How far the once mighty ANC has fallen
President Jacob Zuma’s modus operandi has been to destroy what he cannot control. From the country’s security apparatus, to the ANC Youth League, the South African Communist Party and Cosatu, Zuma has presided over and precipitated their destruction or emasculation.
Most recently, shifting into his cross hairs and those of his coterie of rent-seeking enablers, the Gupta family and their associates, were SA’s financial institutions.
The ANC is left barely standing in the wake of his decade-long control. Will it be next to go? All indications are the party is too far gone to be saved. The policy conference that starts this weekend is being billed by the party itself as “critical to the life of the ANC”. Secretary-general Gwede Mantashe is set to deliver a devastating “diagnostic report” on the problems facing the party, central to which is its centre shifting from Luthuli House to Saxonwold. But his report will once again provide a diagnosis, not a cure. Even if a cure is found, there is no guarantee it will be administered. Diagnosing the illness and finding cures seem to take place at every party gathering, but for all its navel-gazing, the ANC has been unable to turn the tide of self-destruction.
It has become so accustomed to reiterating its Port Elizabeth national general council refrain of its “ability” to “internally renew and redefine itself when the situation so demands”, that the phrase has become meaningless. There has been no evidence of “self-correction”. Party elders are anything but optimistic — they have described the looming attempt at renewal as an “exercise in futility”, calling party leaders “ostriches with their head in the sand”. They have a point.
As Jim Collins wrote in Newsweek on his book, How the Mighty Fall: “I’ve come to see institutional decline like a disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages; easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages.” The ANC is in the much-later stages. “An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside, dangerously on the cusp of a precipitous fall.”
Mantashe said on Thursday the results of the 2016 local election would “loom large” in the party’s analysis of its current state. It is an indication of how the mighty have fallen that the loss of three metros and a majority slipping to 54% in 2016 will preoccupy the ANC of 2017, when 20 years ago, Nelson Mandela delivering his final political report at a national conference, hailed the fact that the ANC had secured a decisive victory in the local elections of 1995-96, an indication of the confidence South Africans then had in the party. ANC policy documents on organisational renewal openly admit its base now resents seeing party leaders only at election time, a shining indication of waning confidence.
Mantashe warned that the policy conference should not descend into an exercise in “adventurism” versus “conservativism, where we fear change”. But this is exactly what is set to unfold: the radical economic transformation conceptualisation by Zuma’s forces and those opposing him will play out in commissions at the conference.
The same party that has failed dismally to implement its own policies on land reform and economic transformation has become more populist in its rhetoric in an attempt to win back some legitimacy among the electorate. While the white monopoly narrative might have begun as Gupta spin, Zuma and his allies will use it as a panacea for the ANC’s declining electoral fortunes and to deflect from their own and the ANC’s inadequacies.
This is the first gathering of the ANC’s structures at a high level since the 2016 local elections. It is the first time the party is meeting since the 2015 axing of Nhlanhla Nene, since the admission by Mcebisi Jonas that the Guptas had offered him the post of finance minister, the first since the Nkandla judgment that in effect deemed Zuma an unfit president, the first since the contentious cabinet reshuffle that caused the country’s investment ratings to be downgraded by three agencies, the first since we have entered a technical recession and the first since the news that the devastating unemployment level has worsened even further.
ANC structures now have the baton. Their conduct will be a critical sign of whether the 105-year-old movement can survive in its current state. The argument for modernisation and renewal has never been more urgent.
SA is no longer willing to wait for the ANC’s navel gazing to end. If it does not act decisively, it will become a party of the past.
This is the ANC’s policy conference, but it is in fact choosing between its own survival and a leader who has more of the attributes of a sociopath than of a statesman.
ANC STRUCTURES NOW HAVE THE BATON. THEIR CONDUCT WILL BE A CRITICAL SIGN OF WHETHER THE PARTY CAN SURVIVE