Thinking about the ANC after May 2024.

 The ANC, a resilient entity, has weathered 113 years of existence. It has triumphed over British Colonialism, apartheid, the homeland system, and the Cold War's hottest moments. Despite facing assassinations, detentions without trial, long prison terms, and economic marginalisation, it has persevered as an organisation and movement. 

The ANC has the whole human history to live and potentially recover as a hegemon or leader of society. Its current membership, leaders, and capturers risk being rejected by what the ANC stands for. The ANC has never been subjected to such degradation of what it stands for by those that must represent its founding values and provisions. While it is true that organisations are its members, there are moments when the organisation carries, defines, and makes its members. As a brand and historical reality, the ANC survives without those inside it. 

In the last two decades since its founding in 1912, its members and leaders have challenged the ANC’s existence more than its enemies. Its past four national conferences contain the most resolutions about the integrity of its members and leaders. It has had two of its presidents recalled for reasons related to its entanglement with corruption, capture by predatory benefactors, and factionalism owing to defence or otherwise of malfeasance. It has put most institutions and governments, provincial and local, where it governed under administration. It has been to court about its internal disputes more than any registered political party in RSA. 

It was only after society was sensitised to a strange breed of leadership taking centre stage that notions of it being late to rescue the ANC from the breeds of members, leaders, branches, and other structures were entertained. The apex flection point of its possible collapse came when its current president admitted that whilst it is not the only one in the dock about the rising incidences of corruption and related malfeasance, it is accused number one. This prognosis is adverse. 

While its members, operating within what it stands for, can keep pace with its renewal rhetoric and realism, the behaviour of its members as humans outside its rules has undermined its endeavours. The imperfections of its post-anti-apartheid struggle organisational design, which had little to no filtration systems, have caught into the membership fishing net members whose objectives had nothing to do with what it stands for. 

These strange breeds of members, and by default leaders when raised to that level, now constitute an in-ANC system and establishment. The ideational weaknesses of the potentially influential, either through being members of members or the courage to defend wrong, create a quicksand in any movement, correct or otherwise, registers progress of sinking deeper. As a system, they have become a fragile ensemble ready to lurch into chaos without anyone anticipating it as a result of an accumulation of factors. 

As we observed in 2013, when the EFF was established into an ANC youth diversion catchment area, the July 2021 insurrection which the economy has not recovered from, and the consequential MK Party split that redefined the absolute power to govern as a system, the ANC is unstable. The immortality and resilience of its hegemony can no longer be relied upon as what holds it. What defined its relevance for most of its history is what it bequeathed to society by codifying its policies as the substructure of RSA's constitutional order. 

Since 2016, when the ANC started to fracture from within, where its urban machinery has always been dominant, its capacity to recover has been found wanting. The loss of absolute power to govern in the urban spaces of RSA from 2016 to 2021 demonstrated that the ANC was unaware of its true standing with voters. Its response to voter feedback since 2016 proved that what was at play with its traditional voting constituencies was unforeseen. Thus, the opposition complexes appeared to be discretely transforming the governing arrangements. 

The consequentially dangerous dimension of the fragile ensemble the ANC is now dealing with is that it is radically reconfiguring the ANC as an organisation system. The confusion of losing state power, a manifestation of a collapsed internal organisational system, has bred many hammers, making everyone in the organisation a scapegoat to be nailed. Driven by the burden of not wanting to be seen as doing nothing, a new nomenclature, which amounts to disbanding, is introduced. When you reconfigure a PEC to be a PTT, you have removed its executive naming convention and put in its stead a task team role; that is disbandment. 

An organisational system that destroys its social and political capital cannot survive any pressure in the immediate future, such as the upcoming local government elections. In its current state, the ANC is not capable of answering the needs of its disgruntled traditional constituency, Blacks and Africans in particular. The liberation promise of human dignity, social and economic justice, fulfilment of the Bill of Rights, equality, non-racialism, non-sexism, and democracy have now become vulnerable to the fragile ensemble making up the ANC. 

The May 2024 elections have sent a resounding message: No single entity has the absolute majority to govern South Africa alone. The inability to pass a budget has underscored a democratic order that values extreme prudence to solidify the coalition arrangements that form the current government. The notion of a single hegemony in charge has been debunked, emphasizing that the mandate of the GNU is a shared one, reflected in all policy expression instruments, with the budget being the most significant. 

This does not bode well for an ANC learning to co-govern after a 30-year honeymoon of absolute power to govern. The institutional makeup of government planning cycles would require ANC leaders to reorient their thinking about who the government of the day is. The significant change for the ANC from May 2024 was to trust not only people in your party with the future of RSA. However broadly construed, the need to trust rules and institutions that constitute the state will be the best arbiter for the ongoing coalition arrangements. 

In a large organisation like the ANC, with a broad diffusion of responsibility, literally managing over 4000 branches, it is essential to review and adopt rituals through which you can inculcate norms and expectations of a new era such as a GNU necessitated by a loss of the absolute power to govern. One such ritual is to instil that state power is reconfigured in its membership. Members and leaders must know that in most modern democracies, people in power can no longer be trusted to have a final say unless that say is based on the people’s will. Conference resolutions of the ANC must start reflecting the reality it has become: a political party contesting for power. The Constitution of South Africa is the new Liberation Movement; the ANC is no longer. What is true, though, is that the personality of the Constitution is a split image of the ANC as a liberation movement. CUT!!!