Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, one of the ANC's Presidential candidates at its 55th National Conference, voted against the party's marching orders. In doing so, she invoked one of the sacred statements by ANC members when acting within the most principled of its many realms. She declared that her yes vote for the impeachment of President Ramaphosa was based on her being a disciplined and loyal member of the ANC. This was one of the bravest actions by an ANC leader in a context where being elected to its highest office is at stake, including the possibility of facing career-limiting disciplinary proceedings. The question this rendition seeks to explore is at what point is the principle of being loyal to what the ANC stands for as an institution of leadership correct or otherwise when the defence of such a principle is at variance with a prescribed party line that might later be found to be at variance with what the party stands for as a principle? The NDZ vote coincides with dealing with matters that are classifiable as bringing the organisation into disrepute or impugning the leader of society status of the ANC. The deeper conscience of ANC members has, and according to its 54th Conference adopted member integrity management system, been elevated to being one of the greatest resources to reverse the tide of corruption, state capture, and general conduct of those in leadership. Let us explore.
The African National Congress is one of the influential laboratories or test sites of what our democracy is or maybe ought to be. Having sustained for the longest time a struggle against racial colonialism, later called apartheid and declared a crime against humanity, it accumulated in the process a moral authority to be a model liberation movement in respect of what it crafted as reasons for the struggle it waged. To date, the ANC as a liberation movement has not yet declared its struggle to have ended, as 1994 was neatly characterised as a democratic breakthrough in its quest to pursue a National Democratic Struggle whose outcome is the creation of a National Democratic Society. Beyond the breakthrough, the ANC as a political party has defined its role as establishing a National Democratic Order with which the greater assignment could be executed. Government as the most active agency of the State will constitute one of the institutional complexes at the disposal of the ANC, including the ANC itself as an institution, to lead and direct society to the ideological end state only labelled a National Democratic Society.
At its formation in 1912, the ANC as a political construct was created as an alternative Parliament of the people. This was after native Africans were excluded from the 1910 Constitution-based non-blacks-only democratic dispensation. Exclusion from the formal state power defined in the then 1910 Constitution and subsequent others triggered a continuum of activities constituting a struggle system to establish a dispensation where all that live in South Africa have a legitimate and legal right befitting anyone classifiable as a citizen. As a result, the ANC went through several epochs that defined its relationship with concepts associated with modern democracy. Central to these concepts, and of this rendition, is the accountability of its members to the policies it espouses and advocates. What constitutes its leader of society role as a liberation movement and an institution of leadership has been anchored on accountability to the cause of the liberation struggle for a while.
In defining itself as a movement committed to creating a South Africa based on a value system representative of what shapes society, the ANC described and chronicled the end state in several ways. The most authoritative were; the African Claims Document, the Congress League Program of Action, The 1955 Freedom Charter, the inaugural Strategy and Tactics Document, and ultimately the 1996 Constitution of South Africa as the culmination of what legalised the liberation promise found in its ancestral documents. The 1996 Constitution, which establishes a non-racial, non-sexist, and democratic South Africa, also calibrates a value system a new constitutional democratic state will be governed with. Notwithstanding that the 1996 Constitution was an outcome of a negotiated settlement and part of a political accord, its adoption at the 51st Conference in Mafikeng makes it a formal ANC document.
At the apex of the now constitutionalised, thus legal, value system, and in addition to other sound government principles implicit in on-boarding instruments such as the oath of office, the Constitution imposes expectations which have personal consequences on leaders it vests the legislative and executive authority. The obligation to the oath of office a 'deployed' member of Parliament commits to, has individual consequences, albeit derived from a platform accessed through being a member of a defined collective. What the Constitution also provides is that access to political power by individuals is through the political party. The contest, therefore, for being the governing party is defined differently, and equally so, being a member of Parliament is a privilege accessed through being a member of a political party. The injunctions or instructions the political party gives to members of Parliament are binding to the extent that the presiding officer of Parliament has determined the voting procedures. Unless a determination of secret balloting, which by its nature calls for a conscience vote, any public vote might define a loyal and disciplined member who is a member of Parliament away from other principles expressed in the party policies. In such cases, interests as the currency of politics take over and supersede even established principles.
