Committed members need to stand up and save ANC

What is the future of the ANC? I found myself thinking about this on Sunday as I reminisced about the launch of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in Cape Town 34 years ago. My father, who was born in Cape Town, used to say to my mother: “All good things come from Cape Town.”

While my mother never disputed the fact that her husband was the one good thing the Mother City gave her, what is still in dispute is whether the UDF was a front of the ANC. For the purposes of this column, what is pertinent is the fact that as a young and handsome hothead, I believed that the formation of the UDF was ordained by the ancestors as the glorious movement of our people.

As I write this missive, I am in a state of confusion about which is more glorious, the ANC or Grace Mugabe.

When I meet my ANC comrades, I always tell them there is no doubt in my mind that the ANC will celebrate its 200th birthday, not in a packed stadium in Mangaung, but in a cosy restaurant in Bloemfontein.

In other words, the sons and daughters of the great grandchildren of the current generation of ANC members and leaders will inherit the consequences of the sins of their forefathers and mothers.

When the ANC was unbanned, the UDF disbanded. This was based, consciously or otherwise, on the belief that the ANC would always act in the best interests of the people. In so doing, we failed to distinguish between the ANC as a noble idea, on the one hand, and the ANC as a human instrument of history, on the other.

The infidelity of the current leadership of the governing party to the values, principles and vision of liberation constitutes the tension between the idea of freedom and reality of state power. Because the tension is not static, we must wallow in neither the delusion of institutional self-correction nor a sense of pessimism about irreversible decline.

The latter we must avoid notwithstanding the fact that some in the leadership of the ANC are doing what they were doing during the liberation struggle; that is, working towards the destruction of the ANC, colluding with the same forces that would have liked Nelson Mandela to die in prison.

The primary enemy of the ANC, therefore, is the askari impulse within its leadership. Fighting against this askari element are leaders and members of the ANC who were not an extension of the murderous and corrupt apartheid state, but were in the ANC in pursuit of narrow personal, political, economic, ethnic and racial interests.

These are the groups and individuals who pose the greatest danger to the ANC and the democratic project. This greatest challenge must be confronted by those who are neither. These are the men and women who are truly committed to the ANC and the liberation of our people. Their voice is being drowned out by the noisy eloquence of the askari impulse and the opportunists — inside and outside the ANC.

Those who are truly committed need to come to the realisation that history does not owe them and the ANC a permanent place in our political landscape.

Furthermore, it is inconceivable that they and the ANC of their dreams constitute the only force for revolutionary change.

Inaction will leave a vacuum that will be occupied by a deeper state of decline, or fake copies of the postapartheid society the UDF thought SA would become under the ANC. What SA needs is a genuine push against state capture. Beware of fong-kong struggles.