Facing an adversary who knows the endgame
● The ANC’s response to the formation of the MK Party has played into the hands of its most threatening adversary since 1994.
Efforts to counter support for the MK Party have focused on attacking Jacob Zuma’s reputation and silencing criticism of the governing party.
The ANC’s electioneering juggernaut was unleashed to show its public support in the Mbombela Stadium and the process will be repeated in the Moses Mabhida and FNB stadiums. But these strategies need to respond to the reason the MK Party was formed, and why it is becoming attractive to disillusioned ANC activists.
The governing party’s attacks on Zuma, using allegations that it defended him in the past, make it look desperate. In Mbhazima Shilowa’s parlance, complaining — when you have been warned — of being bitten by a wild dog you reared as a puppy makes you a clown. This also raises the question of the innocence of other ANC leaders now being defended by the party against allegations of wrongdoing.
What the ANC should have noticed is that on media platforms bad news about Zuma has been so overdone that what he says as a victim of the onslaught commands the attention of those living with discontent about service delivery. The propaganda advantages in attacking Zuma are growing slimmer as he has been able to weaponise them against his adversaries. Having been in the ANC national executive committee (NEC) for a long time, his ability to read and know the endgame of whatever strategy they unleash on him cannot be underestimated.
Facing the ANC, to a Zuma-led MK Party, will be more about working on what it knows are its weaknesses. The more propaganda is unleashed about Zuma, the more his chosen party’s ratings as an alternative grow. His choices of independent African churches and the institution of traditional leadership as his core platforms of mobilisation have hit the sore spot of a secular state among churches and of land dispossession and national grievances among traditional leaders.
Calling for a review of the judicial, legislative and executive authority of traditional leadership institutions will encourage the call to review the entire constitutional order. This may be a masterstroke.
Perhaps the most bitterly humiliating weapons the MK Party has yet to take advantage of are the ANC’s failures involving load-shedding, the underreported water crisis, poor service delivery, declining public infrastructure and changing the templates of economic dominance by monopoly capital.
The challenge the governing party faces is getting out of the corner it has painted itself into on radical economic transformation issues, especially land. The best way for the ANC to regain its liberation movement credentials and the moral high ground among its furious majority constituency is by moderating its uncompromising march into a neoliberal future without first consolidating its developmental state fundamentals.
Its manifesto should respond to the demands of its now contested constituency, the African majority. Closest to the ANC brand, having delivered the freedom that the liberation struggle was about, is the MK brand. The ANC’s focus on the MK Party and the decline in media focus on other parties attests to its disruptive potential.
The MK Party’s strategy was always based on how the ANC would respond to Zuma’s decision. His declaration of “loyalty” to the ANC while voting against it was critical. This was, by design, supposed to start an internal debate about his reasons for doing so. The discussions would have opened the Phala Phala issue and potentially triggered the step-aside rule for several of the ANC’s NEC members. Logic would have dictated a national general council or consultative conference through which new permutations of the leadership function would have been devised.
The answer to the question of whether the MK Party has an advantage is, yes. ANC leaders in KwaZulu-Natal were provoked into a counterproductive overreaction that sought to airbrush what they knew of Jacob Zuma. July 2021 demonstrated a scary dimension of his provincial support. They fell into the trap of Zuma-bashing. The reality is that in KwaZulu-Natal and beyond the ANC is now faced with the IFP, the EFF generation and the MK Party.
The ANC prides itself on its ability to rise to any challenge. Its election juggernaut is still the most oiled, despite its growing inability to lure back discouraged voters. The question is: what if those leaving are its core strategists?