To adapt WB Yeats’s poem, pure anarchy was loosed upon the party as the red-eyed comrades were full of scary intensity. The centre clearly is not holding.
It was at the University of Limpopo four years ago that an acrimonious contest for power corroded the last jot of discipline and the democratic ethos germinated by the ANC’s founding fathers almost 100 years ago.
The seeds of intolerance and destructive behaviour were planted here in December 2007, when Jacob Zuma defeated Thabo Mbeki as party leader. Now Zuma, who wants a second term next year, is at loggerheads with some of his nasty allies-turned-rivals in Limpopo.
Mbeki’s leadership style ignited a revolt – which was captured by the purveyors of anarchic behaviour – and things have never been the same.
One delegate, Sello Lediga, described the state of affairs as “an entrenched culture”.
After the Polokwane victory in 2007, Zuma and his new leadership – including his deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe – did little to censure the chaos that has now become a permanent feature of ANC conferences. It suited them then.
Little did they know they would come face to face with the haunting apparition of the second Polokwane disorder when Zuma’s erstwhile friend, Cassel Mathale – the beleaguered premier – contested power with Joe Phaahla, the Deputy Arts Minister. A wounded Mathale won.
Their supporters outdid each other in displaying the crudest form of ill discipline at the opening of the seventh conference of the ANC in Limpopo on Saturday.
Their behaviour shocked Motlanthe. He had to “plead” with the mob not to interrupt his speech. It was a sad spectacle.
The tribal fissures, the insults, the hatred, the bitterness and the dreadful enmity characterised the atmosphere in the university’s Tiro Hall as factions rivalled each other for power at all costs.
Onkgopotse Tiro, a student revolutionary who shook the university in the 1970s, and Sefako Makgatho, the second ANC president who hailed from this city, must be turning in their graves.
It appeared as if the delegates took the phrase “succession battle” too literally.
It was the loudest shouters and not the deepest thinkers who wielded raw power. The creativity in composing the most offensive and odious lyrics, and not innovative ideas, won the conference.
The expletives, vulgarities and rudeness – and not smartness and vision – were attributes of a true cadre on the day.
The award for the best and loudest heckling belonged to Phaahla’s supporters, while the trophy for the most artistic but crudest lyrics went to Mathale’s lot.
Surely, some of those finger-pointing, loud-mouthed hecklers and the so-called comrades who loudly sang, “You put a shower in office, it will rape our women,” a distasteful reference to Zuma’s rape case, resembled nothing of men and women who met in Mangaung in 1912 to form one of Africa’s most glorious movements.
In what could be described as a comical irony of ironies, Julius Malema’s “Shoot the Boer” song that landed him in court was remixed to “Shoot the Shower”.
A senior ANC leader privately gloated that the unpalatable slogans against Zuma were a reaction to other equally offensive songs sung in KwaZulu-Natal against Malema.
He was proud of the tit-for-tat tosh as the party withered away like the pot plants that decorated the conference stage.
If this leader, who was once a staunch Zuma ally, could find mocking his president’s moral and sexual misjudgements amusing, then the ANC has lost the plot.
The tensions and bitterness were written all over these leaders’ faces.
Limpopo spokesman and Finance MEC David Masondo and Co-operative Governance Minister Richard Baloyi sat glowering next to each other without exchanging any niceties. No chit-chat.
While the pensive Masondo stared into space, Baloyi indifferently chewed a piece of biltong. The atmosphere was toxically tense.
Speakers were heckled, differences were dealt with through verbal abuse and rivals were shown the rolling finger substitution sign, a symbol of regime change. By the way, this unruly posture was also the hallmark of the 2007 conference.
The hecklers mingled with thugs. Provincial ANC administrator Clifford Mohloana hit a journalist with a brick, apparently after being caught red-handed printing dodgy name tags. He was arrested and released on warning.
Mohloana’s actions – if it’s true that he was fabricating ghost delegates – means winning by any means necessary is becoming the chilling norm.
This is worrying as the exercise, accounting and transfer of power are slowly but disturbingly corroding internal party democracy. If not arrested, this phenomenon could be emulated in the country’s democratic processes.
The rift and the climate were precipitated by what is called slates – a divisive mechanism of splitting delegates according to their loyalty to the preferred leader.
On Saturday, Motlanthe tried bravely to warn the delegates against the consequences of slates, calling for party renewal.
Ironically, both Motlanthe and Zuma came to power through a slate.
But he cautioned against “the emergence of slates within our organisational culture and processes (that) represent the worst form of corruption of the spirit, character and vision of the organisation”.
Motlanthe said, soon after the Polokwane 2007 conference, that the slates would be investigated. Unfortunately, nothing happened.
But he warned the Limpopo delegates last weekend that slates paralysed the party and government, as factions wasted energy plotting against and punishing each other.
“Part of punishing such individuals is removing them from work or depriving them of opportunities irrespective of their ability to excel in their duties, and act in a manner which is likely to undermine transformation and development,” he counselled the delegates, adding that “in this divided and poisoned landscape, comrades even undermine each other’s work and thus weaken the collective”.
As Motlanthe spoke, there was silence for the first time in the conference hall – except occasional applause when factions agreed with some of his points.
But soon after Motlanthe’s speech, ANC Youth League chairman Frans Moswane leapt to snatch the microphone and announced that “those who support Mathale should remain in the hall”.
And other speakers who spoke after Motlanthe suffered the indignity of being shouted down, with their faint voices drowned by the humiliating reverberation of “boooooooooo!!” from the rival faction. - Political Bureau