“Collective leadership” doesn’t cut it anymore as many ANC supporters want Jacob Zuma out, says Eusebius McKaiser.
Johannesburg - The ANC is soon going to have to ditch the romance of collective leadership. There’s a remarkable and healthy persistence beginning to creep in among voters: distinguishing between the ANC as an organisation, and individual leaders of the ANC like president Jacob Zuma.
The possible implications are interesting.
For several weeks now, for example, I have fielded countless calls from self-proclaimed ANC supporters who call into the radio show I host.
And a blunt, dominant view has been coming through, “I love the ANC but JZ must go!”.
Some insist, to be clear, they will still vote ANC next year.
But a good many of these ANC supporters have a more threatening message, “I will no longer vote for the ANC for so long as JZ is the leader!”.
Let’s qualify this: radio show’s callers do not amount to peer-reviewed academic research about voter sentiment. Anecdote is anecdote.
But I think these sentiments are fascinating, nevertheless.
These are overwhelmingly black supporters, supporters who love the country and the ANC as a political outfit.
And they are calling into a safe radio space, in my view, not one designed to generate deliberate contrarian views.
They are not the gripes of opposition party supporters on a conservative Afrikaans community station, say, if such exists.
So it would be lazy to ignore these radio conversations as mere anecdote.
With these qualifications out the way, what should the ANC make of this?
First, just because our electoral system does not distinguish between parties and individuals does not mean voters do not.
But what many of us assumed for too long – myself included – is that a voter’s love for a party is always stronger than their hatred of individual leaders in that party.
Some 20 years into democracy, I do not think we can hold this assumption so casually, so surely any more.
The willingness of a voter to tell me they are fed up with the ANC because, and only because, the ANC is insisting on a second Zuma term, shows a willingness to punish a much-loved party brand in order to express disapproval of the current leader.
And so you will not get away with the revolutionary idea of “collective leadership”.
Many voters now want a chief executive for SA Inc they can trust. It’s not good enough to say a weak chief executive has a good team assembled around him or her.
The ANC can, therefore, not afford to ignore this growing disappointment with Zuma’s leadership. It surely will cost them.
But there is no way of quantifying the voting impact of just this negative sentiment towards JZ.
The result is that the party can pretend there is no problem or that the problem is negligible.
But that would be to bury your political head in the sand. It’s all too late for 2014 of course. The party must now fake confidence in the choice of Zuma as a leader beyond 2014.
But there is a bigger issue here. It really is high time the ANC opened up leadership contests. And, yes, we hate comparisons with First World countries, but imagine American-style, internal leadership contests to determine the ANC presidential candidate? Cyril Ramaphosa, for example, became deputy president of the ANC without uttering a word publicly. Why on earth is he fit for that position? It’s bizarre.
Equally, both Kgalema Motlanthe and Zuma pretended, comically, not to have presidential ambition ahead of Bloemfontein last year. There is nothing cute about this coy behaviour. It promotes a political culture of secrecy, rather than healthy, open contestation for leadership positions.
The result? No one is allowed, come election time, to openly ask whether the incumbent Jacob Zuma deserves a second term. The ANC loses out, and the country.
But voters of course have the power. And, yes, there won’t be an option that says “I vote ANC but not JZ”, but the magnitude of the ANC’s decline next year will be affected by this frustration. The ANC must reform or steadily decline. Time will tell.
* McKaiser is the host of Power Talk With Eusebius McKaiser on Power 98.7, weekdays 9am to noon.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
The Star