Be afraid, ANC ...very afraid

The ANC's leadership shenanigans have not only tarnished the image of the party in the eyes of voters, they have made the age-old appeals to liberation struggle sympathies sound incongruous and anachronistic, says the writer. Picture: @MyANC

The ANC's leadership shenanigans have not only tarnished the image of the party in the eyes of voters, they have made the age-old appeals to liberation struggle sympathies sound incongruous and anachronistic, says the writer. Picture: @MyANC

Published May 1, 2016

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If I were a member of the ANC I would be afraid before the August local government elections, writes Xolela Mangcu

Johannesburg - If I were a member of the ANC I would be afraid before the August local government elections. I mean, very afraid. Just compare the fiasco that surrounded the ANC’s poorly attended rally in Port Elizabeth with the well-oiled DA rallies in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Who ever would have thought the party of Vuyisile Mini, Oom Gov (Govan Mbeki) and Oom Ray (Raymond Mhlaba) would struggle to fill a stadium and have to transport ANC supporters from across the country to make up for the lack of enthusiasm?

Contrast the ANC’s shambolic rally in Port Elizabeth with the sea of blue T-shirts as black DA supporters marched through Joburg to attend the launch of their party’s election manifesto.

The ANC’s leadership shenanigans have not only tarnished the image of the party in the eyes of voters, they have made the age-old appeals to liberation struggle sympathies sound incongruous and anachronistic.

At the best of times liberation movements have difficulty holding on to power because of two drivers of change, neither of which a party can do anything about, other than bend to their dictates.

The first is demography. Younger people watch in disbelief as the leaders of the ruling party aggrandise themselves with state resources while they go without education and jobs. Is it any wonder that they flock to the DA. The president has four palatial homes: Genadenda andTuynhuys in Cape Town; Mahlambandhlovu in Pretoria; and the R250-million boondoggle at Nkandla.

Black people did not invent this practice, nor are we obliged to continue the vulgarity. Contrast this opulence with the fact that the US president has to make do with the White House, the British prime minister with No 10 Downing Street and the French president with the Elysee Palace. You could be forgiven for thinking we were four times richer.

Perhaps the ANC could take a leaf from the great Julius Nyerere. Here is how a New York Times reporter described his style: “In contrast to many African leaders who often raced through their capitals in motorcades with phalanxes of motorcycle outriders, he moved around non-salaried in his old car with just his driver, who stopped for red lights ... On retirement he went to live in his childhood home in Butima. Most important, Tanzanians remember him fondly for never stealing from them.”

If the ANC thinks the thousands of young people marching through the streets in those blue T-shirts have a false consciousness or have been bought off by white people, it is in for the shock of its life.

It is sheer tone deafness to expect the concerns of young people in 2016 to mirror those of the septuagenarians who run the party. The mere fact that the ANC was blind-sided by students last year is proof of just how out of touch it is with the aspirations and anxieties of young black South Africans.

The second reason the ANC has to be concerned is the role of cities in transforming political cultures. It is not a fluke that the 1968 student revolts took place in major cities such as Madrid, Mexico City, Tokyo and Chicago. Globally those revolts marked the end of an era and the beginning of another - what some have dubbed a transition from a modern to post-modern era.

While I don’t buy into that separation, it speaks of a desire to break free of the clutches of an earlier era, intellectually, culturally and politically.

This post-modern sensibility goes against the demand for loyalty in political parties. Political parties were established to put the brakes on democratic autonomy, just in case the hoi polloi should seek to run away with the family silver.

If you don’t believe me just take a look at the manner in which the Republication Party is scrambling to stop Donald Trump from winning the party’s primary election for president. They know they cannot win with him at the helm of their party. The ANC could take a lesson from that as it ponders its future under Jacob Zuma.

Cities are, as British writer Jonathan Raban put it, “plastic by nature”, allowing us to bring our “subjective individualism” into their maelstrom of salvation and degradation, innovation and violence, personal freedom and group exploitation. Cities become theatres of struggle among all these contending forces, and the outcomes are not always predictable.

Those of us who participated in the Struggle take joy in thinking we liberated the country. But the victory belongs to the cities. The more the apartheid government sought to contain them, the more they overflowed with humanity, complicating the story for everyone involved because of their irreducible plurality.

This is not to say we are moving towards a hyper-plural, post-ideological age. It is simply to say post-modern plurality introduces not only new issues for young people but a different way of doing politics, mediated by social media and other extra-party political sources of influence, such as universities.

The future belongs to those parties that master the political technologies that such plurality demands. This is not the hyper-plurality of political parties that end up with one or no seat in parliament. I am talking about political parties that are able to construct what Antonio Gramsci called the “popular will” among a range of divergent interests. Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party in the US is made up of like-minded people. Black folk coexist with the racists.

If South Africa is to move to a two-party state, two political moves would have to happen.

First, a new generation would enter the ANC and transform it from within.This would happen only if the ANC had a new leadership with the magnanimity to bring back into the fold those such as Bantu Holomisa, Julius Malema and Mosiuoa Lekota.

The second would be for black people to enter the DA in droves.

If you think about it, we work in predominantly white institutions, we do not leave universities because we have to endure the racist offerings of our colleagues under the cloak of scholarship. We take the blows, wince a little, and forge ahead.

We do not walk away from the Springboks and the Proteas because of the racism in sport, but seek to transform them to better reflect the demographics of the country and the values of equality enshrined in the constitution.

Advocates for Transformation have not left the Bar because white attorneys (and President Jacob Zuma) continually brief white advocates.

Perhaps black people can do the same with the DA. This would mean they would have to stop behaving like they are the minority. White people constitute only 8 percent of the population. So clearly the future of the DA is black.

It would require a thick skin to make and survive the first move, just as it would require the courage of moral conviction to confront the corruption in the ANC.

Either way, the country would win.

* Mangcu is a professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town.

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

The Sunday Independent

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