Hope for better future with Ramaphosa heading ANC

SINCE the election of Cyril Ramaphosa as the new president of the ANC, there has developed a high sense of expectation among South Africans.

The surprises and shocks resulting from Jacob Zuma’s chaotic leadership saw the organisation suffer some of the severest seizures since its founding, with its membership dropping drastically and its power lost in the most strategic metro municipalities, translating into the party’s deployees losing their jobs.

With very little to carry us forward and nothing to slow the downward spiral, and with our collective backs against the wall as a nation, the strength went out of all of us and we were just so, so tired of Zuma.

This is said to be the most draining experience of our time, as a young democracy, with the nation’s emotions way too near the surface and drawing everyone down. It felt like another country, but it wasn’t, it was our South Africa, the real South Africa.

Oddly, this time of unrelenting anxiety, tension and pain, despite its harmful impact, helped us know who the liars, thieves, pretenders and fakes were.

In December, we waited nervously for the light or even darkness that the ANC’s elective conference could bring.

The waiting was made more intense by the delegates battling with the identity of an organisation they no longer knew, a captured organisation.

We watched in anticipation as they struggled to just get the conference kick-started, we squirmed at their inability to speedily resolve internal registration issues and we all started getting worried about the conference not ever taking place, as the air was thick with rumours.

The media and political analysts were groaning from the slowness of the process.

The ANC’s ambivalence towards the media and social media in particular is quite telling, because critical building blocks to making a success as a brand in the digital space are authenticity, self-confidence, self-esteem, engagement, etc.

And the ANC has unfortunately destroyed all of these steadily for itself over the years.

All growing political brands in this country are attractive, particularly to young people, and seem to make compelling arguments on issues affecting the poor and unemployed young black South Africans. The ANC has fallen down from the horse. A glance at the ANC’s conduct and performance at the conference would tell you that it was not faithful in how it dealt with the disappointments and failures it had visited upon the masses.

Some of its half-cooked ideas on issues such as education, health and economic transformation show this.

It needs to re-establish the connection it had with South Africans and acknowledge its flights of disgrace that reduced state-owned enterprises of our country to hives of decay, scorn and ridicule.

It needs to acknowledge that it is hurting, accepting its idiosyncratic move from a people’s movement into something distorted and that it needs help from South Africans, some of whom may not be ANC members, to recover and heal itself.

This takes humility, and that humility would be the only means of breaking bread with Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela and many more departed leaders.