The ANC is once again getting into succession or leadership battles. The contest for political power within the ANC is in full swing. The contest will continue the despoliation of the ANC’s liberation movement character without introducing a party political alternative. In its conduct of the succession discourse, the ANC has, and since its unbanning in 1990, been perfecting its new tradition of referencing its past without a commitment to break it asunder and bringing forth a newness that re-creates it as a ‘new or post liberation’, liberation movement.
The road to the 55th ANC Conference has started in earnest. In Lenin's parlance, 'there are (set periods) decades in history where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen'; a few weeks before 16 December will certainly have more than a decade happening. In the local parlance 'these weeks, like some nine years before them, and subsequent five years as of December 2022, might be proverbially wasted or gainfully applied. The ANC is, arguably, inside its most consequential weeks. This is if it is to enter a period wherein the nation thrives for the ANC to thrive.
The growing uncertainty about the president's possible impeachment for the Phala-Phala money in the furniture incident has thrown the succession debate after one term too wide. PhalaPhala seems to be a section 96 of the Constitution matter. Notwithstanding the apparent 'non-winnability of the case court, and difficulty of consolidating prima-facie evidence to proceed charging the President, it would take a legal genius to airbrush it away, it can only be processed within set in-integrity management systems and the criminal justice system. The acute discontent by previous Presidents of the ANC and stalwarts has made the would-be suitors to the ANC throne have greater hopes of unseating the incumbent after just one term. The general expectation of society that the ANC will emerge with a solution to the country's problems is more a question of when the incumbents are leaving.
The dearth of in-ANC discourse about 'what is to be done' at the altar of 'who should lead' has affected the in-ANC order that has earned it the status of being a 'leader of society'. Happening at a time when handing the baton from an exiting struggle credentialed cohort of ANC leaders who were mostly in exile to an ascending cohort that executed the struggle from the internal front, the causes for the dearth of the discourse are getting complex by the hour. What is now robustly engaged inside the ANC is who should lead the ANC and not what should be the agenda to lead society according to the ANC.
Compounding this challenge is the ten-year-old absence of an elected ANC Youth League leadership that historically managed the supply-side leadership dynamics of the ANC. Crass in its various manifestations is growing into a dominant leadership demand pool dynamic. The future of the ANC is stillborn. There is no structured succession organisational planning, and ANC youth has no exposure to a practical ideological training school, the youth league was. The political school is generic, and within the national accreditation system, the future costs of the current kraal without calves are too ghastly to contemplate.
As this dearth opens opportunities for persons who would otherwise not have made it through the vintage-ANC-rigorous leadership selection process, the widely thrown nets are coming back with 'strange breeds' of ANC members and, thus, leaders. The volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of running one of the world's top thirty economies has long started to steeply demand matching leadership sophisticatedness. The conflictual intercourse of 'leaders of society' and personal aggrandisement breeds of in-ANC leadership is growing into a new threat to the stability of the ANC, and by extension South Africa as a democracy. Consequently, the ANC is struggling to meet leadership expectations of the moment, a factor that apparently explains the decline in its urban support, and loss of its smartest.
On the one hand, the splitting into true ideological coalitions that have historically been incubated inside the anti-apartheid ANC-led alliance is finding expression in the 'civil society' structures led by erstwhile 'struggle activists' known to be ANC members. These individuals, bolstered by the global rise of liberal economic thinking and capitalism, state-led or otherwise, are trying to muscle into the centre of ANC politics without due regard to its strong periphery branches. Their relative success in media exposure has branded them the 'alternative', notwithstanding their outside mainstream politics status, as it takes at least a decade to establish formidable election machinery.
Furthermore, the ANC's flirting with a liberal and neo-liberal outlook of defining the 'under construction' democratic order has attracted the ire of its 'leftists of a special type'. While the South African constitution represents the success of market fundamentalism for its economic outlook, the belief in political capitalism by the ANC to pacify its biases to the left has donated its smartest to advocate a neoliberal perspective for South Africa. The go-it-alone demands by the SACP rank and file indicate an in-ANC leftist coalition grasping for ideological breathing space.
There is also a concretising relationship between capital, in its non-racial character, albeit predominantly non-Black, and the democratic state. This relationship manifests the growing policy convergence between the ANC as government and capital. The ANC's position on state-owned entities represents one of its posterity-defining doctrinal shifts for attaining a developmental state as defined in its policy documents. The implementation of government energy policies that are climate change sensitive has not carried along the 'just transition' implications to the industrialisation objects of a developmental state. As capital and state come together without a defined ideological orientation, the profit motive tends to reign so supremely that the seeping in of corruption gets normalised, as long as it is not state-led.
What might be disturbing about the convergence is a somewhat perception that ANC non-negotiable policy positions are ditched in the process. Fundamental to this, it would seem, is the resurgence of a non-racial right economic thinking etched on principles of the mercantilist and extractive economic planning models that were developmentally unattached to Black advancement. Economically speaking, favouring historical capital and sprinkles of allowed black capital in the wholesale auctioning of state-owned entities is a foregrounded discontent. Disturbing is that it more and more appears to be about 'phuma singene', as the alternatives proffered have no thesis.
The current leadership of the ANC, interestingly past and present, has for a while, correctly or otherwise, seen South Africa as an extension or part of the ANC's sphere of influence. In fact, the ANC continues to see itself as the universe of African representation in South Africa's democracy. There is a passionate belief by ANC members, rightly or otherwise, that it is a convenor of society. There is therefore a subtle, and yet real, contestation for the role of 'cradle of South Africa's democracy' between the ANC's democratic and profoundly consultative heritage of conferences, and Parliament as the legal convenor of societal aspirations and imagination.