Given that interests are embodiments of active diversities in any political system, the unity of individuals that constitute the membership of the ANC can only be assumed to have superseded the active diversities inherent in the interests each one brings into the ANC. As an institution, the importance of the ANC to its politics and those of its members is that it is a means by which they have volunteered themselves. Through it, conflicts of (their) interests will be registered, resolved, altered, and maintained. It should thus be apparent to ANC members that as an organisation, it embodies power, not mere opinion, and it can thus coerce or punish (its members) under certain conditions. Once an injunction or instruction is put forward and agreed upon, all politics beyond that point will take place against the background of what is sanctified by the injunction or instruction.
Individuals who become members of an organisation have their membership to it in common. Their acceptance of specific rules that define the organisation will keep and hold it together. In time, and as a prize of good politics, some in the organisation will develop into an establishment whose interests will dominate the organisation's direction. Establishments in organisations such as the ANC are not innocent of interests beyond its membership base, including the geopolitical spaces it occupies. It will be naive to believe that as the active diversities of interests settle, others will not arise and that the ambitions of individuals will not be so strong that they refuse to let society be uniform and stable, even in its political texture. Such is what the Establishment in any organisation manages and manipulates for as long as it commands foregrounded power. Institutions of leadership like the ANC should know that its dominant Establishment's commitment to its increasingly assertive liberal democratic order, which guarantees a free market economic system, is much more predictable than any long-term inside-the-ANC ideological response. There appears to be no effective national strategy to prevent or end the ideology-less factionalism that has choked beyond leadership contestation thinking in the ANC. In fact, only a new-generation approach can do that.
Notwithstanding the disciplined and loyal member badges, people conveniently wear, not everyone who wants democracy wants democracy with accountability and answerability. In fact, the most rebellious against systems that are not democratic have a greater propensity to be unaccountable when they have access to power. To the,m accountability to their cause is democratic. It is, therefore, essential for the ANC to know that building a governing and/or ruling class would require the assistance of the people (they rule), without which they cannot secure and maintain the sources of political power. Therefore, crafting a national interest-driven establishment in South Africa requires the abundance of social and political capital the ANC commands. This might include living with party political positions that do not make public accountability sense and yet create a semblance of a centre that is not vulnerable but holds.
Movement claiming the leader of society mantle cannot hope to bring down a system that defined their struggle paths and establish political freedom without the ability to apply their own or institutionally acquired power effectively. The essence of having a parliamentary majority is to make political power management one of the most potent tools to resolve difficult situations. The influence each political power block in a democratic system brings to a contestation determines how the development of a national interest-based establishment unfolds.
Yes, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, with the 'public reasons' she has given and her understanding of the principles that the ANC has thus far adopted, would arguably be correct in the position and posture she took. The PhalaPhala matter, looked at from any angle, barring the legal and technical justifications giving it a semblance of credence, has impugned the credibility of the President as a gladiator against corruption. It will also take serious ingenuity to argue that it has not impacted the reputation of the ANC as an institution, thus making it befitting for the integrity committee to ask whoever will ultimately be charged and if he or she is a leader of the ANC to step aside. Invoking the statement of a loyal and disciplined member of the ANC should be a consistent act by those relying on it as a shield of reasoning. It would have made greater sense and more significant impact if it could have been invoked in contexts where worse and admitted as well as proven acts were committed to profoundly compromising levels for our democracy. "Deception that strengthens a 'we’-group should always be viewed by members as morally superior to truth-telling that weakens the organisation".
Yes, the overwhelming no vote by the majority of ANC members of Parliament can also not be celebrated as a remarkable feat of societal leadership. To the extent that the party position was to make the National centre of and for South Africa to hold the 'no to impeachment hearings', notwithstanding there being an accountability case to be answered, the 'no vote' by the ANC is excusable, albeit it is difficult to argue its correctness. In voting no and directed by a party line and position, ANC MPs rose above factional interests. They demonstrated that despite the truism that factional oligarchy, which arguably exists within the ANC, provides a veil of plausible deniability, they refused to succumb to its power.
In organisational development parlance, the maturity stage of the ANC as a governing party was accelerated through this episode. Yes, evolution is sometimes mistakenly seen in terms of survival of the fittest. Still, such a view ignores the nurturance that our Constitution and the institutions of leadership established by it give to us as incumbents in the nation-building process. CUT!!! 🤷🏿♂️
Kgomo ga e nye boloko kamoka
Comments
Post a Comment