Crossroads for the ANC

THROUGHOUT its 100-year history, the ANC has faced many challenges, which can be categorised broadly into two – those internal to the party and those related to the political environment within which it operated.

The fact that the ANC yesterday marked its centenary in Mangaung, its birthplace, is testament to the fact that the ruling party has been able to deal successfully with these challenges or navigate its way around them. But it also has had luck on its side. The timing of Oliver Tambo’s stroke in August 1989 and the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 helped avert what has been the bane of most liberation movements in Africa and elsewhere – leadership battles. The battle for Tambo’s post would have come at a very critical time as the movement needed to rally its rank and file behind negotiations with the FW de Klerk government.

The ANC has survived most of its challenges throughout the centenary by changing leadership, the first of which took place within six years of its founding. John Langalibalele Dube, its first president, was removed after supporting “the principle of segregation so far as it can fairly and practically be carried out”. The same fate befell Josiah Gumede, the third president, who sought to move the ANC closer to the Communist Party.

The most significant of changes occurred in the late 1940s after youth leaders, including Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Tambo, engineered leadership changes that launched the ANC onto the second phase of its struggle against apartheid.

Now President Jacob Zuma wants to remake the ruling party again. He promised yesterday to make it much more modern by professionalising its operations. He said the ANC was fully aware that the world into which it was born had changed.

All of this is stating the obvious. The question to be answered by ANC delegates at the elective conference in December is whether the ANC can bring about the kind of change Zuma referred to without the need for a change in leadership.