MOLIFI TSHABALALA
Johannesburg - At its 54th National Conference, the ANC resolved to renew itself and forge unity.
The latter would enhance its electoral appeal.
The ANC has been on an electoral decline since 2009, declining from 69.7% (a two-thirds majority) to 57.5% over the past three electoral cycles. It declined further to below 50% in the 2021 local government election (LGE).
If the governing party fails to renew itself and forge unity, it would lose its grip on state power, thus rendering the country ‘ungovernable’, warned its former president Thabo Mbeki.
He is right on two accounts.
First, the ANC is still a dominant party by a huge percentage.
Although a single-party dominant system can be undesirable, especially in a multi-party democracy, it does bring a great deal of political stability, which is indispensable for sustainable development.
Second, although the opposition parties do sing from the same hymn sheet on grand corruption, load shedding, and other equally-pressing national issues, they are not well-co-ordinated, largely owing to DA leader John Steenhuisen’s poor, uncharismatic leadership.
As an opposition leader, he bears more responsibility to forge unity and co-ordinate the opposition parties in pursuit of common national interests.
He has no respect for small parties.
Yet they hold significant sway on a coalition government as kingmakers.
For example, he had implored the electorate to not vote for them in the 2021 LGE. An ideological divide between the DA and the EFF is too wide. Therefore, the centre will not hold in a power-sharing arrangement in which the second- and the third-largest parties respectively are on either extreme side of the ideological divide.
Adding insult to injury, they are in undeclared alliances with two main ANC factions. The DA is in the alliance with a majority faction, led by ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa, whereas the EFF is in the alliance with a minority faction, led by former ANC president Jacob Zuma.
The DA, for example, does not support an EFF-led multi-pronged strategy by eight opposition parties to hold Ramaphosa to account for the Phala Phala farm saga.
Opting rather to afford a Parliamentary inquiry into the matter to first run its course, the official opposition party is wary that Ramaphosa's removal may advance the interests of the Zuma faction.
Incidentally, despite his expulsion from the governing party over a decade ago, EFF leader Julius Malema is still inextricably embedded in intra-ANC factional conflicts and activities. He even seeks to dictate to the ANC whom it should elect as its president to secure a coalition partnership with his party in 2024, as it is generally believed that the ANC will finally lose its grip on state power.
Despite their ideological distance, the EFF had thrown its weight behind the DA-led coalition governments in Ekurhuleni, Joburg, and Tshwane metropolitan municipalities through a voluntary confidence-and-supply, an informal power-sharing arrangement, following the 2021 LGE.
This it did strategically to dislodge the ANC. It will most likely do the same in the national sphere of government if the ANC fails to muster an outright majority.
Thereafter, in cahoots with the ANC and its allies, of course, the left-wing party will turn the heat on a power-sharing government, seeking to foist its non-negotiable policies, chief among which expropriating land without compensation and nationalising the Reserve Bank, on it. The DA, which advocates for secure property rights, in particular, would not capitulate to any of its policy demands, thus collapsing the DA-led coalition government, as the country lacks a legislative framework to manage power-sharing arrangements.
It happened in Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB) metropolitan municipality, where the EFF sought to cajole the DA into voting for its motion in the national legislature to expropriate land without compensation. Henceforth, the municipality has had a great deal of political instability, which impinges on basic service delivery, including water, a basic human right.
Although Mbeki contends that the ANC “is too big to fail,” he acknowledges that it is grappling with a myriad of challenges, including a “cult of personality,” a leadership crisis, and a “habit of telling lies” as well as factionalism. Intertwined with neo-patrimonialism, the latter is the root of the ANC's electoral decline. For example, corruption is one of the three main neo-patrimonial facets.
In all fairness to the ANC, no party is immune from factionalism. Even single-issue parties do fragment into factions because a conflict can stem from major disagreements over a policy, a position, a strategy, or their combination in pursuit of a particular objective.
Although the ANC is correctable, it cannot self-correct. Therefore, it requires an external correction. To begin with, the party does not understand the nature of its all-encompassing problem, namely factionalism, not to mention that it is inextricably intertwined with neo-patrimonialism, nor its factional type.
In its constitution, for example, the governing party calls on its members to defeat factionalism. Yet factionalism does not only have centrifugal effects; it also has centripetal effects, including diversity, which also enhances the party’s electoral appeal. Once an ideologically heterogeneous party, such as the ANC, defeats factionalism, it would cease to exist.
Towards the watershed 52nd ANC National Conference, its two main ideological factions had mutated into leadership factions, known as the Mbeki and Zuma factions. Hence, its members are more preoccupied with leadership changes for self-enrichment of course than party policies, not to mention whether the Ramaphosa faction implement them or not. This has, therefore, given rise to the notion that “the ANC has the best policies, but the problem lies with a failure to implement them.”
Nevertheless, from an external correction perspective, the ANC should turn the forthcoming 55th national conference into a national consultative conference and then take stock of its state of affairs to chart a way forward. In particular, it should discuss how corruption has distracted it from a national democratic revolution (NDR). This, however, would require it to first discuss factionalism from a neo-patrimonial perspective.
Considering its factional type, a contested leadership change will not arrest the ANC's electoral decline, not by a long shot. According to Cyril Ramaphosa, the party is at its lowest ebb since 1994.
If the Ramaphosa faction retains party dominance, the ANC would become a shell organisation. The Zuma faction is unlikely to defect from the host party and form a breakaway party, as the majority of its prominent members, including the patron-in-chief, are either charged with or implicated in allegations of corruption, fraud, and state capture.
Zuma and many among his clients who have been criminally charged or implicated in the foregoing allegations and others know very well that their prospects of being either granted paroles or avoiding prosecutions are very slim outside the ANC. Incidentally, none of the ANC's breakaway parties has ever come close to dislodging it.
In contrast, if the Zuma faction regains party dominance, many within the Ramaphosa faction are most likely to defect from the ANC and establish its third breakaway party since the 52nd national conference. Either outcome of a contested leadership change will further impinge on the party's electoral dominance.
The ANC reached its lowest ebb under his presidency, yet Ramaphosa will vie for a second term if pronouncements by his clients are anything to go by. The reality is that, apart from a failure to grow the economy and fight corruption, he has lost a great deal of political legitimacy over a veil of secrecies that shrouds his CR17 Campaign and the Phala Phala saga.
As a result, it would be arduous for the ANC to secure coalition partners with him at the helm over the latter in particular.
Having turned the 55th national conference into the national consultative conference, the ANC should appoint Mbeki as the party president to lead its renewal and unity, which requires ideological coherence, organisational discipline, strong leadership, and, above all, an elitist pact (as the party’s fragmentation is born out of elitist interests) to name but a few, while some lead the country.
Mbeki, whose appointment would serve as a factional buffer, had been groomed from an early age as part of an external mission to lead the party in a liberated South Africa.
He understands the party’s values, principles, and historical mission.
In 1989, while recuperating from a stroke in London, Britain, ‘OR’, as the late Oliver Tambo was fondly called by his initials (Oliver Reginald), informally passed on a leadership baton to him.
“He then communicated another, the most challenging since I first met him in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) 27 years earlier: look after the ANC and make sure we succeed: You will know what needs to be done,” wrote Mbeki, who served as OR’s political secretary, in the preface of “Oliver Tambo Remembered”.
Most importantly, Mbeki should be mandated to groom a new crop of future ANC leaders and pass on a leadership baton to it.
Along with Ramaphosa, the majority, if not all, of those who have already raised their hands for ANC presidency and deputy presidency have not been brought up in the ANC tradition.
Molifi Tshabalala is a political writer.