The ANC is haunted by its failure to invest in its intellectual capital
White parties with experience are taking advantage
The ANC has a leadership problem, and not a masses problem. It is a leadership that over time has failed to appreciate the importance of consolidating the organisation, rather than focusing on its own factional leadership positions.
The masses are merely reponding to a leadership that has reduced them to a step ladder to access and sustain power positions. In the process, the ANC leadership has reduced the movement into a shallow organisation, which is now on a survival mission, heavily reliant on the virtues of its former leaders and historical events.
On face value, the ANC keeps losing electoral support, as evidenced by the loss of control of key metros such as Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni. According to those who hold this limited view, both within and outside the ANC, the party just needs to regroup and focus on the forthcoming 2024 national elections.
In this limited view, the ANC is now a mere electioneering organisation simply preoccupied with its five-year periodic survival.
In real terms, the ANC lost the substance of being a liberation movement and organisa
tion. It has lost its liberation capital and character. It has lost its centrality of being the pillar of the proverbial “broad church” against the apartheid legacy. It has lost the substance of being a “leader of society”, and it cannot “lead society” from opposition benches.
In a historical twist of irony, the ANC has committed to be an opposition, and to hold the governing conservative DA “accountable”. Given the DA’S programme of conserving the wealth and poverty patterns of apartheid, the ANC is committing itself to holding the DA accountable to this agenda, and thus leaving the poor black masses more vulnerable to socioeconomic exclusion.
The ANC is increasingly being positioned where the architects of Codesa wanted it to be: a weak and non-consequential political party post statutory apartheid. The white minority architects of Codesa had a longterm plan: sustain apartheid’s economy over time, mainly by decapitating the liberation agenda and its leading liberation movement – the ANC.
Given the ANC leadership presence in most of the post-colonial Africa where this agenda was also applied, the ANC ought to have expected that it was going to be subjected to similar patterns over time, and
plan accordingly to counter it.
Perhaps, the ANC leadership did appreciate this agenda but failed to strategise and sustainably contest against this white minority agenda.
The ANC has in part actively participated in its own weakening. This includes the ANC’S demobilisation of would-be left forces such as the South African Communist Party, the Congress of the South African Trade Unions and the South African National Civic Organisation.
The ANC, therefore, has steadily alienated itself from the masses organisationally, in terms of its alliances and its endless leadership factional battles.
The ANC failed a basic revolutionary principle – that revolutions are rooted within solid political movements and organisations, and not in government.
The National Party (NP) understood well the nexus between a strong political party and a strong government. Hence, it invested massively on intellectual production and other scientific projects to capacitate the NP organisationally and in government.
The ANC leadership, for all its revolutionary rhetoric, has not built a single think tank to enrich the organisation and its government. Failure to invest in the intellectual capital of the ANC, resulted in a stale organisation lacking in innovation, and the ability to appreciate emerging societal dynamics.
Rather than a liberation government, the ANC simply positioned itself as a neutral government, subject to open contestation by various race, class and interest groups.
This gives white minorities with the historical experience and resources to formally engage government at an advantage. While the black masses continue to go to the streets with rocks as their means of engaging the government.
The ANC will not be able to rebuild trust and confidence before 2024, as it will be embroiled in leadership contestation over whether its president, Cyril Ramaphosa must continue to lead the party.
Soon, writing about the ANC will start with: “Once upon a time ...”
It’s leadership has not built a single think tank to enrich the party