Mbeki was right: quality is way better

Former ANC president Thabo Mbeki, perhaps borrowing from Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, once appeared to support the notion of “better few, but better” when it came to ANC membership.

He was suggesting that what mattered most was the calibre and quality of members of the ANC, rather than the quantity.

Mbeki appreciated very early on that opening the membership of the ANC to huge numbers of untested people with no grounding in the policies and traditions of the ANC would lead to trouble for the party down the line.

And how right Mbeki was. On taking over the party presidency, Mbeki’s successor, Jacob Zuma – for what seems his own personal reasons – favoured recruitment of membership by the thousands. The latter strategy resulted in the party reaching its goal of having more than 1-million members in a few years.

Events since the mass recruitment strategy commenced have proven that Mbeki was right.

It opened the door for unsavoury characters whose sole reason for being members of the ANC was to access state patronage in the form of lucrative jobs and government tenders.

The coveted patronage a leadership position confers is the main reason some party officials have been killed in KwaZulu-Natal, for example. It’s the reason the 2015 provincial elective conference in KwaZulu-Natal was such a contested affair that it resulted in some people resorting to underhanded methods to win.

It’s the reason the weekend party conference in Eastern Cape was marred by violence as one of the factions, realising it was going to lose the contest, cried foul and tried to stop the event.

It has thus come to pass that the ANC, an organisation with a proud history of struggle against oppression, has been overrun by charlatans and opportunists who see it as an opportunity to line their pockets at the expense of ordinary people.

The Eastern Cape conference was a shameful episode – and one can only shudder to think what could happen in December when the party holds its presidential elective conference and the stakes are so much higher.

There is no papering over the cracks now; the ANC is at a crossroads.