Can ANC be rehabilitated?

It must ditch neo-liberalism, which alienated it from its mass base

MY WISH is that the President of the ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa, and its most senior leaders, will use this festive season to do some serious introspection about what has caused it to go so “horribly wrong”, especially over the past decade.

The biggest problem facing the ANC today is that the conquest of political power in 1994 transformed it from the spearhead of the national liberation movement into an elitist leadership whose access to state power and the enormous public finances at its disposal, rapidly became the source of its increasing decline, corruption and distance from its support base.

This was made possible and inevitable largely due to the neo-liberal policies it adopted from the mid-1990s, which gave rise, on the one hand, to black elitism, and on the other hand to massive black unemployment, poverty and increasing inequalities.

In this regard it is the municipal legislation it adopted in the early 2000s which proved to be the Achilles heel of the ANC and the source of a deep social crisis in the black townships, testament of which is the fact that for several years South Africa is the protest capital of the world.

It is the policy decisions the ANC took to commercialise and commodify basic services which quickly became the source of unstoppable township revolts with all the destruction and chaos it has often vividly entailed.

That is why the electoral fortunes of the ANC began to markedly shift from the 2006 local government elections, up until 2016, when it lost the most powerful metros in South Africa, Johannesburg and Tshwane, to a coalition of the DA and the EFF. That was the biggest shock and setback to the ANC since 1994, from which I don’t think it has quite recovered.

But the biggest problem facing efforts at rehabilitation is that the ANC is not a “learning organisation”. Just look at what it has done since losing those metros in 2016. It has responded to legitimate township protests with the jackboot of repression, so typical of previous white rule.

Besides, there was no shift at all from those policies which I argue is the main reason for the defeats in those metros. A governing party, particularly one already in evident decline, cannot inflict daily suffering on the electorate regarding their most basic needs and expect that they will continue to vote for them.

What is very interesting, and revealing, is that the ANC was during the 1990s the most powerful force in those same townships which today are in revolt against it. And in fact, the masses in those same townships were loyal to the ANC throughout the years it was banned and its leadership jailed or exiled. The chronic protests are hence an expression of deep dissatisfaction and disappointment with the ANC.

The protesters are consciously, militantly and sadly often destructively making their voices heard. Today, across the country, black townships are often the scene of seething violence, smouldering smoke from burnt down infrastructure and running battles between angry residents and the police. Nobody, not even the harshest critics of the ANC before 1994, could have foreseen that this would become a regular feature of post-apartheid South Africa under ANC rule.

But given how embedded the neo-liberal policy choices of the ANC are in black townships, what can it do differently between now and the 2019 elections in six months?

Hardly anything which will address and fix those deep and serious problems. However, a fundamental policy review of basic services at local level after the elections is imperative if the ANC is to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the black masses it has increasingly alienated after 1994. It is a lie repeated ad nauseam by the ANC for long, that it has the right policies in place, but that what is lacking is implementation.

The biggest reasons for the protests, among others, is not due to the lack of implementation of policies but the neo-liberal policies themselves, such as pit latrines, poor and inferior housing and other infrastructure and the deprivations imposed by prepaid meters in a situation of high unemployment, which prevent access to sufficient water and electricity.

Once a governing party compromises such basic needs not only will poor people register their dissatisfaction in elections, as has already happened at the expense of the ANC, but to recover such lost ground will be an uphill battle, especially that already captured by competing parties.

But so deep is the crisis and rot in the ANC that rehabilitation, even if that only means a return to its still limited but much better social democratic character, will take a long time.

For too long has it largely been in the clutches of neo-liberalism, to the detriment of its mass base.

This will have to urgently change if it is to restore the continuous erosion of confidence of the masses in it.