ANC must itself be transformed

BEFORE the president announced his new cabinet on Monday, much of South Africa had been caught up in the Thuma Mina (Send Me) “Ramaphoria” following Cyril Ramaphosa’s anointment as president. This optimism is understandable, to a point.

By the time the man from Nkandla resigned, South Africa was ready for Anyone But Zuma – except, perhaps, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.

Jacob Zuma’s presidency has left South Africa in tatters. Last week’s budget, notable for large spending cuts on infrastructure and a host of tax increases that will hit the poor and middle class, is merely one unavoidable outcome of a decade lost to presidential misrule.

For 10 years Zuma, aided by his gang of thieves, used the state to enrich his cronies and protect himself from answering to the law. The ANC enabled all of this.

Now Ramaphosa has asked everyone to raise their hands to say Send Me. But many South Africans have been saying

Thuma Mina for quite a while. Included are activists, opposition parties, sections of the media, whistle-blowers and others who worked for many years to expose and defeat state capture.

It is a welcome development that Ramaphosa has finally arrived at his

Thuma Mina moment. But it wouldn’t be churlish to ask why it took him so long.

Ramaphosa’s voluble public relations brigade, which has many enthusiastic members, would have us believe he has been strategising to effect a miraculous change for some time.

Maybe, but as his first cabinet reshuffle shows, vigilant South Africans should not partake of Cyril’s Kool-Aid.

But let us give Ramaphosa the benefit of the doubt. Having emerged at the top of the heap, he now has an impossible task: a dual clean-up and reform programme within the ANC and the state.

Stabilising the state seems feasible in the near term. There remains a critical mass of honest public servants who have carried on with integrity under trying circumstances over the past decade. Aided by a host of prosecutions and the expulsion of the most obvious crooks from government departments and entities, dedicated officials can begin to right the ship of state.

South Africa also has talented, competent people who can run stateowned enterprises. Provided their work is also supported by swift and effective prosecutorial action, and that none of the mismanaged entities collapses under a pile of debt in the next few months, a turnaround can begin.

Of course, these are big “ifs”. Reforming the way the government works, and creating the “capable” state envisioned in the National Development Plan, is a much longer-term affair.

On the political front, it’s important not to allow a palpable sense of relief to morph into self-delusion.

Ramaphosa is no messiah. He has been party to the degeneration of the ANC. I won’t even go into the Marikana whitewash, or his silence in the face of Zuma’s misleadership.

In 2007, Ramaphosa was elected to the ANC national executive committee (NEC) that launched a systematic attack on the foundations of our democracy when the governing party decided to dismantle the Scorpions independent crime-fighting unit. That decision had nothing to do with fighting crime. It was done in the service of the cult of Zuma.

What followed was an assault on democratic institutions, with more sections of the state being captured, right up until 2017.

But here we are. Ramaphosa says his party has pushed the renewal button and intends to do good by the people of South Africa. We have heard this before. At the party’s national general council held in

the Eastern Cape in 2000, the ANC talked about the “dawn of the new cadre”.

Explaining this renewal to the ANC parliamentary caucus, former president Thabo Mbeki warned “the danger … that all of us have seen is the temptation of people who in reality ought not to be members of the ANC. We have seen those people attracted to join the ANC as a bee is attracted to pot of honey”.

But South Africa’s governing party is indeed a pot of honey for its cadres. It’s the national party of patronage. The competition for access to its levers of power has entrenched factionalism and gatekeeping, sometimes to deadly effect.

In How to Steal A City: The Battle for

Nelson Mandela Bay, Crispian Olver writes, “Although the formation of groups around agendas and candidates is a natural feature of any political party, contestation within the ANC had congealed into invisible but organised power structures … that bypassed official structures. Party factions maintained their hold of power by keeping branches under their thumb and members on their payroll.”

There will be no renewal based on a “new selfless cadre”. Such a person does not exist in this place and time.

The ANC’s only hope is to adapt its functioning to life in an open democracy, transitioning into a modern political party.

What are Ramaphosa’s options?

Not many. Look at who’s sitting at the table.

Two members of the “top six”, David Mabuza and Ace Magashule, are provincial strongmen, an overly charitable description that will suffice for now. Members of the ANC also saw nothing wrong with putting on to the NEC known Gupta enablers such as former finance minister, now recycled home affairs minister Malusi Gigaba and ousted mining minister Mosebenzi Zwane.

Ramaphosa can now discourage the culture of sycophancy. There is already an unedifying spectacle of cadres falling over themselves to line up behind the new boss; a few weeks ago they were describing him as an agent of “white monopoly capital”.

He can also allow for open political contestation and debate. Accept that some “smallanyana skeletons” will tumble out of the closet. Good. The rhetoric of “national democratic revolution” fools no one: many ANC cadres are ambitious, grasping politicians. Let the public judge them on their merits, warts and all.

In other words, the ANC can do itself a favour by becoming a more democratic party that allows for open contestation of views, which today it is not.

Failure to do so will result in a sustained intra-party conflict and increased litigation by aggrieved members.

More fundamentally, a series of reforms is needed to prevent a repeat of the past decade. More on that in a future column.