Tipping point that put ANC on the skids
Iwas intrigued to read an interesting take on the demise of the ANC in the February 2034 edition of the Journal of Social and Political Science. The article by Aubrey Cheeki located the tipping point for the start of the decline in the party’s fortunes in the blisteringly hot summer of 2017.
Not many people think about the ANC now, following its decision to disband a decade ago, after its dismal performance in the 2024 elections, but according to Cheeki, there are still important lessons to be learned from the party’s disappearance from the political scene.
The history of the ANC’s decline remains one of the most surprising and disheartening trajectories of a once proud movement that bestrode the SA political scene under the leadership of the beloved Nelson Mandela.
The outlines of the decline are well known: the ANC ejected its thoughtful but detached president, Thabo Mbeki, in 2009, and he was followed by the disastrous leadership of Jacob Zuma, who narrowly escaped a prison term for complicity in the looting of the state, first by the Gupta family and subsequently, by convicted criminals after being pardoned by his former wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
Zuma’s accession coincided with a global economic downturn; SA’s economic situation was worsened by poor economic choices, a dysfunctional government and a culture of fiscal degradation that Zuma allowed to creep into his administration. This resulted in reduced local and international investment, which crippled the government’s often misguided attempts to stimulate the economy.
The crucial political moment came in September 2017 when, desperate to retain some sort of familial grip on power, Zuma fired his deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, and replaced him with his former wife to position her as the frontrunner in the fractious leadership contest that culminated in the elective conference of December 2017.
This act further enraged senior ANC members, but through political manipulation, bribing conference delegates and using the state intelligence agencies to leak defamatory material about competitors, Dlamini-Zuma became the leader of the party.
Ramaphosa stayed on for a while as an ANC cabinet member but later withdrew to his extensive buffalo farm in Venda. Others, however, established a new party, the African United Democratic Party (AUDP) and fought the election under a banner that they were the real ANC.
The results of the 2019 election astounded most observers, with the reformed DA and the EFF registering enormous gains.
Dlamini-Zuma turned out to be a terrible retail politician, failing to connect with the rural vote because of her status as a member of the urban elite and hostility to tribal politics. She also failed to connect with the urban youth vote because she was, in the words of one member of this group, “old and boring”.
The AUDP played an important role in splitting the ANC vote, which had also lost the “get out the vote” power of the now divided and fractious labour movement. Politics remained awkward under the DA/EFF/AUDP “grand coalition”, as it was called, but the loss of power radicalised the ANC, which led to further losses until its demise in 2024. The global economic upturn after 2019 helped the “grand coalition” and resulted in absorbing politics that inadvertently made the ANC less newsworthy.
Cheeki’s article supplemented this superficial history with three major insights, concluding that the ANC’s decline was only partly self-inflicted. The party’s major problem was that it lacked important conceptual tools and failed to incorporate those ideas into its government. The most important of these was how a country creates wealth, how to enhance productivity and how to stimulate innovation.
The decline of the ANC was surprising particularly because the ANC started so well, adopting a policy of fiscal conservatism and restraint, influenced by a succession of respected finance ministers who drew extensively on modern best practice. However, this tradition was gradually undermined and the Treasury, the Reserve Bank and the revenue service lost their status as places of preferred employment.
Cheeki notes an article by then columnist Barney Mthombothi in that hot summer of 2017, who wrote that liberation movements typically interpret their mission as one of wealth distribution rather than wealth creation. “Instead of growing the cake, they redistribute what is already in existence.”
With no real business people within the party and indeed an ideological hostility to business, the party wasn’t able to distinguish between real business innovators and tenderpreneurs seeking rent through guaranteed inflated margins underpinned by tax income. It embarked on successive engagements with business that were dominated by formulaic lectures on how business wasn’t “doing enough”.
Business would try to gently point out that it actually did contribute 95% of government revenue in one way or another and 80% of formal employment, but it was angrily told that it should stop “lecturing” government.
Liberation movements that have endured in power typically do so by force, but the political circumstances of the transition meant that this option was closed to the ANC, Cheeki pointed out.
At liberation, the army was dominated by a hostile leadership, which the ANC gradually removed. But financial pressures to spend elsewhere resulted in a small, dispirited and largely dysfunctional organisation.
The police and the prosecution services were disempowered to stop them investigating the notional “business deals” by ANC tenderpreneurs that were actually elaborate systems designed to defraud taxpayers.
The great irony is how simple it would have been for the ANC to reform itself while the country sweltered in 2017 if the many good people who were members of the party had the courage to imagine where the party might end up. But they didn’t. The rest, as they say, is history.