, submits, almost in a fashion that Mandela argued in Robben Island that "...let me hasten to say that, branches have, throughout the past 28 years of freedom, until today, been the live wire and lifeblood of the ANC. They will continue to remain so into the future. They are the basic unit that allows for direct and daily interface with communities... thus the cliché  'Amandla asemasebeni'. The ANC is as strong as its branches are, and vice versa".  

Mbulelo goes on to argue "having said that though, the past decade of experience, as well as recent developments in Mpumalanga and eThekwini Provincial and Regional Conferences respectively, are revealing,  as they are very instructive.  For branches to nominate and even elect in their majority  'leaders' with chequered credentials, including criminal charges...are not only telling but very alarming. They beg the questions,

1. What type of branches are these?
2. Is there political and moral integrity that guides them such as the Eye of the Needle? 
3. Are they susceptible to being bribed/bought to vote for a particular member without questioning? 
4. If so, what message is that type of branch conduct driving? 
5. Is this the truth or envisaged reflection of what  'Amandla asemasebeni' should really mean? "

These questions by Mbulelo are in effect supportive of the idea that renewal of the ANC might have to include a critical review of the hold that its branches have on the future of South Africa. What his questions, like many who do so in a muted tone, are doing is to say that the absence of answers to them might mean we don't need branches, although he calls for a discussion on how to keep branches relevant. 

As would any self-respecting institution of leadership, the ANC has responded with a School of Political and Leadership Education (POLEDU). Whilst reports from the school are encouraging in respect of the number of graduates that went through it, it will be the extent to which the qualitative of its graduate catch up with the momentum and time that our politics, as Mbulelo wisens, dictate. The Brute truth is that the domain of learning is both time and experience intensive, and throwing theory at members without recalibration of systems and structures to support what is otherwise an in-service training by POLEDU, their impact might be felt long after power might have shifted.

The questions that Mbulelo is asking as you further interrogate his rant, have more to do with the various orientations about, and of, the ANC that its members have. Mbulelo, clearly representing a cohort of ANC members that have a lived experience of an ANC that was organized as cells within which members owed allegiance to both the organization and each other, questions the attributes of a mass-based ANC within the context of an underground, banned, and somewhat vanguard ANC. The exigencies of being a mass-based political party contesting for elections in a liberal constitutional democracy might be procuring for branded individuals with whom voters might be lured to vote than your highly sophisticated NDR and NDS reciting cadres who might survive in democracies such as China is. The ANC might be in denial that it will soon be in a branded leader contest which might occasion it to field popular or sufficiently branded individuals who will come into the ANC with their own social capital, and this is about to be legislated. 

The question will always be, what next? 

1. Without vitiating the importance of Branches, the ANC should seriously consider introducing a constituency system for its NEC composition. The 52 Regions provide sufficient space to introduce this arrangement. 
2. Each region must be represented in the NEC of the ANC. This will go a long way toward increasing awareness of the quality and caliber of leaders a region should send to the NEC. The rider should be that those elected into the NEC on this basis cannot be appointed minister or MEC but will form the core electoral college selecting who goes into National Parliament and by extension might be Minister or otherwise.
3. Of the other 28 members of the NEC, 9 can be directly elected at the National Conference as President and two Deputies, The Secretary-General and Deputy, The National Chairperson and Deputy, The Treasurer General and Deputy.
4. The remaining 19 NEC Members can be drawn from the leagues and provinces. 
5. The above reconfiguration can be applied through to branches.
6. The only positions that should be tied with a corresponding in-government position should be that of President and Deputy, National Chairperson and Deputy, Provincial Chairperson, Regional Chairperson, and Branch Chairperson. These would then constitute the executive out of an already electoral college-managed list of candidates for government. 
7. The idea that members should be allowed into the ANC through criteria that included a clean criminal record should be highly considered. 

Once the structure is intact in-service training can then be targeted. I hope Mbulelo will then rest as the institutional make-up of the ANC will attract attributes it can let survive it. It is important that persons that come into the ANC must survive being inside it because of the institutional leadership it provides. As things are, it would appear the ANC is struggling to survive those that are inside it. CUT!!!

🤷🏿‍♂️Be ngi phendula u comrade Mbulelo nje. Haai kabi maqabane ka Matamela and all that came before him.