ANC’s W Cape secretary says it lost the province due to internal strife

HAVING been out power for 11 years, first losing the City of Cape Town and then the Western Cape, the ANC’s provincial secretary, Faiez Jacobs, admits his party’s attempts to wrestle control of the province from the DA have been a failure.

And as the ANC in the Western Cape’s fortunes have declined, so has its ability to influence issues on the national stage. The party’s recent branch audits have placed the Western Cape in last position in terms of ANC membership, even smaller than the sparsely populated Northern Cape. Jacobs says if the warring parties had known in 2005 at a divisive provincial conference that their bickering could see the ANC lose power the following year, they would not have fought “tooth and nail”.

In 2005, a year after taking power in the Western Cape through a coalition with the erstwhile New National Party, ANC leaders were at each other’s throats, the main belligerents being Mcebisi Skwatsha and former premier Ebrahim Rasool. According to Jacobs, the two men would not speak for eight years. Now ironically they both support Cyril Ramaphosa and have ironed out their differences.

“What we’re doing now is that we’re telling ( the ANC national leadership) that if we don’t deal with our own sense of divisions, then we are on a continuous demise,” says Jacobs.

“The critical reflection was that we need a solidarity of comrades in both coloured and African areas, that translates… it’s a fine balance to deal with because in this province there is a coloured majority who are a national minority so the National Question, we had to revisit it,” says Jacobs.

The ANC’s National Question analysis asserts that while black people ( including coloureds and Indians) were oppressed, Africans bore the brunt of oppression and this legacy should be remedied through government action.

“We had Pallo Jordan to explain to us that here in the Western Cape was a peculiar non-racialism happening where coloured people, and to a lesser extent African people, lived side-by-side with their oppressor from the time of Jan van Riebeeck… we had a co-operative and a competitive relationship with white people,” says Jacobs.

He said at the time when the ANC gained power in the province in 2004 it had the right mix of non-racialism practised among comrades.

“Clearly (former ANC Western Cape chairperson) Marius Fransman’s strategy as the Saving Grace, the Jesus Christ, is not going to work (for the ANC),” said Jacobs.

He said Fransman’s pandering to “crude coloured nationalism” had not worked and instead the party had to go back to the non-racialism of the United Democratic Front, which was founded in Mitchells Plain in 1983. Fransman’s embrace of the klopse – and some of the unsavoury characters associated with the annual festival – had also rubbed his ANC comrades up the wrong way. In November last year Fransman had his ANC membership suspended for five years after he was found guilty of using his office to solicit sexual favours from a 21-yearold Stellenbosch woman.

“We need to work in the communities and show that we are a better, credible opposition to the DA’s white privilege, fighting the good fight for communities. That’s the strategy that we’re putting together.” He admitted that scandal-prone President Jacob Zuma had been a hardsell for the ANC in the Western Cape.

“If Cyril wins, 70% of South Africans will come back to the ANC in a non-racial character… what we’re doing, the fight that we’re fighting, is not for a personality but what he represents,” said Jacobs.

He said the ANC had been in decline for the past eight years because of the scandals over state capture and looting. This had left it hamstrung.

“A lot of time we spent defending Zuma, rather than saving the ANC,” said Jacobs.

Faiez Jacobs