Quinton Mtyala
Don’t expect any fireworks when the ANC’s National General Council convenes this weekend in Midrand – it might just end up being a tepid affair when compared with previous years.
The NGC, as it is popularly known, is the ANC’s mid-term review of the party’s policy implementation and usually takes place a few years after an elective conference.
Five years ago at the Durban Exhibition Centre, Julius Malema and his lieutenants in the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) stormed the stage during a closed discussion when their call for the nationalisation of mines was rejected by delegates. This time around, there won’t be much trouble.
Two years after that incident, Malema was eventually expelled from the ANC. The party’s youth league has been whipped into line since Malema’s expulsion, and this was confirmed by the recent election of its new executive, led by president Collen Maine, who is believed to have the backing of the so-called “Premier League”.
The “Premier League”, consisting of Free State Premier Ace Magashule, North West Premier Supra Mahumapelo and Mpumalanga Premier David Mabuza, is also believed to have been crucial in seeing to it that Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini beat Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga to lead the ANC Women’s League.
In 2005, following his sacking as South Africa’s deputy president over the Schabir Shaik corruption trial, supporters of Jacob Zuma used the party’s National General Council as a springboard, when most delegates reaffirmed him as the party’s deputy president.
Two years later he would triumph at the party’s Polokwane conference.
Early indications that the “Premier League” would agitate for a third term for Zuma as president of the ANC seem to have died down, with some arguing (as they did at the party’s Polokwane conference in 2007) that having a different president of South Africa to that of the ANC would create “two centres of power”.
This weekend, 3 000 delegates, including those from Cosatu and the SACP, will discuss various topics and gauge government’s implementation of the resolutions it adopted at Manguang in December 2012.
While South Africa’s economic growth has been anaemic since the global slowdown in 2008, the past year’s energy crisis has worsened the country’s prospects of reaching the required 5 percent gross domestic product, which would see sustained job growth.
In its discussion documents, the ANC also acknowledged that state-owned enterprises like Eskom and South African Airways were deeply troubled, and have made suggestions about how these entities should be led, including the appointment of competent board members and executives.
South Africa’s widening income gap, nationalisation and how an ANC government deals with a media it views as hostile will be some of the issues over which the party’s delegates will deliberate.
In its discussion documents, released in August, the ANC expressed its unhappiness with the current system by which the media is held accountable, through the Press Ombudsman and the Press Council.
While the ANC’s next elective conference is only two years away, delegates have been encouraged not to engage in a succession debate over who would likely succeed Zuma as president of the party, and in all likelihood South Africa, should the ANC retain its majority at the next elections in 2019.
In the Western Cape, the provincial ANC resolved that it wanted to see a reduction in the number of provinces, performance assessments for its councillors, and that 30 percent of fishing quotas be handed to subsistence fisherfolk.
While the Western Cape ANC as a collective said it wanted to see a reduction in the provinces, one of the party’s leaders agreed that the idea would in all likelihood face opposition at the National General Council due to the fact that provincial patronage networks were so well entrenched, with very few ANC leaders wanting to concede their powers.
Besides that opposition, a change in South Africa’s boundaries would require a two-thirds majority in Parliament for the constitution to be changed, as well as each legislature agreeing to the amendment – a near impossibility considering that the ANC neither has a two-thirds majority in Parliament, nor control of the Western Cape.