Time for voices of reason to drown out the loud-hailers
Zuma gets stronger, ANC weaker,
❛ Its leaders have been swallowed in the quagmire created by one man’s battle for survival
WHEN the ANC musters its forces today for its annual day of promises and parties in the form of its January 8 rally — marking its 105th anniversary — it will give a diagnosis of the political situation without stating the obvious: the party has become an enemy unto itself.
The ANC is not merely dealing with the ambiguous phenomenon of factionalism, which everyone speaks about but no one owns up to: it faces a deeper crisis, much like a fish rotting from the head.
The party may have taken a bashing from the electorate in the local government elections in August last year, but this was not due to any outstanding performances by opposition parties.
Instead, ANC leaders have often said, almost gloatingly, that the party did not lose support to the opposition, but was the victim of a disillusioned electorate.
If 2016 has taught us anything it is that the ANC is its own worst enemy, more lethal than any beretclad opposition leader.
This is because the party and all its leaders have been swallowed in the quagmire created by one man’s battle for survival.
Supporting President Jacob Zuma has morphed into outwardly supporting his ill-fated decision to fire the finance minister, supporting his questionable proximity to a parasitic family, defending him against a damning Constitutional Court ruling, and fighting the battles of his lieutenants, who have repeatedly broken the law while trying to help him cling to power.
Last year we saw how, despite scandal after scandal, Zuma grew stronger and stronger: it was the party that suffered the fallout from the president’s actions, while its leader is surrounded by a fence of people bound together by patronage and ambition.
Premiers who are ANC provincial leaders, leaders of the youth league who are by no means youthful, the women’s league, a group of former combatants with questionable credentials and heads of state institutions have all banded together in support of their leader.
So, as a member of the Zuma support group, you were required to justify the ill-fated and unexplained firing of a finance minister in December 2015. You were also expected to back the appointment of backbencher Des van Rooyen as finance minister, who arrived at the National Treasury with advisers whose first task was to access sensitive information and pass it on to a private (Gupta family) company they were linked to.
Remember the infamous words of one of those e-mails? “Gents, finally . . .”, uttered when an adviser to Van Rooyen sent confidential cabinet plans to a Guptalinked company?
Zuma’s response to the outrage has been victimhood — that those with economic muscle had forced him to reverse his decision on Van Rooyen.
When, in March, the most powerful court in the land ruled Zuma had violated the constitution, his supporters found ambiguity in the ruling, claiming that the justices’ words — that Zuma’s actions were “inconsistent with the constitution” — were not that severe.
It wasn’t “that bad” for the president of the republic to have violated the very constitution that allows him to hold office, this faction argued.
Zuma again played the victim: he had received bad advice.
But the 2016 work of the president’s faction had hardly begun: they then had to defend the Gupta family and break the law to flex the state’s muscles in a private dispute between banks and the family.
Zuma’s supporters had to bend over backwards to ensure that the status quo of dodgy deals was upheld in the name of transformation.
They attacked the credibility of Deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas for his disclosure that the Guptas had offered him a bribe in exchange for making him finance minister and “working with them”.
Zuma’s response was to shirk responsibility: “I appointed Jonas as a deputy minister. I have never offered Jonas a ministry. Ask Jonas or the Guptas about this offer,” he said.
The president’s faction was now in high gear, accusing Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan of “humming the tune of white minority capital”, attacking him in private meetings for not strong-arming the banks into reopening the Guptas’ bank accounts, and insisting that Gordhan be allowed to “have his day in court” after charges were brought against him.
Never mind that it was clear that the charges — which few doubted were politically motivated — would not stick.
When former public protector Thuli Madonsela released her damning State of Capture report showing only a rough outline of this web of state capture, Zuma’s faction nit-picked at it, dismissing it as a collage of claims — as if evidence that Van Rooyen visited the Guptas’ compound in Saxonwold, Johannesburg, on seven consecutive days before his shock appointment as finance minister was an insignificant detail.
Leaders of state institutions who have been fingered in dodgy deals are protected — under the guise of transformation — and use their proximity to “Pretoria” to openly break the law. The SABC’s Hlaudi Motsoeneng is a case in point.
For too long, ANC leaders allowed this loud narrative of the Zuma faction to be seen as the party’s position. But the charging of Gordhan and the release of the state capture report emboldened others to try to “recapture the party” late last year.
By then it was too late. The Zuma cabal used every opportunity to counter the debate on state capture internally in the ANC.
One of the ANC’s best minds of recent times, Joel Netshitenzhe, has warned that the beneficiaries of state capture and corruption will not go down without a fight. We have already seen this battle to cling to power and privilege spill over and tarnish state institutions — and it has now begun to tear at the party from within.
As we approach the end of the term of the current ANC leaders with the party’s elective conference coming up later this year, the ANC has to realise that shielding one man from the natural course of justice is tearing the party apart.
The president is not a victim of outside forces, nor of a conspiracy by his own comrades.
Neither is he a victim of the law or of parliament.
Should right-thinking ANC leaders allow this situation to continue, then, by their own admission, the party risks losing power and legitimacy. It is time for the voices of reason to drown out the loud-hailers, and for those who oppose wrongdoing to become the dominant voice inside and outside party structures.
But they cannot solely rely on the election of a new leader at the December conference to solve the party’s problems.
A new leader may merely put a shiny skin on a rotting core.
That is why the party’s mechanism to elect leaders from branch level up to president cannot simply be a popularity contest. Popularity, we have come to learn, can be bought and sold.
The party must go back to a culture of political persuasion. Party structures must have an appetite to listen to, and be persuaded by, dissenting voices, although they may be in the minority. Party leaders must stop hiding behind party processes, and do what is right when advised to do so. Only then will the ANC regain legitimacy and the public trust.
But if things continue as they are, with the party ignoring logic and the rule of law, the beginning of the end could be near.
The December elections may produce a leadership that would protect the status quo — therefore plunging the party to a deeper crisis of legitimacy.
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