South Africa has for a while been grappling with how to make in-ANC political trends to be just about the ANC. The battle to discount the ANC as the context of all contexts has been ongoing in hegemonic spaces, almost equal to the establishment of liberal order as a political economy path for South Africa. Gradually in-ANC politics started to follow this pull, and the most visible in-ANC consequence has been the rise of 'who leads the ANC' and the retreat of what it stands for. This coup of the personality cult over policy got diffused in pursuing voter support as a natural replacement to its traditional leader of society custom. The convenience of making ANC fundamental policy trajectories about 'investor confidence' and its elections winning rhetoric to be about 'voter support' impacted its 'social transformation' thrust as leader of society. What became sovereign was its individual leaders and not what it proffered as a value proposition to continue leading society.
As electoral politics entered the centre stage of ANCness, its strategic make-up had to change from being inherently a liberation movement to a political party. Its approval ratings were suddenly subjected to measures it never worked towards being good at; instead, it pursued its traditional analysis of self, which amounted to a lot of self-aggrandisement rather than its value proposition to South Africans. Its key platforms of mobilisation, most of which were excelling in deconstruction than construction, started to fall, if not recede quick enough to create distinct in-ANC groups, now called factions, and this could unfortunately not stop the inevitability of a change in its structural, cultural evolution required by a post-conflict context in RSA.
Fortunately for South Africa, its constitutional development history, which is just two years older than the ANC, stands as a background of permanence against which ANCness has for a long time been about how to enter and ultimately legitimise it as a platform of political interest trading with voter support as an undergirding currency. The transmission of ANC memory about itself has deep roots; what became critical of being ANC had always been about how you represented its ideas of South Africa than preferences of a sponsored view of the country as a piece in the global geopolitical puzzle. Soon after 1994, access to political power in South Africa became a numbers game. The person of Nelson Mandela became a precedent on how the leader of the ANC can grow above what it stands for. In fact, the popularity of ANC leaders started to increasingly outrank the quality of its policies. Its roots of being led by the substance or content of the social-transformation agenda it stands for were disrupted by the imposition of a leader-centric party political system the South African constitution has templated. Consequently, ANC leaders started to model themselves as individuals purchasable by the resourcefulness of what is popular with the (global) economic establishment than what is good or in the national interest of South Africa.
As the ideational and ideological roots of the ANC grew shallow, and 'in-ANC thinker turnover' and leader of society mandate drifted, the liberation movement got polarised. Its polarisation was not innocent, as its networks started to display concentrates of highly funded scenario planning and entrenchment to levels where its leaders began to work towards proving one scenario rather than proffering self-standing theses disproving the scenarios. This entanglement into sponsored perspectives of and about how South Africa should ultimately turn out to be, bred leaders that have to date, planned for a South Africa that succeeds in becoming an outpost of speculative foreign direct investments which are not going to commit to any plans that dislodge the hegemonic power of where the investment originated.
The endorsement, therefore, of in-ANC leaders should be filtered through the various layers of leadership that ultimately give us, as South Africans, a President. There is a wave of endorsements of President Ramaphosa by the provincial leadership of the ANC for him to stand for the second successive term. These endorsements are increasingly demonstrating that they are more about the in-ANC matters than about South Africa; if service delivery were to be an apex criterion for any mandate renewal, the country might be in a project to consolidate an establishment with which service delivery might find later attention.
What is interesting about the endorsement by one of its most ideationally influential provinces, Gauteng, is the state that "the ANC PEC in Gauteng is deeply concerned with the devastating challenges brought about by load-shedding, which continue to affect the Gauteng economy and the livelihoods of our people, who are in the main majority the working class and the poor. Public knowledge is that the energy crisis contributes immensely to the social crisis that negatively contributes to high unemployment, the tripled cost of doing business and the skyrocketing prices of goods and services. The PEC will engage the National leadership of the ANC on finding lasting solutions to the energy crisis that is crippling the economy". This statement on its own is saying there is dysfunctionality in the leadership system; it also tells the incumbents to need to be consulted about the solution, and yet in the same statement, it gets praiseworthy of leadership in respect of in-ANC matters. The statement reads, "the current President Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa for a second term as President of the ANC, to continue with the ANC programme of organisational unity and renewal. The PEC further resolved that it will support our longest serving Gauteng Provincial Chairperson and current ANC TG, Cde Paul Mashatile, as the Deputy President of the ANC. Comrade Paul Mashatile is a towering revolutionary with unquestionable revolutionary morality and impeccable credentials". There was a robust discussion whose outcome, as communicated, was the retention of Cyril Ramaphosa to renew the ANC.
While the Ramaphosa endorsement defines the hub-and-spoke hierarchy of the new and emerging ANC, its risk is that in-ANC primaries are not graduating to being about service delivery but political capture of the state. With the office of the ANC President, and potentially that of the country's President, being the most concentrated node of political influence in the African continent, any unmanaged change or transition of the leadership process might compromise whatever is left of ANCness going forward. The risk, though, is that as the conference approaches and the stakes start to be high, service delivery issues might define who ultimately becomes the President of the ANC. CUT!!!
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