The Gauteng ANC leadership transition: What can we learn.

    The secret about political transitions is that they work when the interests of the outgoing leadership and those of the incoming do not seem to conflict. While there is, in the eyes of the public, a semblance of an amicable agreement interior to the political space, but the new is good to proceed with what the old has started. However, believing the truth of such a transition is always challenging. There are infrequent occasions in the ANC where there is consensus about transitioning from one leader to another without generating fresh factions. 

 

The pessimism about the unprecedented transfer of power from David Makhura to Panyaza Letshufi indicates that South Africa's academic media complexes have gotten used to the chaos the ANC has perfected since the watershed Polokwane conference. In these circumstances, the relative strength and influence of belonging to one political party have for a while been unclear, whence the ANC itself leads as the generator of competing narratives about its quest for unity. In fact, the question of unity, renewal, and rebuilding has had triumphalists after its conferences as the wrecking iron balls of the institution that the ANC has become. 

 

With underdeveloped political cognitive faculties, no defined philosophy of leadership, and the availability of confusing reading material about power, elected leaders assume textbook characters in how they deal with options. The concept of power and how it relates to followers’ expectations are understood, and unfortunately so, by the confused and dominant, as an ability to coerce, if not manipulate, the otherwise friendly to any will democratic processes of the ANC and capture its soul. Over time, to be in pole positions to have in-ANC political capital, as a conduit to access the resources distributive prowess of the state, your capacity to de-campaign those that are exiting seemed to have guaranteed you legitimation outside the organisation that elects you into the position.

 

The Makhura-to-Lesufi transition was about accounting to power centres that define the politics of the ANC and the Gauteng Provincial Government. Crucial in the political accountability ecosystem within which this transition was contextualised was the institutionalisation of societal expectations about the future of leadership in, of, and about the Gauteng province- and whether Panyaza Lesufi and his new cohort of ANC leaders believe in the optimistic destiny of the ANC as pronounced at its last conference, and now theming the 55^th National Conference, renewal and rebuilding the ANC. It is also about making the ANC the core substrate of renewal and rebuilding of the South Africanness our constitution has bequeathed future generations as the liberation promise.

 

In the Makhura-Lesufi transition, and as a country, we must have read the script of the new ANC, led by the ‘leader of society brigade’, which imbues on society to foresee a brighter future for the Gauteng Province, Africa’s most recognisable economic hub, ahead of their in-ANC factional differences. Out of the transition was also a display of encroaching strategic patience about re-establishing the ANC as the central institution of leadership in charge of all discourse about South Africa’s development. Potentially a dividend of the investment by the 54^th National Conference resolve to build a member integrity management system that invokes into our present the Oliver Tambo guided ‘code of conduct’ by which the ANC would hold itself to a high standard of  ‘ubuntu’ and ethics in undertaking the task of being a leader of society. The Makhura-to-Lesufi transition has the whole moral content of ANCness written on it.

 

The soft power of ANC hegemony found expression in the symbolic handover report Makhura gave to Lesufi, notwithstanding that a chapter contains how Lesufi accounted to Makhura-as-Premier so that Panyaza-as-Premier received what Panyaza-as-MEC did to implement the political program when Makhura-was-ANC Chairperson. It is clear that in Gauteng, other provinces could learn that it should not be convention that the history of ANC transitions should be explained in terms of conflict between the attempt of existing political power networks to monopolise and bequeath political power and the attempt to enter political networks to change the relations of an otherwise one source political power. In a political movement which has demonstrated that it has always been an intergenerational project whose objects were carried through cohorts of leaders that defines its various epochs, history has a legitimate expectation of capability circulation.

Closest to the Makhura-to-Lesufi transition, albeit without the public ritual of handover report exchanges, is the Zikalala-Duma transition of KwaZulu Natal. In KZN Sihle Zikalala became the MEC to a Premier who was an MEC under him. Yes, the notion of leading where the ANC sees fit to deploy you is gaining good traction and precedence when there are few in the wisdom cohort of leadership to approve such plausible acts by the new and young. What is now left to follow is the young to lead in believing the power of succession in the bureaucracy. They should recall the wisdom, and not individuals, of the early Mandela-to-Mbeki mandarins, and ask the question, when you legislated A, what were you in pursuit of? If you were to be given a similar opportunity, what would you change or improve, and why? Similarly the new might want to interrogate our apartheid past and determine what can they import back into the future with a non-racial posture.

