Big splits loom from left Despite choreographed unity, fragmentation of ANC is almost irrevocable
SOUTH Africa is entering the 20-year post-liberation mark when many African liberation organisations which became governments, then fail to deliver adequately on promises, either break up or splinter when members and supporters leave for new parties.
The almost irreversible fragmentation of the ANC, Africa’s oldest liberation movement, is underway. It appears the ANC does not have the quality leadership at its head to reverse the decline, nor is it open enough to bring in fresh leadership and ideas, and it is unwilling to genuinely introspect.
The ANC, the party of liberation, is starting to fragment on the back of government’s inability to reduce poverty, deliver jobs and effective public services. The ANC may have reached its electoral peak.
In future, it may never secure the two-thirds majorities it grabbed in previous national elections. Traditionally, it has been assumed that a break in the ANC, when it occurs, will assume a “big bang” dimension.
In such a scenario, it is assumed the ANC will break apart into left and centrist factions, with the left being the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) and/ or the South African Communist Party (SACP).
These groups would go their own way, while the centrists, including the African nationalists and black business, in alliance with populists and Africanists groupings would remain as the rump of the “ANC”.
However, it is more likely that the model will rather be the fragmentation of South Africa’s largest trade union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), where disillusioned members have splintered into the Association of Mine Workers Construction Union (Amcu) and other smaller unions.
The rate of smaller groups breaking from the ANC is now likely to occur at a higher rate.
Recently Julius Malema, the expelled former president of the ANC Youth League, announced he would form a political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). In April, some MK veterans formed a new party, South Africa First. In 2011, some SACP members in North West, broke away and formed their own communist party, the Lebaleng Communist Party.
Ahead of the 2011 local government elections, scores of disgruntled ANC-SACP-Cosatu members stood as independent candidates, or formed new parties at municipal level. These former-ANC- membersturned-independents, and their new parties, may form the nuclei of future new national parties.
Although Agang, launched last week by former black consciousness leader, Mamphela Ramphele, is not strictly a break-away from the ANC, many disgruntled ANC members have joined it.
Smaller left-wing parties, outside the mainstream ANC left, may also emerge to recruit disillusioned leftwing members of the ANC alliance. An example is the formation of the Workers’ and Socialist Party (Wasp), which claims to have made political inroads among disgruntled communities in SA’s mining areas, following the Lonmin Marikana mine massacre.
The break-away of the Congress of the People (COPE) from the ANC in 2008 in protest against the election of Jacob Zuma as ANC president started the fragmentation of the ANC. Although COPE was plunged into chaos amid infighting between its two leaders Mosioua Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa, its formation broke an important invisible wall: it made it acceptable for ANC members to seek a political life outside the ANC.
Although the ANC choreographed unity after the re-election of Zuma as ANC president at its Mangaung national conference in December last year, the ANC is perhaps at its most divided since 1994.
The president may have won the leadership of the ANC’s 4 000-member electoral college consisting of the leaders of branches, structures and affiliates of the ANC, but he may have lost the vote of the broader membership and support base of the party. The final ANC national executive committee elected at Mangaung had no members from the five provincial branches which either directly opposed the president or almost equally divided between those opposing him and those supporting him. This was a historical first for the party. Not only may these provincial branches distance themselves from key decisions of Zuma, they may oppose the implementation of such decisions.
There is an unprecedented large number of senior ANC figures, who all had presidential or deputy presidential ambitions, who have opposed Zuma’s re-election and who are now out in the cold. They include Tokyo Sexwale (Housing Settlements Minister), Mathews Phosa (former ANC treasurer), Fikile Mbalula (Sports Minister), Kgalema Motlanthe (Deputy President), and Zwelinzima Vavi (Cosatu general secretary). There is also Malema.
When COPE broke away from the ANC in 2008 there were only two prominent ANC leaders, Mosiuoa Lekota (the ANC former national chairman) and Mbhazima Shilowa (the former premier of Gauteng).
ANC leaders, including Zuma, appear to have accepted that the party has lost large numbers of the black middle class.
Hence party leaders’ continual attacks on the suspect “loyalty” of the black middle class.
For the first time, there are powerful individuals and constituencies within the ANC which feel marginalised.
Clearly, if all the disgruntled and purged leaders and constituencies band together they could create an unprecedentedly powerful opposition (more powerful than COPE at its peak) whether within or outside the ANC.
Even if these groups do not form a formal opposition, they may at best be lukewarm about campaigning for the ANC in the 2014 national elections – which may undermine the party’s electoral performance.
The tipping point could well have been reached where the gap between the ANC leadership and the daily grind of ordinary members has become such a wide gulf that many ANC members, despite having a deep affinity with the party, may now not be able anymore to identify themselves with both the leaders and the party.
A toxic combination of factors led to the splintering of the NUM. The social gap between the leaders of the NUM and ordinary members became so large that the ordinary miners could not identify with their leaders and trade union anymore, and therefore they sought new leaders and established a new organisation.
Zuma’s questionable friendships and personal behaviour, and invisible leadership, and the un-ANC behaviour of many of the ANC’s leaders, is making it easier for members, supporters and voters to leave the party.
The Cosatu may fracture over disputes over the trade union federation’s support for Zuma. Such a fracturing could spark additional trade union-based breakaway parties from the ANC.
South Africa is entering a period of realignment of politics where the ANC’s majority is likely going to be dramatically reduced, and where we are going to see a number of smaller breakaway parties emerge from within the ANC – from the left, centre and populist wings – plus breaka-ways from the opposition parties, and the formation of entirely new parties from both the left and centre of SA’s politics.
William Gumede