The drubbing the ANC has taken in local elections has caused consternation at the feeding trough, writes William Saunderson-Meyer.
It’s one of the anomalies of many of the modern Western democracies. Their political parties are not at all tolerant of internal differences of opinion.
It’s about “singing from the same hymn sheet”, as the leaders of secular Britain persist in describing it. And not being “on message” about the inner circle’s unfolding policy positions is a quick route to being booted from party power structures.
The reason for such authoritarianism is that controlling elites, certainly in the Anglophone democracies, have electorates that are highly intolerant of governments which do not deliver a clear, consistent message. So, too, are economic markets.
Endemic internal dissent is seen not as an admirable tolerance of disparate points of views, but weakness of leadership. A party or government which cannot quell stirrings in the ranks is soon confronted with insurrection, to be followed by electoral rejection. Ask Britain’s Labour Party, both immediately before and after the stewardship of Tony Blair.
The ANC government, rather endearingly for the anarchist that lurks in me, has been completely different from these examples of the imperative for unity and coherence. But nevertheless electorally successful for 22 years, to boot.
Despite its self-congratulatory moniker of “Africa’s oldest liberation movement”, with all the military connotations of discipline and order, the reality is quite different. Partly because of being a broad church of workers, communists and nationalists, it was historically compelled to be intellectually flexible - to allow debate, to tolerate differences, to broker ideological compromises.
For all the propaganda of “disciplined cadres” marching in lockstep towards the great national democratic revolution, ordinary ANC members were generally free to challenge their leaders, whether it be at branch meetings or congresses. The expectation, until the elevation of the notoriously thin-skinned Thabo Mbeki to the presidency, was that the leadership would suck it up as part of the socialist mantra of brotherhood and equality.
It was Mbeki’s intolerance of ANC opinions other than his own which led to his recall. At which point we became saddled with the intellectually incoherent but tactically accomplished Jacob Zuma, who somehow managed to camouflage his real presidential objectives - staying out of jail and in the money - as a welcome laissez-faire leadership ethos.
Laissez-faire relatively quickly became licence. On occasion a minister would publicly announce legislation, only to have a colleague just as publicly repudiate the need for it. Laws were drafted without sufficient thought, passed in haste, and then - when reality set in - either remained unsigned or were sent back for rewriting.
The economy became becalmed, while the tenderpreneurs and Zuma’s cronies seemingly got an “open sesame” to state resources and even, it is claimed, the power to appoint and dismiss ministers.
Matters may now have reached some kind of a tipping point. The drubbing the ANC has taken in local elections has caused consternation at the feeding trough. The 2019 general election looms. The economy is tanking. Dissent within the party and on the township streets is at an all time high.
From the way ministers publicly slag one another off, it is difficult to believe they are from the same government. And, of course, in a sense they aren’t. While the ANC hasn’t split, it is divided into fiercely warring camps.
There’s a Zuma-protected alliance of political pirates set on seizing the commanding heights of the economy, not to transform them, but to drain them. Arrayed against the pirates is a beleaguered “old-ANC” - with Pravin Gordhan as lightning rod, but as yet without any leader of note willing to venture a head above the bulwarks - that claims to be committed, however much cynics may snigger, to building a modern, developmental economy based on social justice.
Through the increasing chaos and confusion, Zuma retains a cherubic smile and an inscrutable countenance. It’s left to Deputy-President Cyril Ramaphosa to warn of a party at war with itself and for ANC general-secretary Gwede Mantashe to lambaste the various factions for their “ill-discipline” and for “hurting the economy”.
Whatever the political lessons from other democracies, whatever the warnings of his colleagues, Zuma does not seem overly concerned. This week he was at the SA Development Community Summit in Swaziland. Although, judging from his faintly risque banter with fellow heads of state about the bare-breasted maidens dancing for them - “I kept telling them to just look;¦ they were hoping to get closer;” - his mind was on other matters. Wife No 9, perhaps?
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
** Saunderson-Meyer’s Jaundiced Eye column appears in Independent Media titles every Saturday. Follow WSM on Twitter: @TheJaundicedEye
Weekend Argus