Malcolm Ray

The notion that the ANC is factionalised, patronage-centred and increasingly undemocratic is also a political alibi for white capital, writes

IN JULY this year, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, in characteristically blunt terms, excoriated the rise of a new breed of party cadre. As long as the use of money to advance individual ambitions and factions within the ANC-led alliance was the functional equivalent of “corporate capture”, ANC organisational processes would be undermined by business interests outside its formations, he cautioned.

With the ANC’s focus on its mid-term policy review at its fourth National General Council this week, and thousands of members mobilising ahead of its national elective conference, Mantashe had a simple request: Desist from factional conflict. It seemed a reasonable enough request. For years, the standard line from Luthuli House held ANC members back from using the party as a springboard for self-enrichment and power.

But a decade and a half of factional tension, populist excesses and insurgency have shrunk the space for temperance and given opponents plenty of room for autonomous action outside the ANC.

The convenient notion that it is adrift and in danger of becoming a “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” has become both a central tenet of conventional wisdom and a marvellous political alibi, classically articulated in a provocative and closely argued opinion piece last week by analyst Dale T McKinley.

The cumulative result of the ANC’s accumulation path has been the party’s “inexorable political and organisational descent”, McKinley argued. “The ANC has morphed from its earlier transition days as a modern bourgeois political party designed to consolidate a class-based system of power overlaid with narrow racial interests to an inveterate, factionalised patronage-centred, corrupt, rent-seeking and increasingly undemocratic ex-liberation movement.”

The words “Power and Money” carried the headline as defining characteristics of the ANC. But McKinley’s thesis was also striking in its limited ambition. To a “patronage-centred, corrupt, rent-seeking and increasingly undemocratic ex-liberation movement” McKinley might have added impoverished blacks who feel slighted and excluded by white capital.

And herein lies the rub. The suggestion by Mantashe that a corporate-sponsored agenda is behind the factionalism and populist excesses in the ANC is less implausible than it might be at first sound.

The ANC’s actual historical trajectory is not formed independently of the entry of South Africa into the world’s social, political and economic order. Neither have secular notions of social cohesion, which came to influence the basic outlook of the ANC, been independent of market forces beyond 1994.

Simplifying a multifaceted and convoluted narrative, the establishment of a Government of National Unity (GNU) in 1994 and the promulgation of the Promotion of the National Unity and Reconciliation Act two years later constituted a twopart compromise contrived by the ANC.

First there was the “Sunset Clause” to allow old enmities and new anxieties to settle, basically giving white hegemonic political-economic interests the space to protect their shrinking stratum of political positions and maintain their economic interests in the new constitutional order.

The second dimension of the compromise, institutionalised in hundreds of Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, was summarised by the then-minister of justice Penuell Maduna in his introduction to the Reconciliation Act to Parliament as a “historic bridge”.

It was clear that the first wave of black economic empowerment in the mid- to late1990s and its corollary, “deracialisation”, had been an essentially “elite” phenomenon, with full membership and rights, now asymmetrically accessed by money.

In South Africa, this meant the boundaries of redress would be limited.

Embedded in this sketch is a simple proposition: Beneath the rainbow metaphor of the immediate post-apartheid context was its literal translation – the belief, all the while, within the ANC, that power was invested somewhere other than in the government. The same pattern con- tinues today. According to a recent Oxfam Inequality Report, two of South Africa’s richest families have wealth equal to 50 percent of the population combined.

According to the Forbes 2014 World Billionaire List, the Rupert and Oppenheimer families are the wealthiest in South Africa, with a combined net worth of $13.8bn (R150.5bn). In contrast, estimates of black ownership of JSE-listed companies range between 1.6 and 4.6 percent.

Furthermore, Statistics SA data reveals that unemployment is not equally distributed across race and gender. The official unemployment rate, using the expanded definition, is close to 36 percent. It is estimated that unemployed blacks as a proportion of the total unemployed is as high as 85.7 percent.

So even though the government’s attempts at elevating constitutional rights of citizenship to equal opportunity – through remedial interventions such as black economic empowerment and employment equity policies – created a coterie of black corporate citizens, popular confrontation in the form of protests with fundamental social fault lines began to intensify.

The outcome of the initial phase of the transition was not to profoundly change the terms of compromises and economic power relations between the ANC and the old economic order, but give legal authority to permissible boundaries of change.

The point is that most of what has passed more generally for serious political discourse in justifying the terms “patronage and clientism” in relation to the ANC today is really just a throwback to the historical processes that brought blacks and whites together in 1994, with great advantages for one and disabilities for the other. This is not to suggest the post-liberation agenda was knowingly conceived out of the ANC’s compromise with the white ruling bloc; nor do I mean to imply the ANCis therefore irredeemable as a progressive force.

The key to the ANC’s troubles is its constituency relationships in the face of white economic dominance characterised by a few large conglomerates. To be sure, there are several observable trends in the ownership and control of Minerals and Energy Complex (MEC) sectors since the early 1990s:

Significant segments of financial capital, which might previously have been socially rooted within South Africa, have fully or partially externalised or diluted themselves – for example, through the shifting of Old Mutual to London in 1996, the acquisition of Absa by Barclays in 2005 and the acquisition of 20 percent of Standard Bank by China’s ICBC Bank. Two of the three main South African gold producers, AngloGold Ashanti and Goldfields, have shifted offshore, with the largest proportion of shareholders being foreign institutions.

Gold-mining infrastructure has been typified by an increasingly concentrated ownership core around three firms (AngloGold Ashanti, Goldfields, Harmony) jointly producing about 90 percent of total national production.

In every MEC sector, with the exception of gold and coal, ultimate control of either production or export marketing has been secured by subsidiaries of one or other offshore transnational corporation.

In regard to gold, Anglo American has completely divested itself of mines and gold mine ownership. In the case of coal, old order capital has tried to retain control over export coal while ceding the less profitable domestic market to black capital.

The overriding thrust towards a substantive nationalism and substantial corresponding concessions to white economic interests in the initial phase of the transition then formed the material basis for tension and contradiction within the ANC.

In this, the ANC is being undermined from without and within as ownership and control of the economy by white elites produces populist excesses within the party over state resources.

The same developments that had suddenly made black economic empowerment so crucial to the reproduction of economic power by white capital in the 1990s – the cooption of a black elite – are also producing a generation of aspirant ANC members who share an interest in money and power.

Bereft of a social base in the economy, persistent patterns of racial inequality have now placed the ANC in the grip of its legacy. What has radicalised black rankand-file members of the ANC-led alliance and, if anything, laid the ground for populist excesses and factionalism, is the persistence of white economic dominance.

In contrast to the standard counter-narrative circulating outside the ANC, then, we find that the novelty, magnitude and patterning of change in the ANC are rooted in the failure of the private sector to create greater inclusivity rather than the strategic failure of the ANC.

We thus have a paradox: a ruling party, not yet a ruling class, whose lack of autonomous capacity (until recently) for the use of the state to fashion the socio-economic transformation agenda has given rise inside the party to a new breed of party cadres. On this score, McKinley is right: The ANC will continue to grow; unfortunately, so too will crass accumulation and factional conflict.

But that’s no fault of the ruling party; it is the ruling class that must be blamed.

For if, as McKinley argues, factionalism and membership have increased, it is surely not because of abundant opportunities in the private sector; it is because of the foreclosure of those opportunities.

There was the belief all the while that power was

invested somewhere other than in government

Malcolm Ray is a policy analyst at Africa Empowered and Senior Research Fellow

at the University of Johannesburg