ANC missed another opportunity

President Jacob Zuma addresses supporters at Orlando Stadium. The January 8 statement failed to capture the sense of kairos and crisis the movement and the country are facing at this time, says the writer. Picture: Bhekikhaya Mabaso/The Star

President Jacob Zuma addresses supporters at Orlando Stadium. The January 8 statement failed to capture the sense of kairos and crisis the movement and the country are facing at this time, says the writer. Picture: Bhekikhaya Mabaso/The Star

Published Jan 22, 2017

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It's time for South Africans to realise they're on their own - and take back their future, writes Tinyiko Maluleke.

In the 1970s the Black Consciousness (BC) movement coined the slogan “black man (sic), you are on your own”. Unlike the slogan of the newly installed US President, Donald Trump “Make America great again”, which seems to rally Americans to the cause of bringing back some imagined past of glory, the BC slogan was designed to inspire the imagination of a better future.

The slogan disabused all South Africans, especially black people, of any lingering thoughts that the apartheid government and the white liberal establishment ever had their best interests at heart. It was a slogan that invited the oppressed to give up on ever obtaining the approval or permission of their oppressors in order to engage in resistance.

As Bob Marley sang in his Redemption Song, the downtrodden had woken up to the realisation that, “none but ourselves can free our minds”.

Forty years later, South Africans seem to have come full circle, back to the “on your own” moment, and back to the point where Steve Biko had taken them, before he was murdered in police custody, on September 12, 1977.

With the ANC currently floundering under the weight of Nkandla, state capture, Sars wars, factionalism, the rot within several state-owned enterprises and the spectre of a government at war with itself, South Africans are slowly beginning to realise that they may be on their own.

The quadruple national challenges with which the ANC seems unable to deal - namely, poverty, unemployment, inequality and corruption - are at the heart of the social upheavals that are exploding all over the land.

The party seems to have run out of ideas as to how to reinvigorate the economy.

No doubt, the ANC is still politically formidable but, if the 2016 local elections are anything to go by, the party is also losing its emotional hold on the populace.

With 2017 being the consultative and electoral conference year, the ANC is likely to become even more engrossed with succession politics and the issues of its own self-preservation.

Little or no time and space will remain for dealing with the ordinary challenges faced by South Africans - the poverty that grinds, #FeesMustFall and all it signifies, racism, violence and the culture of rape, to name a few.

As the movement continues to yield the moral high ground, as it focuses on its own fumbles and stumbles, as it desperately seeks to recalibrate its policies, as it plunges deeper into the messy process of choosing its next set of ANC leaders, as its own institutions deteriorate even as some of its prominent members and benefactors participate in the weakening of some state institutions, many South Africans will begin to feel, for sure, that they are on their own.

Today, many are caught between the fixing of the ANC and the fixing of the country. Not so long ago, this very formulation of the South African political condition was unimaginable, if only because the former could not be conceived of without the latter.

Indeed, many still believe, with reason, that the country’s woes cannot be fixed without fixing the foibles of the ANC. In reality though, owing to its repeated squandering of opportunities, election after election, the ANC is increasingly beginning to look like a dispensable means towards a far greater end; that end being a fully liberated and prosperous country.

The effort by some ANC veterans to bring the party back to its historic values must be lauded and encouraged. After all, this is the organisation that has, for more than a century, inspired generations of heroic thinkers, selfless leaders and courageous volunteers, including many who never signed up as members. In this sense, the ANC has been a trade union, a resistance army, a cultural organisation, a school, a church and a bubbling fountain of inspiration.

For over a century, South Africans have deferred to the 105-year-old ANC. They have invested their hopes, planted their dreams, staked their future and hedged their life bets upon this glorious movement of the people. But we are fast approaching a point when we are beginning to have that niggling doubt as to whether the current effort of ANC veterans is not tantamount to looking for the living among the dying.

“Until the 1990s, the ANC’s January 8th anniversary statement was a very important day in the calendar for very many people.” With these words, respected historian Raymond Suttner opens his reflective opinion piece triggered by the most recent January 8 anniversary held at Orlando Stadium. Not that the 2017 January 8 statement does not say the right things. Not that the stadium was not packed. Not that the spirits were low. The moment was inspirational.

Even a cursory glance at the sub-headings of the full statement will show that the statement includes all the correct topics, touches on all the relevant themes, all the historic tasks of the movement are there and all great icons of the movement are invoked: Tambo, unity, prosperity, the working class, non-racialism, non-sexism.

And, yet, the statement fails to capture the sense of kairos and crisis the movement and the country are facing at this time.

So we wonder if the 2017 consultative and elective conferences of the ANC will become another missed opportunity for the movement and for the country. How many more opportunities can the ANC afford to squander?

Already the succession debate is off to a faction-ridden start. Slates are already circulating. The debate so far has largely been about who is entitled to run for the office of president of the ANC rather than who has what it takes to re-establish the ANC as the leader of society it once was.

One would think the situation described above would be a glorious opportunity for the opposition parties to step in and step up. But the opposition parties have, so far, not managed to move into the gap by providing a viable alternative vision for the country.

Essentially, each of our three biggest political parties merely promise to improve on ANC policies, offering no distinguishing policies of their own.

Between the populism of the EFF and an official opposition battling to emerge out of its historical racial identity, South Africans have every reason to increasingly feel leaderless.

The precarious coalition governments, cobbled together at the instruction of the electorate after the 2016 local elections, could implode at any time - leaving South Africans on their own.

Given the set of circumstances we have summarised above, it does seem necessary to re-invoke and paraphrase the BC slogan and issue the warning that says: “South Africans, you are on your own”.

The time has come for South Africans to turn down the volume of deference to political parties. It is time for South Africans to take back their future.

* Maluleke is a professor at the University of Pretoria and an extraordinary professor at the University of South Africa. He writes in his personal capacity. Twitter handle - @ProfTinyiko.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

The Sunday Independent

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