ANC ‘POISONED BY CORRUPTION’
The ruling party has long been plagued with the issue of graft. It’s become a systemic problem
Gifts are the frontline soldiers of corruption. There will be gifts, there will be people who come to you because you head this department or occupy this office, and they bring gifts
Acombination of a “corruption of ethics and corruption of money” has beset the ANC and is threatening to thwart the party’s attempts at reform and renewal. That’s according to party veteran and former SA president Kgalema Motlanthe.
Motlanthe — who served in the powerful ANC secretary-general position for a decade, from 1997 — believes party processes today are easily rigged, and those with deep pockets are elected to party positions. The result is a distorted, corrupted system.
Amid factionalism, rampant graft and ineptitude Motlanthe has come to be seen as a voice of reason in the ANC as the party stumbles from crisis to crisis. He’s speaking to the FM while provincial electoral conferences play out across the country — themselves symptomatic of the malaise in the ruling party.
In eThekwini, for example, Zandile Gumede has been elected regional chair. This despite an ANC rule stating that politicians facing criminal charges should “step aside” from their party duties. Gumede faces money laundering and racketeering charges linked to a R340m solid waste management tender awarded during her tenure as eThekwini mayor.
In Mpumalanga, Mandla Msibi has been elected provincial treasurer despite facing murder and attempted murder charges relating to a shooting in Mbombela last year.
In an attempt to turn things around, the
ANC last month announced that it had appointed a commission to drive its renewal process. But with the party’s national elective conference set for December, more deliberate and urgent actions are required. “I don’t know if you can have business as usual,” Motlanthe muses.
“Renewal means a surgical overhaul of structures and systems. And it’s a painful process. Because you lose your comfort zones, and so on ... If it’s minus the pain that must accompany [it], I don’t know how effective that can be.”
It’s not as if the ANC hasn’t had time to deal with the problem; the party has struggled with corruption from the time it was unbanned by the apartheid government in the early 1990s.
“I remember in the first policy conference, the first international policy conference in 1992. I was in a commission where we were discussing the dangers of gifts,” Motlanthe says. “Gifts are the frontline soldiers of corruption. There will be gifts, there will be people who come to you because you head this department or occupy this office, and they bring gifts.”
Thirty-odd years on, the ANC is still struggling with “gifts” and the influence of money. It’s easy for the party to elect rogue leaders at its conferences, Motlanthe explains: bogus members can swing the vote, and the rise of money politics means even legitimate members and branch delegates can be bought off.
The ANC constitution used to prohibit explicitly the buying of delegates or the inflation of membership bases for the purpose of winning elections. Buying votes was, says Motlanthe, an “offence that must lead to disciplinary proceedings”. Inexplicably, however, the rule disappeared from the party constitution after the 2017 elective conference at Nasrec.