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The stressed ANC's member integrity management system

The ANC's member integrity management policy is adrift. The credibility of its leadership is putting the organisation into disrepute. The effectiveness of its step-aside rule is undermined by how those in leadership react to revelations of malfeasance. It is not the guilty or otherwise verdict that matters, but the extent to which forthcoming information lends the organisation into disrepute which matters. As a human or member integrity management mechanism, the step-aside principle assures "we the people" that those who do not step aside are beyond reproach. It is crucial that President Ramaphosa, as the leader of the ANC, takes decisive action against corruption to restore the party's integrity. 

As a virtue leaders must possess, the centrality of integrity has become one criterion for scoring high in many indices of ethical leadership. Everyday experience shows that societies are willing to trade parts of their envisaged democratic order for greater ethicalness. On such grounds, member integrity management systems assert their superiority in democracies like RSA and liberation movements such as the ANC. Although the street-level experience of the post-liberation struggle governments is almost universal in terms of corruption, there are differences of opinion on how this scourge could be arrested. The corruption-attributable decline of voter support for the ANC from 2016 to 2024 is not an anomaly. It confirms that the innocent until proven guilty consensus amongst the political elite is intolerable to voters. 

 

The shifting of decks, literally swapping a malfeasance-attached minister from one ministry to another in the cabinet, if it was at all necessary, has put the integrity management system into disrepute. The moral high ground a Ramaphosa presidency enjoyed is suddenly facing a credibility crisis. How the reshuffle sends a message that "the public tap which has (wrongly) become a (legitimate) source of wealth for the well-connected" is being closed is what will define the seriousness of the President about corruption. 

 

The VBS whistleblowers' testimony sketches one of the most troubling corruption dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa and mentions, with a follow-the-money trail of evidence, might be a lost opportunity for the President to act on many in the circle he exercises the executive authority vested in him together with. It is becoming difficult to understand how corruption support networks, which morphed into patronage networks or criminal syndicates, have survived the clinical attention of a Ramaphosa anticorruption cutting blade. 

 

The availability of reports of evidence, including that which has been confirmed as a loan from a service provider in the political industry not known for veracity, has created a meaningful context of not-so-easy-to-ignore truth. The President was expected to arrive at a decision different from the one he made on Thembi Simelane. 

 

Although there is now a greater realisation that President Ramaphosa must break away from the 'closing of ranks' party political approaches, much of the corrupt, guilty establishment remains committed to defending each other, whatever the cost. Even though the President's relative share of the moral high ground to deal with corruption is compromised by the PhalaPhala saga, he still boasts the most considerable legitimacy to act given the unmatched political and social capital he commands. The ANC must use him as valuable social and political capital to propel its anti-corruption-led renewal and member integrity rebuilding programs. 

 

The ANC needs to recognise and secure its interests in a corruption—and malfeasance-frustrated society rather than futilely attempting to forestall an anticorruption march by "we the people" through a costly and self-defeating effort to disadvantage in-ANC succession adversaries. 

 

To end it all, it will be foolhardy and almost impossible to renew the ANC, mainly through an anticorruption strategic mechanism like its member integrity management system, without renewing and recalibrating its politics. No organisational renewal agenda, however well-intentioned and defined, can long endure amid the ANC's current polarisation, in which every issue becomes another weapon in the internal succession and potentially ethno-regionalised as well as the left and right hegemonic tensions. Overcoming this challenge means confronting the fact that the ANC as a political party is constrained, if not ruined to submission, by a campaign finance system that is tantamount to "state capture of a special type. 

 

Cyril Ramaphosa, in his then wisdom, rhetorically elevated anticorruption as a significant organisational renewal goal, but corruption is not primarily a renewal problem. The problem is how leadership manages the integrity of members to avoid keeping the ANC in a perpetual condition of disrepute. It would thus be prudent for the President to review his entire executive team and act in the interest of "we the people" and his organisation's survival as part of the government of the day complex beyond 2026 and 2029, respectively. CUT!!!

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