Oodwinked?

The ANC that will turn up at Mangaung in a week is a different sort of animal to the organisation many South Africans knew and admired for a century.

It has changed, and changed for the worse — and in so many ways.

It is unrecognisable from the proud movement of Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo and even Nelson Mandela. Power was always going to change the party. But power has also corrupted it. Now that it is in a position to dispense largesse to its impatient members, it is attracting a different sort of cadre. They are no longer the selfless activists who faced torture, and even death, and fanned out and scoured the globe for assistance — diplomatic and military — to overthrow a repressive regime. Prepared to even sacrifice their lives to achieve this goal, they didn’t expect anything in return.

Today’s activist is not concerned with matters of life and death and national liberation, but with the mundane like having a job, clothing and feeding their families. Joining the organisation is a means to that end — and a little selfenrichment on the side. Hence the obsession with the perks and spoils such as tenders which are dished out by the state the ANC controls. It is now more like an employment agency, or Father Christmas.

Thus the type of activist drawn to the organisation has changed, and has in effect changed the ANC. That transmogrification has left many of its supporters, indeed many ordinary South Africans, perplexed and bewildered. Is this the organisation in which they invested their emotions, hopes and aspirations over all these years? Did they miss something, or were they hoodwinked?

An organisation that produced some of the most outstanding and upstanding leaders of their generation now sees no shame or embarrassment in electing venal and corrupt characters into leadership positions. Once it held firm on the noble ideal of nonracialism, an attractive proposition in the face of the rabid racism of the ruling National Party. Now it uses race as a foil for some of its unacceptable behaviour. Leaders who once fought against repression are now using their huge majority in parliament to push through iniquitous legislation such as the Secrecy Bill.

Parliament has become not the crucible of free speech that many had hoped for, but a rubber stamp and a crude instrument to muzzle debate.

Mandela once remarked that the nature of the terrain on which the struggle was waged by the oppressed was often determined by the oppressor. And so it was to be the case with the SA struggle. The banning of liberation movements, including the ANC, in the early 1960s meant that the fight against apartheid was for decades fought on many fronts — in exile, in prison and inside the country.

Because of their isolation from each other and difficulty in communicating, each front became autonomous, with its own culture and mode of carrying out its activities. The most senior and influential members of the ANC had ended up either in exile or in jail. Structures within the country thus deferred to the two fronts, especially the exiles with whom clandestine contacts were maintained throughout. > ANC’s cachet is in its ability to provide jobs, access to state tenders > Party now used as a vehicle for enrichment by politicians Which is why when the ANC was unbanned in 1990, the internal United Democratic Front (UDF) and its affiliates decided to disband and throw in their lot with the returning ANC exiles. Many former UDF activists now readily admit that was a mistake.

Ideally, the three strands of the struggle movement — exiles, prisoners and inxiles — should have met, reflected on the three decades they’d been waging the struggle from different fronts, the policy differences that had emerged as a result and then mapped the way forward — a grand bargain of sorts.

But the returnees took over a country that was foreign to them. Mandela succeeded the ailing Tambo. Cyril Ramaphosa, who cut his political teeth in the trade union movement, replaced the comatose Alfred Nzo as ANC secretarygeneral. Ramaphosa’s inclusion freshened the leadership and helped to reinforce its understanding of the local political terrain.

Though Ramaphosa went on to play a huge role in the Codesa negotiations and the drafting of the new constitution, he was always regarded with suspicion by the exiles. And when Mandela decided he wanted Ramaphosa to be his deputy, the exiles put their foot down, plumping instead for Thabo Mbeki, a fellow exile. (It would be ironic if, after such a painful snub and years in the political wilderness, Ramaphosa were to return to politics to help Jacob Zuma, another exile, to cling to power.)

As Mandela’s deputy and later president, Mbeki cemented the exiles’ hold on power — a trend that is continuing with Zuma’s tenure. And so the culture that has taken hold in government is not one of openness and transparency, which was the hallmark of the anti-apartheid

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