Leadership decay turns ANC into wrinkled centenarian
On December 18 2017, the day the newly elected president of the ANC would be announced, millions of eager-eyed South Africans gazed at their television screens from all corners of the country – some crammed into their one-room, corrugated-iron shacks and some languishing lavishly in the country’s middle-class residential enclaves – but all with a common concern: the future of the Republic of South Africa.
For the first time in our maturing democracy, the succession debate in the ruling party was not just a thing that was discussed in remote branch general meetings by men and women who proudly carried the green and gold membership cards of the party and wore party regalia with love until the picture of the incumbent president of the time waned on their T-shirts.
The discussion on the presidency of the ANC echoed through many beer halls and taxi ranks. It was on the lips of many ordinary South Africans, as it was when Tiyo Soga’s Christian hymn Lizalis’ idinga lakho Thixo Nkosi (God Fulfil Thy Promise) was sung at the first conference of the ANC, in Mangaung on January 8 1912 at 3pm.
The Nasrec conference came at a time when the country had seemingly reached consensus (at least according to the media) that what is setting us back to develop as a nation, was a man from a small village called Nkandla who happened to be at the helm of the ruling party, and this loss of support was argued to be scientifically reflected by the performance of the 2016 local government elections.
The failure to fill up the 40,000-seater Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium at its manifesto launch was the earliest indicator of the grief that would follow with the surrendering of Nelson Mandela Bay Metro, Johannesburg and Tshwane into the hands of the opposition parties.
When the name of Cyril Ramaphosa was announced as the candidate who received more votes than Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, there was a feeling of hope for many party faithful and ordinary South Africans.
Hope that the ANC was headed for renewal and that the powerful speeches of Ramaphosa – such as the one he delivered at a South African Communist Party (SACP) rally in Uitenhage – would ignite a spark within the moral fibre of the party.
It would resuscitate it from its kleptomaniac nature in a manner that would make the hallways of Nasrec equivalent to the mountains of Morogoro that sat its famous 1969 elective conference which saved the party from the fringes of ineffectiveness in fighting the struggles black South Africans were confronted with during the apartheid regime.
The ANC that came out of that 1969 Morogoro conference and the ANC that will be spending lavishly in Durban while the rest of black South Africans are languishing in absolute poverty, are barely comparable, even in the midst of the “new dawn”.
With every second that passes we are reminded of the failure of the ANC to fulfil its historical mission that was envisioned by its founding members, such as Pixley Isaka Seme and Alfred Mangena, with the principle of the ANC being an organisation that existed not to exist, but its existence is now a reminder of the contradictions that are deeply rooted in society.
Therefore it is the weapon to combat these contradictions.
Like any living organism, the ANC has also been a victim of age that has hampered its ability to carry out its revolutionary tasks. It does so now in a manner that one would say epitomises a wrinkled centenarian that has already lived out its best years. Using that very same logic, it would mean that with every passing year, the ANC will become weaker.
The leadership decay that has seen the ruling party falling from leaders of high moral ground, such as Nelson Mandela, Albertina Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Winnie MadikizelaMandela, to constitutional deliquents such as Bathabile Dlamini and Malusi Gigaba who lied under oath, can be attributed to those “wrinkles” that not even the biggest cakes in front of the biggest banners can mask in the 107th year of the ANC.
With the celebrations being held in the midst of squalor as the proletariat watch the newly minted black bourgeoisie with their VIP tags in the “new dawn” economic apartheid SA of Ramaphosa, it has seen the party embracing the concessions that it made in the negotiated settlement at Codesa, instead of eroding the capacity of the previous establishment for it to make socio-economic inroads and change the lives of South Africans for the better.
● Asemahle Gwala is SASCO Claude Qavane deputy chair and Nelson Mandela University political science student