If ANC can’t be cleansed from within, then from without

Assuming — and this is a big assumption — that despite the growing public anger against government corruption, the ANC will still be returned to office in the next elections, the question is whether it can “cleanse itself”, as some of its leaders often claim it will, and in the process save the country from turning into a failed state. It has been a week of turmoil for the ANC, one when the public mood seemed to turn not just against individual politicians and other ANCaligned people implicated in acts of corruption, but against the party.

On radio talk shows and social media and in text messages to television stations, the conversation appeared to be centred on one common theme: how to punish the ANC for the corruption engulfing our country. This was not just from the usual opposition-supporting constituencies. The party’s traditional base was asking the tough questions and, especially on “Black Twitter”, spearheading the desktop-based investigations that revealed links between “entrepreneurs” who benefited from Covid-related state contracts and politicians.

The developments so frightened the party that it resorted to an ill-considered campaign of “defending the ANC” by posting pictures of its flag on social media. The campaign failed to stop the negativity. The unity the initiators of the campaign were hoping for proved elusive, even within its national executive committee (NEC), which was locked in a virtual meeting on the day.

If initial reports of the NEC’s Friday meeting are anything to go by, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC is incapable of rooting out corruption. Any attempt at even discussing steps to do so degenerates into fingerpointing among leaders. The situation is not helped by even its most senior leaders having clouds hanging over them, making it hard for them to say anything, or act against anyone, without fingers being pointed at them.

Its most senior full-time leader, secretary-general Ace Magashule, is at the centre of a number of allegations of wrongdoing related to his time as Free State premier. The president’s authority, on the other hand, is weakened by lingering questions relating to the funding of his presidential campaign ahead of the ANC’s 2017 national conference.

Within this context, it is interesting to see some of the party’s veterans — most notably former president Thabo Mbeki — reviving their pre-2017 conference call for a nonelective national consultative conference to discuss the party’s “renewal”.

It is a call many in the ANC supported at a time when they were frustrated with then president Jacob Zuma, who was resisting calls for him to step down. But once Ramaphosa won the 2017 conference, many abandoned the call, some believing that the new president would be able to lead the process of “renewal”.

However, the ANC’s problems were always much deeper and bigger than Zuma and his friends the Guptas. Even before he ascended to the presidency, there were already signs that ANC structures were increasingly being turned into vehicles of capturing sections of the state for the sole benefit of self-enrichment.

But can a consultative conference help remedy this? Among the more radical proposals associated with this idea is one that suggests that the convening and running of such a consultative conference should be taken away from the current NEC and be handed to party veterans and stalwarts who no longer have ambitions of holding office. Proponents of this idea believe that such a gathering, which will discuss the state of the party and what needs to be done to save it, would be able to have frank debates without anyone worrying about whether they would be elected to office or not.

However, one does not see Ramaphosa and his NEC agreeing to this. Even if they did, the reality is that the majority of the people who will attend the conference are the same delegates who have been electing the current crop of leaders who have turned the organisation into a den of corruption.

At every conference, the delegates write huge volumes of resolutions condemning graft and then go on to put questionable individuals at the very top of the lists to parliament.

Party veterans have every right to want to believe that the ANC can still be saved by its internal mechanisms and processes, but as citizens our hope has to be that there are still enough women and men in the state who are prepared to use the resources at their disposal to go after the thieves, no matter how well connected those thieves may be.

Maybe, just maybe, if more of those thieves are behind bars, the party can have a fighting chance to save itself from imminent collapse.