In the days before the 55th conference of the ANC commenced on December 16, a lot of “pre-conference shenanigans” ensued, mostly, as part of the organisation’s sessions of provincial general councils.
In the spotlight were several critical factors. Among the ANC’s critical documents for consideration when one attempts an analysis of its prospects, is the “Strategy and Tactics” document.
Equally significant in seeking to assess and reflect on the ANC’s performance leading to this 55th conference, is the question of leadership. Critically, the focus on the organisation’s leadership has been on Cyril Ramaphosa.
This focus, though not completely misplaced, has blurred the lines of leadership performance assessment in that, half the time, the departure point appears to have been that of a laboratory experiment. A useful exercise would do well to consider the ceteris paribas [other things equal] disclaimer used in economics models. That is to say, Ramaphosa’s leadership is exercised in an environment where he has all the variables in control.
Leading up to this conference, Ramaphosa would have had to deal with not just ideological variances, policy postulations and intraparty private interests. Having been embraced across the SA spectrum as the “messiah” the country so desperately needed, he was required to deliver on the promise of whatever his “renewal” project meant for different sectors of the population.
Any South Africans who imagine their future political, and economic fortunes are linked to the leadership of Ramaphosa have to possess the requisite patience for the man to navigate the minefield that his own organisation has become over the last two decades.
Central to these is the sense the ANC had become a haven for self-enrichment of the elected few, a vehicle for the connected few to attain career goals as well as the feeding trough for corrupt individuals assigned with leadership roles.
On his way to becoming the ANC president in 2017, Ramaphosa took a firm stand against corruption, rent-seeking, factionalism and other attendant tendencies. And it was on the back of this “refreshing message” SA, at large, appeared to embrace him as the “messiah” to lead them through the “Red Sea”.
On the back of unrelenting power blackouts, sluggish economic performance, and generally depressing human development indicators, the euphoric renewal promise tended to fade into a distant promise unlikely to be realised.
With jobs proving hard to come by, public entities’ performance not rising to expectations, despondency began to set in among ordinary citizens.
I do not know what Ramaphosa told his comrades when he accepted the nomination to be president of his organisation. I am certain everyone around him would have been alert to the morass that awaited him as president of his organisation as well as the country.
Not being a John Wayne of Western movies, Ramaphosa was never going to walk into his first NEC meeting and wave a Smith and Wesson revolver to declare himself the new sheriff in town with signed writs for the “execution” of certain “bad elements”. The “accused” were a sizeable presence in his NEC, most of whom pulled significant support.
Phala Phala has become a source of mud his opponents are using to strip him of his “angelic presence”.
His challenges are what I propose to examine. When ANC members nominated Ramaphosa for their president, it does not seem they put him through a process to determine whether he had any “skeletons in his cupboard”.
What seemed to preoccupy the ANC at the time appears to have been that Ramaphosa was moneyed enough not to have to steal from the poor. The low standard set by his predecessor appears to have secured Ramaphosa the endorsement of his members. As history has aptly demonstrated, it takes more than lessons from the past to set an old entity like the ANC on a “renewal path”.
There are a few critical factors that will always interfere with the post-2007 ANC. There are factors that one can flag as “exogenous” to what the ANC can secure as attendant to its ethos. Central to the ANC’s ethos are declarations in the organisation’s “Strategy and Tactics” documents from 1969 up to 2017.
Critically, these documents have always informed the operation of the ANC, whether in prosecuting the struggle for national liberation or defining the role of other “progressive forces” in pursuit of the goals of the same struggle. In the 1969 Morogoro Conference, the ANC declared the motive forces of the National Democratic Revolution thus: “The system of national oppression meant that the African majority and blacks in general became, from their own experiences and actions, the main motive forces of the struggle.”
This assertion also acknowledges the role of other forces.
“... within the white community, individuals of rare foresight and integrity did realise that all the people of our country shared a common future, and therefore made common cause with the national liberation movement. This is the array of national forces on whom the ANC relies for the continuing struggle to rid SA of the legacy of apartheid. They are made up of the African majority who were the main victims of the apartheid system; the coloured and Indian communities, who, though accorded bigger crumbs from the Masters’ table, were essentially excluded from the court of the privileged; and white democrats.