 

This circulation can only be modelled by those that understand their ‘leader of society obligations’ as a function of how the organisation allows its new to deliberately displace ‘the degenerate elements’ within its tried and tested cohorts, and without truncating the pursuit of the intergenerational mission of the movement. In this pursuit of the mission, counterfeits are generally exposed when the time to let the new continue as the old retreats to wisdom shelves to be consulted when the memory of the experience can be the only solution to overcome obstacles.

 

In his interpretation of political elite transformation, Mosca (1939) posits, “as soon as there is a shift in the balance of (political) forces…then the manner in which the (governing or ruling) class is constituted changes also. If a new source of wealth develops in a society, if the practical importance of knowledge grows, if an old (religion, ideology, political rhetoric) declines or a new one is born, if a new current of ideas spreads, them, simultaneously, far reaching dislocations occur in the (governing or ruling) class”. As a consequence of these drivers of (ruling or governing) class or elite dislocations, Keller (1963) submits that this thesis posits that “strategic elites (will) move into ascendancy when their functions do likewise. The rank order of elites, therefore, is generally determined by the types of problems confronting a society, the priority accorded to this, and the functional and moral solutions proposed to solve them.”

 

The Makhura-Lesufi transition displays how political elite transformation is to be done within an establishment that might otherwise be fraught with intense differences. As the need for in-ANC factional combat declines in importance, unless it ideationally enhances the hegemonic chances of the ANC to continue governing, the relevance of being in a faction is equal to sheer sell-out of the intergenerational meaning of ANCness. The prominence of intellectuals is true of ANC elites and elders, and Gauteng is worse than all provinces. The general tendency of intellectuals is to believe that leaders of society can only be drawn from the historical upper layers of society. The variability of their network prowess, which in some instances might include stranded intellectual assets of society, has for a while scavenged on the factional leadership transitioning tendencies that choked leadership of Makhura and Lesufi ilk.

 

As a political precedent and not an event that passes with history, the Makhura-to-Lesufi transition is a leadership practice monument whose importance must be institutionalised as part of core ANCness. What they carry as an undergirding constituency is the persistence of the youthful revolutionary generation that characterised Gauteng for most of South Africa’s post-apartheid history. Unlike in other provinces, Gauteng, under the leadership of Paul Mashatile, David Makhura, and now Panyaza Lesufi has consistently refused to block oncoming generations, thus disabling the discontinuities of in-ANC socialisation in the province. It is these dilemmas of continuity in the ANC that Gauteng seems to have found an antidote to manage through the institutionalisation of smooth transitioning of leadership, which the ANC should seriously consider as a succession planning management mechanism.

 

Unlike in France after the Revolution and South Africa after the 1994 breakthrough, the Gauteng ANC, through the Makhura-to-Lesufi transition, is institutionalising a context where ideologues and the ANC have many, with “revolutionary experiences’ are managed to give way to in-ANC apparatchiki with administrative skills. The ability of the new to integrate intergenerational missions and, in turn, yield to younger, non-antiapartheid-struggle encumbered, technically savvy and globally gazed, trained in the significance of a bureaucracy to achieve political objects, is what the Makhura-to-Lesufi transition generation will bequeath to our democracy. 

If the ANC believes South Africa’s future is more important than the ANC itself, a condition this rendition labels a 'leader of the society mentality', then perhaps they should focus on building the ANC as an institution of leadership- an organisation which leads those who join it as members until they exit it. The immediate threats it faces should be reasoned within what its institutions provide to manage them, unlike reacting outside what its leadership as an institution directs. The time to produce leadership practice has arrived. 

As human beings, we have always been an unfinished species. As individuals, and worse as organisations, we have always been the story in the middle. We are those tiny threads in the long succession of families, tribes, and societies that connects to the rest that is coming from the much that has happened. We are that species in the animal kingdom that has deliberately changed its surroundings, systems, and values to stretch our capacity and capability so as to provoke new and never seen before accomplishments. The most vulnerable of our inheritance from those before us, is our growing from who they were, to exactly what they have been, just responding to new contexts. 

Each generation will have its own wisdom that is reburied in the 'fleeting drivellings of modernity'. Like diamonds, the roughness of such wisdom will yet again be unearthed by a select in a cohort to not only restore it, but polish it, and present it as a new, valuable, and interestingly as though it never was there. We can never step out of our generation in as much as we may step out of ourselves. In a generation we follow those before, otherwise the discontinuity will truncate that cadence of just being human. In the Makhura-to-Lesufi transition we find comfort that they were once the young in the ANC, and they are becoming the good we expect in the new old. CUT!!!

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