As the ANCs influence is shrinking, in reality, gradual, as every election result provides evidence, the ANC is losing ground as a leader of society. It gets worse when those who previously led it start disputing its claim to that status. This is more apparent in the proliferation of civil society organisations that have in common to their membership former and disgruntled influence-wielding members of the ANC. There is a tectonic and concerted shift away from the ANC as leader of society towards a civil society-led opposition complex whose sophistication can only have regime change as an outcome.
Overstretched by exigencies of government, chronic factional battles within its ranks, the constitutional democracy politics skills deficits, and an aversion to coalition politics as a result of its dogmatic hold on a unitary state, the ANC is fast getting into a shape where it can't guarantee political stability without it governing. The Zondo, and other, reports on corruption, actual or otherwise, with the governing centre as its subject of inquiry, and thus its deployees, are wrecking society's faith in the movement. These revelations, systemic failures in service delivery, and collapsing public infrastructure have started to raise questions on the desirability of a South Africa with the ANC as the only governing party. The scariest part is that its members and stalwarts are unconsciously or otherwise, and through their pronouncements, catalytic to this concretising view. Like the Kenya African National Union of Jomo Kenyatta, the Dube-Tambo-Mandela and others, the ANC, whilst losing its primacy in the political life of South Africa, will remain an active and significant player in the political power matrix, even if it will not be governing.
The issue of corruption and how the ANC responded, and continues to respond, has dealt a severe blow to the moral prestige of the ANC. The renewal program it has pronounced embarking upon has been embarrassingly discounted by COVID-19 PEP looting by then CR17 saints, exposures at Zondo that drew in some of the saints, and more profoundly, the section 96 PhalaPhala matters. As these anti-corruption escapades were unfolding, semblances of leader of society by the ANC were sprouting out of the political landscape, and confidence in the CR17 brigade as guarantor of a less corrupt South Africa grew. The Section 96 PhalaPhala issues, in particular, have shaken society's belief in the movement's ability to decisively deal with the scourge of corruption and its multiplying adjuncts.
ENTER THE NEW BRIGADE
The ANC's weakened status, at least based on the latest local government election results, has awakened its membership for a need to flush itself of whatever it would agree is undesirable to continue incubating. In its history, the ANC has had moments of self-flush. It was generationally led with a defined generational mission that looks beyond the ascending generation. Freedom in our lifetime captures the synoptic essence of what a generational mission can do to drive renewal. As the 1949 ANCYL mission got optimised by the Black Power movement of the 70s and Peoples Power calls of the 80s, the ANC was shaped to execute the liberation struggle.
In this execution, the ANC relied on all its brigades to pursue its objective of leading society as it was liberating it. Internally this assignment was given to a front of civil society bodies that only had to subscribe to the ideals of the Freedom Charter to be part of the ANC-led anti-apartheid alliance. The Freedom Charter got internalised as the vision for a post-apartheid South Africa. Enrolment to the non-racial, non-sexist, and democratic character of the ANC was anchored on its continued pursuit of the Freedom Charter ideals. This accounts for the type of Constitution that emerged out of negotiations. The Preamble, Founding Provisions, Human Rights Chapter and the Public Accountability System institutionalised in Chapter 9, including the Public Service Commission, define the edifice of the Freedom Charter. If there is a legacy the ANC has bequeathed to South Africa, it orchestration of a Freedom Charter-based Constitution is unmatched.
The ideals of the Constitution created within society brigades of South Africans that embraced the 'leader of society' institutional frameworks the Constitution entrenched. This brigade understood government as an agency of a state that institutionally defines our sovereignty, nationhood, and value system. This brigade sought to defend the supremacy of the constitution and the sacrosanctity of the rule of law as the context of all contexts South African. Those in the leadership of the ANC and government were seen by this brigade as South Africans operating on borrowed public power, whence when in government, they are organs of state, and the state is not their organ.
This brigade is intergenerational; it is organised according to the various generations defining the different epochs of the struggle. It was organised as student formations, worker unions, civic associations, and other specialist formations that executed dimensions of the struggle as it applies to them. As this brigade became a force, questions of ethics, code of conduct, and how to govern and manage became central to its agenda. Post-1994, this brigade got deployed into the state, academia, private sector, and the diplomatic corps. This might account for some of the efficiencies as the transition was constructed. There is no empirical evidence to show if leaving politics and public service by them can be attributable to the decline in the role of leader of society of the Constitution. There is, however, sprouts of evidence that the private sector outlook of society, at a point, showed their arrival.
As the structural ambiguities of Parliament in conducting oversight seem to be undermined by towing the party line principles, it will always be the conscience of parliamentarians with a 'leader of society' mindset that the democracy will rely on for its survival. Whilst the ANC as a liberation movement is undoubtedly the custodian of South Africa's liberation from apartheid colonialism, the 'leader of society brigade' within it must be curated to be the guardian of liberation. The soul space of the ANC should thus be troubled if its centre is not dominated by the 'leader of society brigade'. In that way, when the post-liberation political context gets more complicated and sophisticated, and liberation beneficiaries become especially disadvantaged by the complexity of freedom, the 'leader of society brigade' becomes the interior of the ANC that deals with the threat to the liberation promise in the Constitution. CUT!!!
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