The ANC SG has a date with history.

When reality sets in, history compels men and women to react thoughtfully. Leaders in crisis face a pivotal moment that will shape their legacy. Like falling off a cliff, once you begin to descend, the ensuing narrative will revolve around how you landed or were crushed upon impact. Only your resilience, mental strength, and capacity to think clearly in the face of fate can save you. The ANC has been in this situation since the 2024 national election results were announced.

The 29 May 2024 election outcomes, an epoch representing the last fall from the cliff, have put the leadership of the ANC in a position where anything they do to truncate the fall can only manage the inevitability of landing. The gravitational pull is in control of the speed towards crushing or landing. Whichever way you engage with interventions that are made, the endgame is to reach a point where the next take-off can be made, of which such a point can be a crash side. 

 

In vintage Mbalula style, he has already acknowledged that 'si se k***ni', a concept used to dramatise the post-May 2024 convergence of political catastrophes the ANC had to contend with. The story of the ANC's recovery would require the best of its transformation while building skills. With its true north bequeathed to the nation seeking a new north, it might require a total overhaul of form and character. The bottom line is that the ANC knows little about how its current ambidexterity comes about in a historical context.

 

To improve the situation, incumbents are expected to have the flexibility to take advantage of emerging prospects. Slash-and-burn is a common tactic when far-reaching reconfigurations are necessary. The ANC's legacy, the source of its competitive advantage, has been liquidated by the conduct of its members in general and leadership accountability in particular. 

Organisations burdened with ineffective or persistently unreliable subnational systems tend to replace their leaders as a prerequisite for initiating renewal efforts. The ANC is experiencing a challenging phase as it grapples with the uncomfortable truth that it could face political irrelevance in the upcoming election. The period from 2016 to 2024 marks a chapter that the ANC needs to prove it can erase from its narrative.

The brand of the ANC has accumulated liabilities that are now part of what is known by a generation that never experienced pre-1994. The loss of the absolute power to govern with a margin the ANC polled would have always required consequence management. The reconfiguration of leadership in the provinces of Gauteng and KZN to the effect of ending up with a PTT instead of a PEC, disbandment by any standard, is a form of falling from the tipping point. While the NEC or NWC opted to reconfigure (read disband) with elements of continuity, a tradition of continuity alone is insufficient for the recovery and renewal its current and changing environment requires. Continuity invokes the idea of recalling the old guard to renew. This approach assumes the old will bring a new one, but the younger generation cannot. The old custodians of institutional memory will be expected to birth a renewed entity. 

The reconfiguration of leadership in the ANC, which will inevitably include its 52 regions, the anchor structures to fight the upcoming local government elections, introduces a complexity its internal succession dynamics will not easily overcome. How robustly the ANC will manage its 2026 municipal elections readiness fragility will depend on its leadership's capability to neutralise the unanticipated dangers of change interventions, especially the reconfigurations,'' whatever the concept means. Instead of developing new methods of building better boats to help the ANC manage the volatile tides of political change, it has opted to patch leakages and continue rowing with old and outdated boats. 

The nature, form, and character of the challenges and onslaughts the ANC faces require a mindset and complexity it has disabled or lost over the three decades it has been governing alone. The opposition complex the ANC has been facing since it took political power in RSA and immediately after May 2024 has had a sophistication that grew into negative systems operating as common-purpose networks with no established hierarchical structure. In their negativity, they sense, scale, and swarm to sustain the pathways they have selected tactically. 

The demise of ANC hegemony or a monopoly of defining non-racial democracy, which undermines the still intense globally coordinated racism and superior race networks, is the target of a well-funded system. The adjunct of racism, which is tribalism, is an equally committed motive force to undermine the democratic order the ANC has been threading since the 1955 Congress of the People. Fighting such a resilient system requires a non-hierarchical response, which allows for a distribution of influence without rendering the organisation vulnerable to internally originated threats. Tolerance of occasional dessert is a sign of respect for the inherent diversity and difference in multicultural and transtribal organisations like the ANC. 

Implementing consequence management interventions like the recent reconfiguration of KZN and Gauteng at such high vulnerability is complex and multifaceted. The inconvenient truth is that the ANC is transitioning from a liberation movement to a political party in a context where its liberation movement character stubbornly refuses to let go. Worse, the rise of the MK Party on the ticket of the ANC no longer being a liberation movement is tearing apart its strategic outlook and responses. The siphethe syndrome, a dimension of the siphatha ngoku generation, arguably with little to no options, is hierarchical in its relentless drive to renew at any cost, including breaking down to pieces. 

The reconfiguration approach, which should, in all honesty, have started with a National General Council, is a desperate confirmation that "when we don't know what to do, we do more of what we know" This includes constructing frames within which we lock ourselves. The multiple attacks the ANC deals with require it to reframe its context. The 40% performance started in 2014 when voter withdrawal created fictitious majorities the ANC relied upon to believe in its invincibility until Jesus came back declarations. 

Under the difficult task of renewing an organisation with a President who has very little to gain or lose given the last term in both capacities he is facing, SG Fikile Mbalula has a date with history and posterity. He has no precedent for what he is facing; he will be the precedent. He must be competent in finding one to sort through the alternatives and have the wisdom to match the multiple challenges facing the ANC. He is in the territory; he needs all the wisdom no single individual can possess. He is in a position to think or submit to fate. 

This is why the reconfiguration is both an answer and a question. Many will claim they would have done better than reconfiguring, yet few have posited alternatives. The ANC's enemies are sophisticated and complex. They have become organic and self-reproductive. Without opposing the ANC, they have little to no reason to exist. Notwithstanding SG Mbalula'sflaws, history might come back to ask what else he could do to rescue or finish the movement. He has or is on a date with posterity. The ANC itself is off the proverbial cliff; what we all are waiting for is whether it will crash or land when the point of contact with the ground it is headed to fall on happens. CUT!!!