ANC can’t lash Zuma for all its faults

The ANC prides itself on being bigger than any one individual member of the party, including the leader

IT WILL be convenient but also disingenuous for some factions in the ANC to now use the sizeable decline in the party’s share of the vote in the local elections to lash President Jacob Zuma.

Obviously we do not actually know the logic and motive of voters with complete accuracy.

Nevertheless, I would be shocked if the ruinous leadership of Zuma isn’t partly, or massively, responsible for the hammering that the ANC has taken across the country. These elections surely were in part a referendum on the leadership of Zuma.

But here’s the snag. The ANC prides itself on being bigger than any one individual member of the party, including the leader. That was why, as we know all too well, former president Thabo Mbeki was recalled. He got too big for his small boots.

The party even has a weird tendency of speaking as if the party exists like a human being that’s omniscient and omnipotent, and watching over the tiny human beings who are its loyal children, waiting for instructions from it.

But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t anthropomorphise the party, and ascribe to it agency and authority that no one can subvert, and at the same time want to lash out at Zuma as if he is the omniscient, omnipotent one.

The implication is that the party itself, including the leadership at all levels and ordinary ANC members and supporters, are jointly responsible for the erosion of the brand of this once great liberation movement.

So the election wasn’t merely a referendum on Zuma’s leadership. It was that, and much more. It was also an election that reveals exactly what the electorate thinks about the state of the state, especially at local government level, but also in respect of other spheres of government (because, let’s be honest, we all conflate local and national governance questions and maybe that’s not the end of world).

The election also is feedback to the governing ANC about what the electorate makes of the quality, or lack thereof, of the leadership of the party. The local elections were a referendum on the ANC more than it was a referendum on Zuma.

So any factions that use the election results as a basis to form slates that they can start lobbying for, as jostling for positions at the elective conference in 2017 begins, must be careful about the strategies they use to replace the current lot.

Honesty and politics make for awkward bedfellows. But I wish more politicians would take a chance on honesty and see how it works out for them politically. I reckon that an ANC leader who is prepared to narrate a post-mortem analysis that indicts the entire party, including themselves, and not just Zuma, for these election results, will be a leader that gains enormous respect across the party base.

There is just no space here for lying. Sure, a party president has to be held accountable for how he or she exercises their enormous constitutional powers. But ultimately, the party itself has to exercise an accountability role too.

So the smartest factionalist strategy, as counter-intuitive as it might seem, would be, in the first instance, to take the rhetoric of collective accountability seriously, and role-model it.

Even if, as has been the case with the ANC in Gauteng, you have slowly cultivated a brand that’s almost distinct from the national brand of the party, don’t be arrogant about that communicative feat.

Own your role in not holding Zuma accountable. Own your errors for how you failed to provide effective political oversight in ministries

I wish more politicians would take a chance on honesty and see how it works out for them politically

or departments that you are in charge of.

Don’t scapegoat Zuma. Acknowledge openly that the ANC has not taken seriously the Mangaung resolution on organisational renewal.

It will be far easier to have the moral higher ground, and try to get elected on to a leadership position in the ANC next year, if an aspirant leader rehearses a new kind of leadership that is sorely lacking in the party currently.

Ministers who are members of both the ANC and the SACP, for example, should avoid the temptation of now ditching Zuma in the dying days of his political career.

You helped to get the man into the position where he did the damage that he has done, and might still do in the remaining years of the presidency.

You cannot now pretend that Zuma elected himself. He didn’t. He is a product of the processes of the party and therefore the party itself should be embarrassed by what transpired in the elections.

Would we better off without Zuma including getting rid of him before 2019? Absolutely.

Will that be the end of the ANC’s challenges? Absolutely not. It will be the beginning of organisational renewal.