BIG READ: The bad comedy of cadre deployment

Has the ANC won the debate with the DA on cadre deployment? Since the comrades overturned the DA’s insistence on their records about the practice by demanding the same from the blue brigade, there seems to be less fire and brimstone from Cape Town. Also after the ruling party had drawn on experts for their opinion that cadre deployment is a good thing because a majority party’s people serving in an administration can better carry out policy.

Amid all the legal manoeuvring, everyone seemed to have forgotten the central concept: the cadre. What exactly is wrong with it? Isn’t this just another of the many rhetorical embellishments of the ANC, in aid of its posture as a revolutionary movement to the death, and therefore of little practical importance?

The best source for answers — an unexpected one for most people — remains someone who lived through the initial years of the ANC’s transition to armed struggle, the revolutionary of all revolutionaries, Che Guevara. Around 1965 he spied on them, drank with them and reported on them to Fidel Castro — and he was not impressed.

It was during one of the more obscure periods of his life, when he went to fight in the Congo under the orders of the later ruler of the remnants of Zaire, Laurent-Desiré Kabila, whose son Joseph would become the first president of the new Democratic Republic of Congo. It is so obscure that it takes up a mere eight pages in the brick of a biography by Jon Lee Anderson, Che: A Revolutionary Life, and falls conveniently in the time between Steven Soderbergh’s two films about him.

That was because, the Executive Outcomes types will be eager to tell you, Mike Hoare’s mercenaries chased Guevara and his Cuban task force across Lake Tanganyika with their tails between their legs.

Had [Che] Guevara lived long enough, he would have laughed out loud at the honourable ANC members in their city hall parliament calling themselves “comrades” while and yet living the good life through their clandestine businesses.

In preparation for this escapade, Guevara, whose many talents and interests included rugby, acting and mathematics, wore a disguise carefully prepared by the best makeup artists in Cuba to smuggle himself into the Congo and then announce his presence as a fait accompli. This was because Kabila did not want white people to fight with him, not only because of his racism, but because he saw them as less corruptible.

And so Guevara observed at his leisure the missions of the revolutionary movements that Tanzanian president and Uhuru legend Julius Nyerere had gathered in Dar es Salaam. About seven months later, Guevara was incognito there again, this time as a refugee from the Congo in the Cuban embassy to recover from his failure. There he wrote a book-length report to Castro, which appeared only in 1998 in Spanish and in 2000 in English as The African Dream.

Chaplinesque

The book caused quite a stir, not only because of the little-known aspect of his story at the time but because of Guevara’s beguiling sobriety about his own shortcomings, the objective perspective he maintains throughout, and the emotional ups and downs that hint at the restrained passion of the story. It leaves no doubt who is to blame for the fiasco: the murderously deceitful Kabila and his corrupt and incompetent forces.

In contrast, the Cubans were among Castro’s top soldiers and all black, except for one or two Guevara confidants. “Pan blancos” they called the Congolese: burnt white bread, afterwards just “the blacks”. Also “cosmonauts” because one Congolese officer liked to wear a motorcycle helmet with a leopard skin wrapped around it.

“Chaplinesque” was how Guevara described the parades they held “whenever a fly moves in the area ... a bad comedy” in which the officers “uttered shouts, stamped on the ground and did imposing about-turns, and the poor soldiers came and went, vanished and reappeared”.

With clenched jaws, he wrote about their reluctance to carry their own rations: hapani motocari (I’m not a truck), they would say. The local peasants were enlisted for this. Later they changed it to hapani cubana (I’m not Cuban). Trenches had to be dug by women.

Kabila was chosen as Guevara’s first attempt to export the model of the Cuban revolution because he had asked Castro for a huge amount of money. When he offered troops, Kabila snapped: no whites, only money. The Cubans sent black troops anyway, and after their excellent intelligence service began to pass on information from hotels all over the world about Kabila’s penchant for women and whiskey, money was sent for only operational purposes.

Instead of the Cubanisation of the Congo, all that had happened was the Congolisation of the Cubans, one commander remarked bitterly. Kabila never went to the front and seemed not to care that his fighters fled at the first sign of opposition or that they terrorised the locals.

Guevara saw the same kind of thing, the same variation on “Congolisation” in other freedom movements. He did not mention the ANC by name but his nickname for everyone in Dar es Salaam, “Freedom Fighters” (in quotation marks), was English and not French, Portuguese or Swahili.

