With local government elections on the horizon, Western Cape ANC task team leader Membathisi Mdladlana has pretty much indicated that the party expects defeat at the polls, a first test for the new provincial ANC.
Mdladlana made a frank assessment of the many problems facing the party in the province and pointed out that infighting, factions, racial tensions and weak leadership were hurting its chances of securing the key regional coloured vote.
“We are not going to win the coloured community if we continue to conduct ourselves this way. It is a highly organised community,” Mdladlana said last week.
Coloured voters are a key constituency in the province and are seen as a swing vote.
The days when the ANC could sit back and assume it had a hold over voters in certain areas are long gone. Voters in what used to be ANC strongholds have spoken out against poor delivery of services.
Be it in Cape Town’s ward 44, which covers parts of Gugulethu and Heideveld, in Tembisa or in Govan Mbeki in Secunda, they have ignored history and voted for an alternative.
But the real contest will be in the Western Cape.
The ANC has never won outright in the province – even Nelson Mandela failed to capture a majority vote in the province, with the ANC netting a measly 33 percent when he was the party’s candidate for president in 1994, despite fielding a then highly popular and senior coloured leader, Allan Boesak, as the candidate for Western Cape premier.
In 1999 the ANC managed 42 percent of the vote and increased that to 45.3 percent in 2004. But things have since gone full circle for the party: in 2009 it registered its poorest performance of 31 percent.
The Western Cape is the only province where black Africans are not in a majority.
In several internal assessment documents since it lost power to the Democratic Alliance in April 2009, the ANC has admitted to alienating its coloured membership as well as the coloured community in general.
While Mdladlana this week pointed to tensions between “coloured people and people in Gugulethu, for instance”, at September’s national general council ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe said the party regretted its decision to recall former premier Ebrahim Rasool in 2008 and not taking steps against his enemies in the province.
Mantashe said the party was still paying for this and would learn from its mistake. “The decision alienated the coloured community from the ANC because the perception that the leadership took a biased decision was reinforced. This came on top of an already weak organisation in the province.
“Unfortunately, publicly these divisions were projected as mainly being about Africans and the coloureds,” said Mantashe.
Party insiders say that the leadership now wants a coloured person to lead the party in the province in a bid to turn around its fortunes – international relations deputy minister Marius Fransman is its choice.
But several ANC provincial leaders, who spoke to Independent Newspapers on condition of anonymity this week, have warned against the move, saying it had failed in the past.
A senior ANC figure pointed out that several coloured leaders in the province had led the ANC in a number of elections, with no luck.
“In 1994, we had Allan Boesak as a chairman of the ANC and premier candidate and Trevor Manuel as elections co-ordinator. We did dismally.”
The trend continued with the 1995 local government election under the leadership of another coloured cleric, Chris Nissen. Coloured Muslim leaders, the late Dullah Omar and Rasool, also didn’t secure the coloured vote.
“Even if you look at the New National Party and the Democratic Alliance, the ANC gained the most from them when coloured leaders Peter Marais and Gerald Morkel were in charge there.”
He instead warned of resentment which he said was building up in the black townships where people had consistently voted for the ANC. “Now they are not good enough to lead the party.”
The solution would be mobilising United Democratic Front (UDF) style, and not along racial lines, he suggested.
A former provincial leader said Mdladlana’s comments this week were defeatist. “Issues between the African and coloured people are there, but we should not make that a fait accompli.
“Africans and coloureds have worked together successfully in the past during UDF days and in underground structures. But we need a social audit on what happened in the Western Cape,” said the leader.
An internal document, dated July 2010, on how the party could win back support lost in coloured areas, speaks volumes about how desperate the ANC is.
It enlists Boesak among the leaders, activists and other influential people who could be approached to help in the campaign. Boesak campaigned against the ANC in the build-up to the 2009 elections as Cope’s premier candidate. He has since resigned from that party. He could not be reached this week for comment.
Political analyst Keith Gottschalk believes that the solution to the coloured question lies in the application of affirmative action policy.
“The ANC needs to be strategic in its policies. It should sift through some of its policies… they are contradicting the strategies to win the coloured voters.”
Gottschalk said the ANC’s approach put coloured people at a disadvantage when seeking jobs, compared with blacks.
andisiwe.makinana@inl. co.za