This was published in the TimesLive under the title "ANC, beware, the opposition complex is mastering the takeover of surface politics" on 08 August 2024.
With the devastating performance of less than 50% from the 2024 national and provincial elections barely in the rearview mirror, the local government electioneering has already begun. The opposition complex, a coalition of political parties opposing the ANC, has unleashed a propaganda juggernaut to project the GNU as a strategic victory against a 'supposedly' majoritarian ANC. Branding agencies are profiling non-ANC ministers as the oxygen RSA governance requires. End-of-project implementation and launch events are masterminded and will be launched in opposition complex-governed municipalities or by GNU partnership leaders. While the ANC is still excelling with the details of what post-May 2029 means, the opposition complex is mastering the takeover of surface politics.
The service delivery
gaps in municipalities, mostly governed by the ANC, and the general
disintegration of public infrastructure are stark realities that voters face as
they make their way to the voting station. South Africans are yearning for an
end to poverty, unemployment, and inequality. They are striving for the
prosperity that the post-apartheid constitutional order has promised. The 2024
elections have shown that their aspirations are not necessarily aligned with
the ANC's, highlighting the need for the party to connect with the voters on a
deeper level.
The strategy fissures
within the ANC, particularly in how senior leaders engage with the GNU
coalition, have become a significant factor in the in-ANC succession battle.
The truth of Ramaphosa being in his second and last term as ANC President,
coupled with a sophisticatedly muted discontent about the party's performance
in the previous elections under his leadership, is undermining the ANC's
ability to make a comeback. The thrust of the renewal strategy, which has so
far focused on purging ANC members who oppose the promotion of liberal centre
politics in favor of a radical transformation path, could have serious
consequences for the party's future.
Whilst the general trend
in most post-liberation democracies has been a march to a failed state, the
South African version might arguably be a march to a failed liberation
movement. Unmanaged liberation movements in
crisis, fragile or on a path to being failed organisations generally find
refuge in states dependent on economic rent, thus a "rent state".
Economic rent is 'revenue' a state earns from selling licenses to extract
resources; post-liberation RSA might include revenue earned from selling strategically
important state-owned entities. In a 'rent state' the classic bargain for those
with the executive authority of the state, singularly or part of a collective
is "pledge yourself to the status quo, and we shall cut you in on the
resource" or spoils of the wholesale revenue.
The RSA state as an
institution is neither falling nor fragile but in a capability crisis traceable
to governing party fragility and failure. The brute reality is that the
liberator character of the ANC sustains its authority and influence over the
post-1994 liberation promise, now entrenched in the Constitution. This happens
while it battles its crisis to avoid being a marginal player in RSA politics. However,
as the anti-apartheid struggle credentials of the ANC become an extremely
watermarked aspect of RSA politics and recede to being a historical background,
the desensitisation of voters about the ANC as a party of choice is growing.
The genius of hatching a
GNU context, which might essentially be participation in a sophisticated transition
strategy to a South Africa without the ANC as a governing party, has put the
ANC in a condition where it either starts to prepare for a future plagued by
internal strife or further disintegration than mounting a political comeback.
Either way, the consequence will be the rise of a new political centre of South
Africans ready to live in a society bequeathed to them by the heroic acts of
the ANC from 1912 until it delivered the 1996 Constitution. As the National
Party folded and accepted that it was a construct whose mission of racial
segregation had reached its end, the ANC might have to genuinely interrogate
what its foundational mission is still there to pursue outside what is in the
RSA Constitution; if none, it might have to fold or exist like the Kenya
African National Union of Jomo Kenyatta.
The reputation battering
that the ANC has suffered at the hands of its ethically challenged or 'strange
breeds of leadership' deployees across the spheres of government, as various
investigation reports show, remains one of its most significant liabilities on
an otherwise political capital balance sheet facing self-inflicted liquidity
crises. The cost of this battering is a tattered image of being a coterie of
corrupt people interested in milking or renting out the state. Attempts at
repairing the damage might be projected as successes of the GNU antidote and
thus accrue to claims that the liberal coalition is what RSA needed.
The MK Party dynamic
continues to attract ANC members who have defined themselves as 'economic
freedom in our lifetime fighters' of a non-Malema-Shivambu breed. The airtime
they have thus far garnered to articulate why the need for the MK Party will
mature away from Jacob Zuma's reputation discourse to an interrogation of the
essence of the liberation promise. The political rants and tantrums which
characterised the Malema-led opposition complex are over. In the new context, difficult
content for the ANC to contend with will come to the fore, and how it responds
to it might dispel or confirm the 'sell-out' label the MK Party and EFF have
given it. The reformation of the ANC posture by the MK Party might well appeal
to the disgruntled and vote-boycotting sections of society to impact any
recovery strategy.
With no convictions of
those branded as corrupt, many of whom believe their sin was to interrogate the
templates of economic dominance, the likelihood of the MK Party growing its
influence in the next feedback 2026 municipal elections is arguably not far-fetched.
MK Party leaders command the credibility of a type representing anti-system
politics. Fundamentally, anti-system politics is about those frustrated,
correctly or otherwise, with political systems they perceive as broken and
economies that reward only the wealthiest. The financial or means fragility of
society and the non-responsive character of the (neoliberal or neocolonial)
democratic order founded upon free-market capitalism lends credence to
anti-system political coalitions, even if they present no alternatives.
The more plausible
scenario, under the circumstances, will be for the MK Party-led anti-system
opposition complex to exercise power from within the ANC. Membership of the ANC
is not misconduct in MK; the fact is that the MK Party leader insists he is a member
of the ANC and 'is coming back'. The continued rise of the MK Party-led
anti-system parties is the direct consequence of the loosening of the bond
between ANC voters and the representatives they elect and the increasing
perception that the ANC (of Ramaphosa, as they argue) serve a narrow elite of
career politicians and insider interests.
Barely taken seriously
when they warned with the song 'mhla sibuyayo' and launched the MK Party, which
resuscitated their almost fractured to extinction political careers, the
Zuma-anchored opposition complex has more or less singlehandedly blown apart
the possibility of the establishment consensus of a grand coalition.
It would be interesting
to see how national the national dialogue will be without a party with
independent electoral commission auditable support of no less than 14%
nationally and 45%, largest, in the KZN province. The dialogue can only be
complete if it accommodates those who have laid a claim of ownership to the
growing insurrection of subjugated or marginalised voices. The May 2024
election outcomes, including the twenty-two million South Africans who did not
vote, echo the national dialogue that must be followed to unearth whose voices
they are and what messages they carry, highlighting the need for a
comprehensive national dialogue.
The steady drift of the
in-ANC centre towards the overall national (liberal) centre and decisively
toward pro-market positions, which is not driven by a similar shift within the
traditional ANC allies and public opinion, is turning out to be the uppermost
risk to its ability to recover from the 40% show-up in 2024. This has now gone
to levels where the ANC as a political party is too small just to let die, but
the ANC as the liberation movement is too big to fall. Not only will a
broad-based rejection of the existing political establishment and its failure
to protect the living standards of the poor and majority be political and
social capital to maverick politicians, but the health of the democratic order
might suffer irreparable damage.
Notwithstanding its
arguable status as the nexus of RSA politics in its current state, the ANC is
fast becoming a thread the country is experimenting with if it is still
necessary to connect the rest, which our democratic order is all about. Its
relevance depends not on how appealing it is to its GNU partners and their
funders or backers but on how quickly it recuperates from its self-inflicted
demise. CUT!!!
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