Without reviving its core values the ANC is doomed

The problems facing the ANC are both subjective and objective in character. However, attempts to correct our failings as a movement are not succeeding to align the leadership and membership of the ANC to its founding purpose.

ANC president Jacob Zuma suggests that in order to selfcorrect, we have to go back to what brought us together in the first place, and find solutions to the challenges facing the movement.

The question is whether as the leadership we are ready to confront our awkward moment and go back to what brought us together.

We were brought together by a set of intangibles that were articulated in our first constitution. This included our value system at the centre of which is service, solidarity and revolutionary conduct. We have since deviated from these intangibles and the revival of the ANC depends on it addressing these intangibles.

The ANC has never shied away from confronting the intangibles – consider the examples of the Morogoro conference in 1969 and that of Kabwe in 1985.

This readiness to confront our challenges has always been the hallmark of our leadership. We can thus argue that many of the problems we have today arise out of the failure of leadership to lead, and because the sense of resignation to present conditions persists.

The ANC’s proposed strategy and tactics document highlights many negative tendencies among the leadership and membership.

In other words, the sources of our challenges do not in part reside in the structural innovations of the ANC systems. They, in fact, can be located in the intangibles that have historically informed the practice and conduct of our leadership and its broad membership.

The ANC is facing a crisis of legitimacy, arising out of the weaknesses in our political, ideological, moral and organisational stand points.

The fact that our allies are questioning and challenging the notion that the ANC is the leader of broad (mass) movement points to the fracturing of what brought us together. A gap has developed between the ANC and the SA Communist Party, trade union federation Cosatu, the religious sector and civil society.

Veterans of the movement have also weighed in, questioning the corrupt tendencies that have soiled the credibility of our leaders.

Resolving this will require political intervention that digs deep into understanding what has happened to the intangibles and how they can be restored, without resorting to surface-based administrative measures to address the problems.

Organisation building is a slow and painful process. This process should confront the uncomfortable truths in the best traditions of a movement like ours. The initiative by our veterans and stalwarts to convene a national consultative conference must be understood in the context of our history.

We should listen to the commanders and commissars of MK (Umkhonto weSizwe) in their attempt to address these issues through the MK Military Council.

The leadership of the ANC should not be impervious to concerns of the broad church movement, trade unions and civil society organisations.

These pressures constitute a positive feedback loop into this once glorious movement. If however, some among us decide to deviate from our intangibles and thus weaken the ANC of its revolutionary political being, we have no chance of retaining political power in 2019.

Consequently, we would forestall the possibilities to expand the frontiers of freedoms and justice.