Railing against modern society

Must Can a triumph without a change in values, and views in society? Is there such an experience? What accounts for the growing and conduct in our communities in the midst of a project of building a morally

a venture is unclear. Yet the papers at various points present proposals that seem premised on a bottomless Treasury.

The SABC, for instance, should not have to trouble itself with “commercial drivers” – advertising, licence fees and so on – and instead should be “a fiscus-funded public broadcaster”.

Every household should be provided with “free basic [mobile] data” to “bridge the digital divide and create an inclusive society”.

The building of various large-scale heritage monuments, devoted to memorialising the liberation struggle, is envisaged.

Furthermore: “There is a need for a national Space policy.”

At certain moments, the policy papers give the impression of having been written by ageing academics.

When discussing current geopolitical trends, one paper notes with alarm the “denialism” shown by people in ignoring “the fact that China was in fact the world’s largest economy for a large part of the 19th century”.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that parts of the papers are steeped in the 19th century, drawing heavily from one of that era’s pre-eminent thinkers: Karl Marx.

The ANC is concerned about the “crass materialism” and “individualism” that has taken root in modern society, particularly among the “parasitic bourgeoisie”.

Yet simultaneously, it is also critical of a “passive attitude” that has taken root among South Africans since 1994, which assumes “that every problem is government’s responsibility”.

Noting the difficulties the ANC experiences in transmitting its messages directly to the public, one paper states: “The desire to have independent platforms through which the party can communicate its views to the broad public, be it electronic, print or visual, has not borne fruit.”

The fact that social media is used for precisely this purpose by every other major political party in South Africa appears not to have occurred to the paper’s drafters: “This state of affairs is indeed untenable if the ANC must strive to be the leader of our society,” they lament.

In the paper devoted to “Digital Communication and the Battle of Ideas”, it is acknowledged that social media exists – but it is presented primarily as a terrain in which “attacks on the government and the ANC” are launched, “targeting performance in government, local and provincial administration in particular”.

In the same paper, the ANC voices concern that the decline in quality journalism in South Africa “has the potential to distort the hegemony of the ANC [and] the alliance (SACP, Cosatu) as the true leader of the national democratic revolution”.

The alarming implication is that highquality media would present the ANC as entitled to govern South Africa indefinitely.

The same sense of entitlement to power is evident in the following description of local coalition politics: “The bitter reality is that [the ANC] has been kept out of government by the growing phenomenon of small opposition parties ganging up to keep the ANC out of office.”

Yearning for a one-party state?

Perhaps the most worrying implication of the policy papers is that the ANC may be fundamentally uncomfortable in a multiparty democracy – as well as deeply paranoid.

The coalitions keeping the ANC out of power in various metros, the papers state, are “on a crusade to obliterate the defining goals of our national transformation project”, and “all declare the demise of the ANC as the only primary reason they exist”.

An “ideological onslaught against the ANC using all forms of media” persists, claim the papers. “Unsanctioned” sharing of “crime news and reporting” needs “managing”.

It remains to be seen whether delegates to the policy conference will heed the warning sounded by President Cyril Ramaphosa in the introduction to the papers: that the ANC’s priority “has to be the improvement of the quality of lives of people, rather than an often narrow, internal party focus”.