The NGC and a scarred post-Zuma order rising
The ANC knows it has to change, but was hesitant about tackling corruption, factionalism and other problems at talks because the ruling faction is implicated, writes Susan Booysen
HE OLD IS dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms,” wrote Antonio Gramsci. This hiatus sprung to mind when I tracked unfolding speeches, briefings and statements at the ANC’s National General Council (NGC) meeting at the weekend.
The meeting delivered evidence that South Africa and the ANC were starting to shift gear out of the Zuma order. No rush, no promises, but it is happening. Tentative, often bizarre and contradictory, signals appeared, revealing uncertainties about what the ANC has become and might develop into. This 2015 ANC also revealed itself as still uncertain of how far it could (or wanted to) go in shifting gears between leaders and, by inference, movement characters. Vacillation notwithstanding, there was little doubt of the need to disinherit indictments of the Zuma era.
While the meeting’s wealth of information on national policy directions also illuminates change in movement character, this analysis takes stock of the ANC organisationally. President Jacob Zuma might have held the fort at the previous NGC meeting but it became safer (but not safe) to refer to the scourges that have become synonymous with the ANC in the time of Zuma.
The two-headed monster of corruption (organisational and in government) and factionalism had been “eating up the ANC”, in the words of secretary-general Gwede Mantashe.
The ANC knows it has to change course or oversee its own demise. Past election results and ongoing opinion poll monitoring show there is no escaping that leadership antics have been damaging voters’ trust and loyalty. The convergence between bleeding voter support, declining membership and leadership transition (of sorts, posing in the wings) has been creating the opportunity for action. But most telling about the ANC at this time is that its stabs at solving problems of corruption, factionalism, and a host of other blights, were hesitant.
Negative citizen perceptions of the ANC, especially in government and where deployees “annex” public resources, have been around for a while. The ANC has been aware of it and Zuma in his time as president has overseen this rot setting in (apart from the Zuma-ists having been active perpetrators) and voters responding to it, obviously, negatively.
The ANC has been held back from pronouncing emphatically by the fact that the ruling faction is implicated (and its demise is not yet certain). By this year, and with next year’s local elections looming, the damage was getting close to irreversible.
The opportunity for stronger action has opened further because of imminent leadership change. But here the ANC is on thin ice, explaining the weekend’s hesitancy. It needs to show convincing anti-corruption action but cannot confess directly the movement itself has been participating.
Hence it becomes the factions inside the ANC, the greedy ones at the coalface of public positions, or poorly selected councillors and municipal officials, who have let the ANC down.
The ANC’s diagnoses stop short of owning up to Zuma himself having been pushed into, and maintained in, power precisely because of factionalist mobilisation, in which both delegate-buying and “slate votes for rewards” (contracts and tenders, for example) were often alleged.
There is also little formal acknowledgement of the conundrum of conscious fusion between ANC party and government structures, including local.
The weekend did see the announcement of tentative steps to counter these ANC nemeses. They are in the domain of planned or envisaged and were phrased largely in the language of “there must be”.
The announcements included that the ANC integrity committee must get teeth.
The NGC endorsed the earlier National Executive Committee decision to give the committee more power. But leaders varied in their takes. Some reckoned the ANC mantra of the Zuma period – “innocent until proven guilty” – has to take a back seat. Members have to step aside voluntarily, once implicated, in the interest of the ANC. Others pointed out the committee would recommend actions to the National Executive Committee and it would have the power to accept or reject the integrity committee’s rulings.
Amorbid symptom of the time is the ANC had put more emphasis on countering the “perceptions of corruption” than on springing into action to root out corruption. The ANC’s angry weekend narrative connected seamlessly with the media and the negative citizen narratives about it.
The party again expressed anger at the “oppositionist role” of the media. The possibility of a media tribunal was rolled out as heavy mortar to get the ANC better coverage. The ANC conflated criticism of the party, professionalism and fairness in media coverage, and lack of diversity in media houses.
Could such displacement of issues ever not have occurred, one may ask, given the denialism exercised by the president? The president was doing the podium denouncements, has been overseeing his dominant faction’s rise and his own continuation in power on the back of the exact scourges now fingered as spears in the ANC’s heart.
There was no hint of mea culpa in Zuma’s words at the NGC that factions “exist because of greed and the hunger for power which, once obtained, is abused to take control of state resources and to further business interests”.
The new fights between corners within the Zuma camp, in evidence this weekend, were a final set of early symptoms of the closing of the prime Zuma era (the postZuma era might still closely resemble the present). Denial of misdemeanours ruled side by side with condemnations of recent acts involving factions and slates.
There was the gender faction under the banner of the women’s lobby and their campaign-by-any-other-name for a woman president. The now self-denied “Premier League” went underground.
Secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, not implicated directly in acts of corruption, reportedly clashed with the Women’s League. It tried to get him to eat his words on vote-buying in their elections.
Then there was the SACP which is fighting the Premier League. In private conversations, delegates doubted the compliant Youth League was no longer a policy contestant. Others told me some policy issues associated with Zuma would soon disappear because fellow leaders in government would not carry the can beyond his term.
The weekend’s NGC will become known for its drafting of the first of the epitaphs to the Zuma era. It was an ANC that had some ascendant and redeeming moral voices clashing with loyalists, who are clinging to the old order. It was an ANC that revealed its uncertainty of how to come to terms with its recent past.
It was testing the waters on how much it can distance itself from that past.
The ANC is starting to shift out of the Zuma era. No rush, no promises,
but it is happening
Susan Booysen is a professor at the Wits School of Governance, and author of