Its very identity and ideology are up for grabs
South Africa’s ruling ANC is facing its sternest test, from the inside, writes David Everatt
THE GOVERNING ANC lost most major cities this month. But it also lost many small towns and rural municipalities to fragile, ideologically incoherent coalitions of the power-hungry, the forgotten, the almost forgotten, the preferably forgotten, the far right, the rearguard and the downright loony.
The old world as South Africa knew it, of ANC majorities and policy certainty, seems to be at an end.
Now the very identity and ideology of the ANC are up for grabs as power blocs battle for control. And the fight is going to be ugly and entertaining.
A rural-based future is based on tradition and loyalty, where the true African lives on the land where his (yes, his) ancestors lived, is in touch with his roots, and symbolises the “clean”, pure “son of the soil”. This stands in contrast with the “clever black” as President Jacob Zuma infamously called them, seduced by modern life and its sins, by whites and their fickle ways and “dirtied” by a rootless urban life.
The conservative group, an extremely powerful force in the Zuma-led ANC, is deeply suspicious of a modern, sophisticated world where urbanisation is an unstoppable demographic force. The modernisers want the ANC to remain true to its principles but simultaneously to embrace a complex, globally competitive Afropolitan future, where old certainties have gone, forever.
A collision is imminent, reflected in the recent call this week from the ANC Youth League for an early elective conference to hold to account people who taint the name of the organisation busy drinking champagne and expensive whisky.
The ANC may feel partially vindicated by the fact that it lost many of its majorities – but no one else won them.
Voters have ringside seats to see if a series of locale-specific coalitions involving a free-market DA, an avowedly Marxist-Leninist-Fanonist EFF, a Zulu traditionalist IFP, a tiny UDM and the ideologically unknown African Independent Congress (AIC) – with others too small to recall – can hold themselves together long enough to occupy the centre.
A sympathetic author would say the ANC consciously took a series of body blows – ongoing white racism and free market capitalism conspicuous among them – in return for stability and avoiding a racialised civil war.
Another, given a major fillip by the EFF, is more caustic and almost entirely a-historical.
In this version, the ANC deliberately made a Faustian pact with white monopoly capital and ANC leaders were soon hellbent on a craven pursuit of personal wealth and sold the poor for 30 pieces of silver (or a 4x4 or a home built at taxpayers’ expense). The racialised civil war had merely been postponed, not avoided, in this narrative.
As such, it is unsurprising that a key issue of contestation is race. As the economy has got tougher, whiteliness has continued its arrogant posturing and institutional dominance, so no sufficiently broad-based economic or social transformation has taken place.
Getting a toilet that flushes is scarcely to feel “transformed”, let alone equal.
Race, undergirded by inequality, has come back to haunt the country. The EFF speaks with scorn of selling out to white supremacy, and Africanist essentialism is the order of the day for many.
Within the ANC its youth league can usually be relied on to bring into play the worst elements of the party as this recent statement displays: “The enemy of the White Supremacy Liberal agenda is the ANC and the enemy of the ANC is the White Supremacy Liberal.”
Playing with race is not restricted to the youth league. When former president Thabo Mbeki spoke of “two nations”, it was predictably met with howls of hostility from the white chattering classes, but secure with a 70 percent majority in 2004, few felt he was vote-chasing.
However, when Zuma was reported to have said of Cape Town: “In China, the Chinese rule, in India, the Indians are in power; it is only here in South Africa that we allow other people to govern,” the country saw the awful spectacle of the ANC playing race.
Successive generations of ANC leaders during its 104-year-long existence who fell into apathy (or worse) were successively radicalised or removed.
These include the challenge of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union in the 1930s to the UDF and the formation of Cosatu in the 1980s. In each case, the ANC was shaken from torpor to often progressive responsiveness, often shedding leaders on the way.
However, the post-2016 election ANC seems hellbent on becoming a conservative, rural movement. It fears complexity, fluid social identities, uppity student movements and the like. It is retreating into a revanchist rump of self-congratu- latory leaders.
It is a dangerous path: the ANC shed hundreds of thousands of rural votes in these elections. The party will search for a pure rural base at its own peril, as the population at large is becoming better educated and cosmopolitan, demanding high-quality services and choice in everything from politics to personal trainers.
The ANC has always managed to modernise and adapt. But this was driven by progressive activists, not sleaze-tainted politicians.
The ANCYL was once the catalyst of progressive reform in the ANC. In the youth league of founder Anton Lembede, this radicalising perspective turned on two key issues. The first was to remove the ANC from the thrall of white communists. The same seems set to happen this year – a threatened cabinet reshuffle to remove communists has been widely shared. Many communists such as Blade Nzimande, Gwede Mantashe and others are black, but power is at stake.
The second key item on the reformist agenda of the old youth league was the need to radicalise – to move the ANC under the leader AB Xuma from a party that sought to recruit “distinguished university graduates” and turn to extra-parliamentary opposition.
The current youth league prefers “congratulating” the conservative bastions of the current ANC – the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal, the Free State and Mpumalanga. But while the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal may have held a majority in local elections at 58 percent, it dropped 10 percent in the Free State and 8 percent in Mpumalanga.
The ANCYL has demanded a conference to clear the decks. Its position is clear: those who oppose Zuma and his traditionalist dreams “lack thinking capacity” while the man himself is blameless.
If Zuma is innocent, communist and moderniser Mantashe is guilty. He is closely followed by the “selfish” ANC rebels in Gauteng, who must also be expelled if the ANCYL have their way.
The ANC is facing its sternest test, and it is now almost entirely internal. Votes in 2016 suggest that if the traditionalist rural rump wins out, the party is on an irredeemably downward spiral. Whether the ANC is capable of cleansing itself and adopting policies that suit a modern state, remains to be seen. – www.theconversation.com David Everatt is head of the Wits School of Governance