The ANC in opposition proves to be a model of failure
THERE is next to no analysis of the ANC in opposition and it is difficult to understand why.
The City of Cape Town, for example, is a laboratory that has revealed much about the party’s inability to adapt to life outside the corridors of power.
It has also exposed much about the party itself.
Stripped of authority and the unquestioning hegemonic legitimacy it has historically enjoyed, it has collapsed organisationally and, in turn, at the polls.
Opposition is a different universe, where your right to be heard has to be earned.
The ANC is about as familiar with it as it is with all the accompanying ideas: professionalism, vision, leadership and accountability.
The ANC has now been in opposition for 11 years in Africa’s southernmost city. That is a remarkable fact. And it shows not the faintest sign of being able to win back control nor the inclination to try.
Expand your view broader, to 2019, and the ANC will have been in opposition in the Western Cape for a decade and likewise unable to turn the tide. Quite the opposite, in fact. In both the city and the province the party continues to implode rather than reconstitute itself.
That is saying something, as the extent of its decay is so profound it often defies belief.
Just when you think it has hit rock bottom, it digs deeper.
The DA won 66% of the vote in last year’s local government elections (up about five percentage points from 2011).
In 2019, there is every chance the party will replicate that in the Western Cape.
The Western Cape ANC is reeling from its latest self-imposed crisis.
The decision by its provincial executive committee to disband the Dullah Omar region, its biggest, and which includes the Cape Town metro, has effectively reduced the organisation to a basket case.
The ANC top six were forced into an emergency intervention, but to no avail.
“There is still no resolution to the infighting that threatens to cripple the ANC in the Western Cape, despite marathon talks on Monday between the party’s national leadership and the provincial executive,” Business Day reported this week.
Whatever the reason, and there is no doubt the looming ANC national conference has much to do with it, this is a basic building block problem.
If you cannot even properly constitute a party, if you literally cannot produce a structure, there is little point interrogating its programme of action.
This is an organisation so profoundly compromised by the loss of power it cannot even hold a meeting.
And that state of affairs has come about after a decade at the grindstone.
It is an indictment so monumental it is difficult to articulate.
Much was made of former president Thabo Mbeki’s total control after the 2004 elections, when the ANC won just shy of 66% of the vote. The DA has done better than even that. It has decimated the ANC. The fact that the ANC is compromised nationally, both ethically and administratively, is generally celebrated, but the truth is that democracy in these two centres is the poorer for it.
A strong opposition is the lifeblood of good governance.
The DA will be the first to tell you that.
But Cape Town and the Western Cape are effectively one-party states.
The situation is symptomatic of a party so rigid in its thinking, so imbued with an innate sense of its own self-righteousness, that it has yet to even understand the nature of the problem it faces.
President Jacob Zuma told parliament a few weeks ago the ANC could win back the likes of Johannesburg and Tshwane at the drop of a hat. He didn’t mention the Western Cape and you can understand why.
The ANC has effectively given up on the city of Cape Town and the province.
It won’t see power in either for a long time to come.
And if that says anything, it is that Zuma profoundly misunderstands the nature of the problem the ANC faces in those Gauteng metros, too.
The ANC might obsess over the fact that it is Africa’s oldest liberation movement, but South African democracy is likely to be around for a good hundred years to come.
Modern constitutional democracies demand political parties that can function both in government and opposition.
The ANC, however, has only one arrow in its bow, which it is breaking. If it does not reform, it will die. Reform in the sense that it must modernise.
It needs to embrace the idea of opposition and develop for it a plan of action that is not simply a local extension of its national agenda.
Presidential hopeful and man without conviction Cyril Ramaphosa waxed lyrical about how seriously the ANC took organisational renewal at its recent policy conference.
But search the accompanying policy documents as hard as you might and you will find no reference to the ANC as a party of opposition.
It is a reality the ANC simply cannot accept or comprehend, and thus cannot respond to.
Were the ANC a modern political party, the anodyne affair that is its presidential election, in which every candidate pretends he or she is both an individual and simultaneously the best representative of the ANC’s collective hive mind, would be an entirely different affair.
Each candidate would offer a plan to win back power where it has been lost – and it would matter. But majoritarianism breeds laziness. If you view South Africa as one thing, uniform and consistent, your only response need be nothing more than tinkering with pre-existing and seemingly immutable processes.
But it is the outcome of those processes the ANC should be focusing on.
Any objective evaluation of the party in opposition tells you, going all the way back to 1994, that it delivers only ineptitude when applied to any situation where the ANC does not have its hands on power. Take policy, for example.
It is no use having a national policy conference bereft of policies particular to Cape Town and the Western Cape (or Gauteng, for that matter).
Like it or lump it, just as the ANC sets the national agenda, so the DA does where it governs. You need a response to that. A critique. An alternative. The ANC has nothing. And it is a vicious circle. It cannot produce a local response because it is a nationalistic organisation.
All responses are national, a perversion of the idea that all politics are local.
So it remains perpetually trapped by its own nature.
The ANC factory can only ever produce one product.
Being in opposition requires a far more diverse set of skills.
Denial is responsible for a great deal of trouble in the ANC.
As things stand, any analysis of it is directed at Zuma and the extent to which the damage he causes seems immune to consequence inside the party.
That is fair enough. But there is another, more important kind of denial the ANC cannot see.
One augmented by South Africa’s ahistoricism. Democracy is going to be around for a while and unless the ANC embraces the idea of being an effective opposition, in opposition it will stay.
Why is the idea of opposition so ignored, marginalised and derided in South Africa?
It is such an indictment of our democratic credentials.
The DA, where it does govern, is rarely properly interrogated.
It is generally regarded as an abnormality – really the opposition in another guise – where it has stumbled across power.
I have yet to read a proper review of its progress in Johannesburg, Tshwane or Nelson Mandela Bay.
As for the ANC in the Western Cape and Cape Town, it might as well not exist at all.
Despite its collapse, there is next to no analysis of its condition and certainly no pressure on it to reform.
We are a myopic society, enamoured by power and those personalities that wield it.
Without power, relative obscurity follows.
There are a great many tests South African democracy has yet to pass.
One of them is a change of power at national level.
Another is the development of a culture where the value and seriousness of political opposition is appreciated as a democratic commodity in its own right and given the proper attention.
As things stand, it is a nicety we do little more than acknowledge as important.
But in the depth and breadth of our interest in it, it remains something of an enigma.
It is to our general detriment, but for the ANC it is a problem with far more serious and long-term consequences.