The ANC’s contempt for excellence

Excellence is not a word you will readily find in the ANC’s vocabulary. More than the word, it is an alien concept. Not just a value incompatible with the party’s organisational culture, but in many respects at odds with it. Thus, it is detested. The consequences have been profound. The party’s slow-motion implosion can be attributed to many different factors, but its contempt for the idea of excellence is central to them all.

To understand why, it is necessary to understand the ANC’s primary animating force: majoritarianism. Consensus is an essential political tool, but consensus for its own sake is little more than a euphemism for mediocrity and populism.

Many hard but right decisions are inherently unpopular. A good leader, able to bring to bear vision and conviction, can carry the day. A poor leader will simply put any issue to the vote.

The great political appeal of majoritarianism is that it masks failure. No position holds weight in and of itself. Rather, the value of an idea lies in what popular support there is for it.

In the morass of a general vote, any loss, just like any win, is a collective exercise, and emotional safety lies in numbers. Numbers and anonymity. If the real prize is a majority decision, even losers can align themselves with it and embrace the false sense of pride that comes with the belief that “the people have spoken”.

By contrast, excellence makes the implicit explicit. If committed to it, one is obliged to say when the majority is wrong. That is something the ANC cannot do because it does not value excellence — or the idea that a position is inherently the right one, in terms of reason, principle, evidence or morality and whatever most people think — it cannot correct for principle. It can only acquiesce before the “collective wisdom” of the organisation.

The pursuit of excellence bites for another reason. Not only does it separate ideas on their own merit, but its component parts — reason and logic — can make fools of fools. If you live in a universe where a ubiquitous false moral equivalence means every idea is treated as of equal value — until the majority has spoken — then no fool will ever be meaningfully punished for their nonsense. Rather, they will be accommodated and appeased

made to believe they are of no less value than the truly insightful. As the human condition defaults towards mediocrity, so does any organisation that cannot call a spade a spade.

Thus, to value excellence as an organisation you need three things. First, an appreciation for it. Second, the self-belief not to be threatened by it. Third, the ability to instil in others that belief: not to be threatened by failure, but to learn and grow from it. That is not to say there will be no casualties. Excellence, unlike majoritarianism, has a natural attrition rate, but even that, in the right hands, can be aspirational.

There is something wonderful about striving to be the best, about insisting on the highest standard and holding others to it. It is how humanity has progressed throughout history. It is the fundamental fuel for advancement and achievement, and a potential source of great pride. Any organisation that does not value that ideal will stagnate and die.

Few things are harder to arrest in this world than a well-established culture of mediocrity. In the ANC we have today the ultimate manifestation of that disease, an organisation so firmly rooted in incompetence the poison is now totalising in its effect.

You can almost see it, pulsing through every element of the party. Its systems have collapsed. Its managers are incapable. Its programmes are ineffectual and weak, its reformation based as it is on the very majoritarianism that is destroying it nothing more than a fantasy.

Yet it cannot see itself for what it is. “The people have spoken”, and the people are never wrong. Thus, the march towards obscurity continues.

INSULAR

Mediocrity is insular in its effect. The pursuit of excellence requires external benchmarking, for the world is your laboratory. In this way you need to seek out best practice and be open to change to adapt and approve, and meet its relentless demands on you.

Trapped by mediocrity, your only measure is history and your own precedent, as determined by a previous majority. So you often become the author of your own downfall, replicating failure by couching it in the language and metaphors of an age long since redundant.

A common refrain is that SA is going “backwards”. It is caught in the ANC time machine. We are not so much on the cutting edge as balanced on some blunt and worthless blade that could not even cut butter.

Innovation and the latest technology are all put into the time machine and come out antiquated, if not broken altogether.

In the wake of Jacob Zuma, one of the many assumptions made about Cyril Ramaphosa was that he valued excellence. But it was a comparative mistake. Just because the president is not incompetent, does not mean he values the pursuit of excellence.

Excellence demands a bottom line. Ramaphosa does not have one. Whatever line he does have is put to the vote anyway. And thus whatever political capital he once enjoyed has been all but eaten up. Majoritarianism has an insatiable appetite, it devours any attempt to undermine it and spits out more mediocrity.

Few things better illustrate the problem than the president’s own cabinet. Forced to draw on a pool of the talentless, even the constitutional option to bring in two external ministers is not possible for him. For it would be to embrace excellence, and some external standard not of the ANC. Majoritarianism ensures the loop is always closed. It is how it protects itself, and replicates.

In those committed to excellence, another cornerstone value can be found: contrition. But embarrassment is no less alien to the ANC. One must feel a sense of shame when one fails, or there is simply no incentive to change. Besides, if failure is embraced as a necessary stepping stone on the path to progress it need not be embarrassing at all, but a chance to improve. Majoritarianism negates shame, just as populism negates principle. Without it, a stubborn contempt and arrogance holds sway. A refusal to introspect, and thus ignorance.

When the ANC does eventually collapse, totally and finally, the party will be entirely unaware of what happened, or why. Already it cannot see just how far down the path it is. To save itself, it must make unpopular decisions. But when majoritarianism is your guiding principle, no such decisions can ever be made. Nor will you ever produce a leader capable of upholding a difficult position. From that point, the end is inevitable.

Van Onselen, a former journalist who also worked for the DA in various capacities, was head of politics at the Institute of Race Relations before joining market research company Victory Research as CEO. He writes in his personal capacity.

THE GREAT POLITICAL APPEAL OF MAJORITARIANISM IS THAT IT MASKS FAILURE

‘THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN’. THE PEOPLE ARE NEVER WRONG. THUS, THE MARCH TOWARDS OBSCURITY CONTINUES