ANC factions regroup and re-arm under facade of unity

Talking about attempts to unite the opposition, former DA leader Tony Leon used to say that nothing divides opposition parties more than talks of unity. I suppose something similar can be said about the governing party, the ANC.

It is now seven months since members of the ANC left unity in their chairs as they rushed to their cars and buses at the end of the Nasrec conference. Before they left, the delegates installed Cyril Ramaphosa as the president of the ANC but forgot to give him the party. Ramaphosa left with the ANC crown on his head but it felt as light as paper because a large territory of the ANC kingdom is still under the control of his opponents. Since then, his supporters and apologists have been hallucinating about unity and a new dawn. I was, therefore, not surprised when leaders of the ANC hailed the outcomes of provincial conferences in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng as evidence of deepening unity or factional divisions in decline.

Because manners maketh a man, I am not going to dismiss as an oversimplification the suggestion that in both provinces the outcome of leadership contests is evidence that Ramaphosa is beginning to stamp his authority on the party. While I accept there is a thin line between reality and fiction, poetic prose about unity in the ANC must not substitute for a realistic assessment of the state of the party and its leadership.

As words are not what they describe, ANC leaders need to develop an honest appreciation of the fact that the word “unity” is not unity. This is not to insist that unity is an unattainable goal. But the ANC must accept that the trajectory of decline that culminated in the outcome of the Polokwane conference has become a continuum of factional discord out of which, in all probability, the ANC will not emerge before 2029. Why 2029? I still contend that organisations adjust to the quality of individual and collective leadership available to them. The ANC is no exception in this regard. The Zuma and Ramaphosa presidencies are a product and consequence of the same crisis of internal decline and factional disharmony.

If I am correct, unless Ramaphosa becomes part of a radical process of realignment and the re-engineering of ANC values, he will be nothing more than part of the decline in the quality of leadership available to the party and, by extension, to our society as a whole.

In this scenario, the outcomes of the KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng conferences will usher in a period of peace for re-armament and consolidation. In other words, the appearance of unity may be just that — an apparition. What the different factions must appreciate is the fact that in chess one can lose one’s queen and still win the game. So in both provinces the outcome of the leadership elections should not cause the winning faction (real or imagined) to have a distorted perception of the balance of forces and the possible ways it might shift to its advantage or disadvantage between now and the 2022 national conference.

Winning the battle for the position of provincial chair does not mean you are the dominant faction if the general is surrounded by the enemy.

As we move towards the next ANC national general council and the 2022 national conference, unity will be the cover under which the different factions disguise their true intentions: the victory of a single slate in 2022. During this period of unity, the allies of Nasrec will become the opponents of the next leadership battle.

WINNING THE BATTLE FOR PROVINCIAL CHAIR DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE THE DOMINANT FACTION IF THE GENERAL IS SURROUNDED BY THE ENEMY