“Equally important is the role of the working class. Being a multiclass organisation, the ANC’s wording of the working class’s role appears to have been, at best, cautious. The 1997 version of the Strategy and Tactics document bears this out as the document makes reference to the working class as part of the motive forces, albeit, one that has “earned recognition due to its role in the struggle for national liberation”.
What the 2022 leadership of the ANC should look like and focus on, is not a complicated theorem to fathom.
Depending on which slate emerges victorious, the likes of Gwede Mantashe, Paul Mashatile, Stan Mathabatha, and Ramaphosa loom large on the “top six” nominees; the likes of David Masondo, Fikile Mbalula, Mdumiseni Ntuli, Febe Potgieter, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni as representative of the young. The Ramaphosa administration has made significant strides in re-energising law enforcement agencies. While the judiciary has come under attack from some within the ANC, that noise has come from a few, most of whom face serious criminal cases. In this regard, Ramaphosa should be seen to have gone some distance in restoring the public’s confidence in law enforcement agencies.
The intraparty considerations that the 55th conference must deal with include what some term the party’s apparent “strategic disorientation”.
In this regard, the apparent source of distress is the disjuncture between the organisation’s appreciation of the “motive forces of the National Democratic Revolution”.
Whereas Morogoro in 1969 up to Stellenbosch in the early 2000s, seemed to affirm “blacks in general and Africans in particular”, the 2007 strategy and tactics document seemed to declare the working class as the main motive force.
The same line of said can be found in subsequent documents. For a multiclass organisation, this theoretical formulation is always going to be practically improbable. Marxists will point this out free of charge. A struggle led by the working class is intended to overthrow the ruling class and replace it with a working class-led state whose aim is to impose the hegemony of the working class towards a “classless society”.
Joe Slovo’s pamphlet, “The South African Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution”, is unambiguous about what the working class can and cannot do in the context of the NDR.
The pamphlet acknowledges the multiclass nature of the NDR. Slovo’s proposition is that: “In general, it remains true that our National Democratic Revolution expresses the broad objective interests not only of the working class but also of most of the other classes within the nationally-dominated majority, including the black petit bourgeoisie and significant strata of the emergent black bourgeoisie.
“This reality provides the foundation for a struggle that aims to mobilise to its side all the oppressed classes and strata as participants in the national liberation alliance. We believe the working class is both an indispensable part and the leading force of such a liberation alliance. But its relations with other classes and strata cannot be conditional on the acceptance by them of socialist aims. The historic programme which has evolved to express the common immediate aspirations of all the classes of the oppressed people is the Freedom Charter. This document is not, in itself, a programme for socialism, even though (as we argue later) it can provide a basis for uninterrupted advance to a socialist future.”
Without clearing this apparent ‘indecision’ the ANC is always going to be compelled to adopt the “awkward” stance of being more than a multiclass entity. Something it can never be. Of course there are the ever present cases of ill-discipline that have made it possible for members like Zuma to go around insulting current leaders with impunity.
The same can be said of the likes of Ace Magashule, Bongani Bongo, Supra Mahumapelo and, lately, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Equally important is how the ANC’s 55th conference deals with the need to consolidate provincial sites and champions of renewal with the jostling for positions in the NEC and its top six. Zamani Saul appears to be the example of leadership focus.
He seems to have made it his point to fix his province before setting sights on higher levers of power. The overcrowded spots for national chair, deputy president and secretary-general present a serious headache for lobbyists.
If aspiring young leaders like Ronald Lamola, who I would hold back from this conference and allow the likes of Mabuyane, who has led his province reasonably well to ascend to deputy president, can be elected into the NEC and retain portfolios in cabinet, the appetite for contestation may be diminished.
Last, someone like Ntuli appears to have won some mileage with his measured approach and emphasis on a future where the ANC becomes a people’s movement rather than a sectarian enclave of tribalists, corrupt individuals and the like.
Melikaya Rubushe used to teach industrial sociology at Rhodes University's East London
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