A voice of reason the ANC can’t afford to lose

The ANC may very well still be able to persuade its stalwart Mavuso Msimang, the former deputy president of its veterans’ league, to rescind his decision to leave the organisation after more than 60 years in service.

Talk in the corridors of Luthuli House is that the party is pulling out all stops to get him back as his very public departure, taking place as it does just months before the country heads to elections, further weakens the ANC in the eyes of the voting public.

There are those in the party, of course, who are playing down the damage that could be caused by his departure. He led no discernible constituency and was not a current member of the national executive committee, they say.

The party has in recent history lost far more “important” leaders, including a former national chair (Mosiuoa Lekota) as well as a former secretary-general (Ace Magashule), without experiencing an exodus of members and supporters.

But those pushing hard for Msimang to stay know exactly what his giving up on the ANC after six decades as a member signifies for President Cyril Ramaphosa, the current NEC and their “renewal project”.

If Msimang — a fierce critic of state capture and the corruption that occurred on president Jacob Zuma’s watch — stayed on during those difficult years to fight from within but has now decided to throw in the towel, then the “renewal project” has surely failed.

Although he never rose through the party ranks to become one of the party’s national officials, Msimang is as blue an ANC blue blood as they come.

One of his forebears, Richard Msimang, was at the founding conference of the South African Native National Congress — which later changed its name to the ANC in 1923. His uncle, Selby Msimang, was for many years a prominent figure in the ANC and the broader liberation struggle before joining the Liberal Party and, later, Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha.

Mavuso Msimang was among uMkhonto weSizwe’s earliest recruits — having skipped the country to join the armed struggle in the 1960s.

In exile, he is said to have been among those who had the ear of the then ANC president Oliver Tambo; that Tambo valued his input was apparent in the late 1960s when the exiled organisation faced a near split following the emergence of a political grouping that became known as the Gang of Eight.

This was a group of senior members who were not happy with the leftist direction the party was taking and were agitating for a more Africanist approach to the liberation struggle. There were genuine fears that, left unattended, the group’s rift with Tambo’s NEC would lead to the kind of split last seen in 1959, when the Pan Africanist Congress broke away.

In a bid to break the deadlock, Tambo is said to have put together a team to hold talks with the Gang of Eight. Among members of this team were Thabo Mbeki, Chris Hani, Zolile Ngcakani and Mavuso Msimang.

More recently, Msimang — along with many other ANC veterans — tried to play a counselling role for the leadership as the party stumbled from one crisis to the next.

Towards the end of Zuma’s tenure as president, Msimang was at a forefront of an initiative by 101 ANC veterans who thought they could rescue the ANC by persuading its warring leaders to postpone their 2017 elective conference. They wanted the elective conference to be replaced by a consultative gathering at which party structures would meet to iron out their differences and chart a new path for party and state without the distraction of political campaigning that comes with elective conferences.

Although the ANC has an established tradition of consultative conferences helping to put the movement back on track — in Morogoro, Tanzania, in 1969, Kabwe, Zambia, in 1985, and Durban after the unbanning in 1990 — the idea was firmly shut down by Luthuli House.

The two main factions at the time — one supportive of the then president Zuma and the other loyal to his deputy and rival, Ramaphosa — believed that winning the leadership battle at an elective conference was the only solution.

But as is now commonly accepted, the two Nasrec conferences (in 2017 and 2022) did not bring about renewal for the ANC or the country. In many respects corruption worsened and service delivery became almost nonexistent in many parts of the country run by the former liberation movement.

This is all because, instead of taking the advice of the 101 veterans that they first fix the party before rushing into another divisive elective national conference, the leaders chose a short cut that would guarantee some of them continued access to state resources and the other trappings of power.

Whether Msimang decides to listen to the pleas and returns to the “family”, or he stays true to what he said in his resignation letter, the truth is that the ANC is in the crisis that it is because its leaders refused to listen to Msimang and the other 100 veterans when they gave them sound advice.