Reconnect Jan 8 to history
Clearly this illustrates and highlights in bold that most traditions and cultures of the ANC have been established over a period of time.
This also relates to the recent emotionally-charged debate about the deputy president succeeding the president which has now also firmly established itself as a tradition of the movement.
Returning to January 8, as opposition to apartheid swelled abroad, information-deprived South Africans were hungry for guidance from their leaders in exile. This important message provided that guidance and was a source of enlightenment for the masses.
In 1978 a high-level delegation of the leadership of the SACP and the ANC visited Vietnam and found inspiration from General Vo Nguyen Giap’s description of that country’s struggle against the US, particularly regarding the synergy between mass struggle, the underground and the army in pursuit of revolutionary aims.
This delegation was also impressed by how the Vietnam revolution had secured the full participation of the population in the fight against the enemy, thus collapsing the categories of combatant and non-combatant.
This visit sparked a new approach to the struggle against apartheid and over the next few years, the leadership developed a comprehensive new strategy informed by the Vietnamese revolution termed: “The four Pillars of the Revolution”. This was announced and explained in the 1984 January 8 Statement in which president OR Tambo proclaimed 1984 as: “The year of the Women”. The statement by Tambo also made the call to “make the country ungovernable and apartheid unworkable”.
Having expounded the meaning of this important day, there is no doubt that the 2018 January 8 NEC Statement to be delivered by the newly-elected president of the ANC, Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa, must address the following questions and deep worries of our people – who must be swayed from using whiteowned liberal media as their only source of information and to analyse the political and economic dynamics of this country through the lenses of a biased media.
The questions the statement ought to respond to are:
How is the ANC going to implement free tertiary education in the next few days starting with registrations that are underway at Unisa;
How is the ANC going to expropriate land without compensation;
How is the ANC going to improve the state of the economy and how it will create jobs without shedding any;
How will the newly-elected NEC manage the transition between the outgoing ANC president and the newly elected president of the ANC – and how will this affect the functionality of government;
The ANC needs to explain if it is still committed to liquidating labour brokers;
What is the ANC’s plan regarding the effects of the 4th Industrial Revolution;
How does the ANC define the international balance of forces and what are the implications of South Africa being part of BRICS.
It is a tall order I know, but these issues are what the January 8 Statement in East London must respond to.
Lesego Makhubela is a former ANC Youth League Tshwane coordinator and an ANC activist