Julius Malema’s attack on ANC policies at the opening of the ANC Youth League’s 24th national congress this week struck at the very core of the ruling party, setting the stage for a bruising battle in the run-up to the 2012 conference over the future direction of the party.
The ANC celebrates its centenary next year, which it will cap with its 53rd conference in Mangaung, Free State, where it is to elect new leadership as well as adopt new policies.
Borrowing from Hugo Chavez and other populists, Malema built his narrative this week on three pillars: he tapped into and stoked the anger and feelings of social despair among the black majority; framed poverty as a function of conflict between the powerful elite (white people in this case) and the majority (poor, landless black people who own very little of the economy); and then presented the youth league, if not himself, as capable of radically transforming the lives of the poor.
In his political report, which he delivered with President Jacob Zuma sitting on the podium, Malema criticised the politics of accommodation and social harmony, which has been a defining feature of the ruling party since its unbanning in 1990, if not longer.
He painted a stark picture of South Africa’s socio-economic progress since 1994 and then called for bold leadership and radical policies if the country’s apartheid legacies are to be eliminated.
Malema’s political report sharply contrasts with that of the ruling party as outlined in its strategy and tactics document adopted at the 52nd annual conference in Polokwane, Limpopo, in 2007.
If the league succeeds in pushing its policy proposals through in Mangaung, they would radically transform the ANC into an African nationalist movement and set it on a collision course with investors.
Interestingly, the youth league’s stance is a replay of the policy platform of the youth league of the 1940s, which, according to a brief history of the ANC on the ruling party’s website, based its ideas on African nationalism – a belief that Africans would be freed only by their own efforts.
Malema made it clear on Thursday that minorities, especially white South Africans, were a lost cause for the ruling party.
He called on ANC members to increase the party’s support to more than 75 percent in the 2014 general election, a target he said would only be possible with increased support from black people and from Africans in particular.
“The rest are unlikely to vote for the ANC because they feel threatened by the aspirations of the Freedom Charter and they do not want to share in the country’s wealth, which are the key messages we will not betray,” Malema said.
He added: “In the struggle to emancipate our people, we should never live in dreamland and for a moment believe that those empowered and enriched by the murderous apartheid system will share in our vision to transform South Africa for the benefit of all.”
The ANC needed at least 75 percent electoral support because it must enact key radical transformation policies and legislations, he said. “For us to expropriate without compensation, we should change the constitution, so a greater majority is necessary.”
Malema’s stance challenges current ANC policy. While ANC analysis agrees with Malema that many in the white community still have to realise that the poverty and inequality spawned by apartheid are not in their long-term interest and that black people are as capable as anyone else to lead and exercise authority in all spheres of life, the ruling party’s position is more nuanced.
It qualifies its position by adding that unlike in the past, when antagonists across the apartheid divide were locked in mortal combat, “engagement around issues of transformation in a democracy forms part of legitimate discourse and electoral politics”.
“Those who continue to resist change within the constitutional framework are opponents in a democratic order.
“Their political and other organisations are legitimate expressions of a school of thought that should be challenged, but at the same time accepted as part of democratic engagement,” the Strategy and Tactics document says.
In addition, the ANC makes it its task “to persist in clarifying the long-term self-interest that the white community shares in ridding our society of the legacy of apartheid”.
Malema also called for a more open confrontation with the private sector, asking delegates to decide whether “we have men and women of courage in the Liberation Movement who are ready to confront white monopoly capital and imperialism and fearlessly fight for the ideals of the Freedom Charter”.
“Do we have courageous men and women who, 100 years after the existence of the ANC, will say we should confront the economic and neo-colonial subjugation of the black majority and Africans in the same way Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and their generation confronted apartheid repression in the face of death, torture and imprisonment?”
There was greater consensus in the ANC on the nationalisation of mines and other strategic sectors of the economy, Malema added, but “we are still to see if the leadership has the political will to confront mining capitalists”.
“It is the courage and the political will of the leadership which must inform the militant and radical resolutions and policy directions to be taken at the 53rd National Conference of the ANC in December 2012,” he said.
Accusing the ANC of managing the state on behalf of the private sector, Malema called on the ruling party to act on behalf of the class that did not own the means of production.
With his narrative of what ails South Africa and how to fix it, Malema has marked his policy territory – gunning for the soul of the ruling party before the 2012 conference.
What remains to be seen is whether Zuma and the leadership of the ANC have the stomach to defend the ANC. - Group Political Editor