Guevara recommended that Cuba send no more money. Kuba would simply turn itself into an ally of “Yankee imperialism”, because the money “allows the lords of the revolution to take holidays worthy of a prince and allows the freedom fighters to sacrifice and sell out their people ... Nothing is cheaper for imperialism than to drop a few thousand dollars on the table at a conference of liberation movements in Africa.” He added, “I have no doubt that if it does not already do this, it will in future.”

They were not on the front to fight the enemy but their own people. “The men led a camp life ... The ... People’s Liberation Army was ... a parasitic army; it did not work, did not train, did not fight, and demanded provisions and labour from the population, sometimes with extreme harshness. Such were the consequences of training students from petty-bourgeois milieux ... with all their burden of resentment and their urges to copy the colonialists.”

Domesticated revolutionaries

He writes about the students from “black Africa” returning from just six months of revolutionary training in Eastern Europe, Russia and China: “They brought back with them a great sense of their own importance, a highly developed conception of the duty to protect the cadre (meaning themselves) and a well-formed idea, clearly expressed in their demands, that the revolution owed them a lot for their period of study abroad and should somehow reward them now that they were sacrificing themselves to be with their comrades.

“Good education can do an extraordinary amount for someone with an awakening consciousness. But for this kind of pliable and domesticated revolutionary, all that developed during his months in a socialist country was the ambition to get a leadership position on the basis of his colossal knowledge — and ... a nostalgia for the good times spent abroad.”

In particular, he developed a contempt for political commissars. “Their activity was like that of sporadic loudspeakers; the men would assemble at a certain moment to hear the commissar ‘sound off’ on specific problems and were then left to their own devices. They looked after their own skin, and had better food and clothing than the rest of the troops. [He] is a veritable sponger off the revolution and could also be eliminated without any harm to it.”

And what is the commissar expectorating bile about? Guevara describes the Congolese as “ultra-sensitive because of past insults at the hands of settlers”. Add the words “racism” and Guevara has long foreseen anti-racist witch hunts using the “sporadic speakers” of social media. In fact, much of Guevara’s prognosis could have served as a forecast of the type of governance wielded by liberation movements attaining power.

Now, almost 60 years later, all of Africa looks different. People of great integrity have risen from the ranks of the ANC and have already left deep traces in SA’s history. But they are rarely more than individuals, and too many of them cling to the myth that the ANC was once a values-orientated, honourable organisation. The blights on its character, such as the tortures and murders at Quattro, the corruption under all its post-apartheid presidents and state capture were just aberrations, the work of “bad apples”.

But what remains of Cold War world revolution institutions have forged new relationships with post-Cold War Russia and China. In these countries, a great many ANC members still feel at home, not so much ideologically but because the political culture has remained the same, or what in Vladimir Putin’s era the Russians have come to call “political technology”. This has little to do with the logistics of democracy, rather with the complex of anti-Western rhetoric, internal connections, bribery and violence that has to be mastered and wielded for anyone to rise in the system.

The ANC has developed a double-faced technology, one with a Russian/Chinese disguise and the other a capitalist one called BEE. Had Guevara lived long enough, he would have laughed out loud at the honourable ANC members in their city hall parliament calling themselves “comrades” while living the good life through their clandestine businesses.

And he might have wept at the accuracy of his simile about “imperialism” dropping a wad of money on a table. In all of the countries whose cadres Guevara had met in disguise or during conferences, the top government officials, the elected ones too, became little more than the local agents, go-betweens or frontmen for multinational companies — Russian and Chinese ones too — who bribed them with impunity. 

Words that Guevara added to his prophecy have become all too true as ANC cadres assassinate each other or instigate service delivery riots against rivals: “The distribution of the money then causes more conflicts, divisions and defeat than an army would inflict on the battlefield.”

Gareth van Onselen captured the entanglement of cadre and trader in a Business Day column well: “You get the sense that if the revolution ever does come, the private sector won’t so much be the first against the wall, as the first to offer to build the wall — at a discount, of course.”

Scarcely five years after the 1994 revolution, stirrings began about “the arms scandal”, involving bribery by European multinationals on a vast scale. Through the years, just about every top cadre in the 1994 generation of the ANC was tainted with it in one way or another. Its fallout continues to this day as the state tries to put former president Jacob Zuma on trial for his part in it. 

Zuma was also the linchpin in the state capture project, in which the Treasury was almost taken over by an Indian émigré family. As fast learners of the political technology, they found it easy to spout the cadre talk of the ANC political commissar.

Few can derive a true grasp of any possible ministerial vision from these long, fragmented, defensive speeches. 

—  The late Linda Bozzoli, MP, describing parliamentary debate

State capture was really an extension of the BEE schemes devised by the local private sector; a political technology initially meant to create and co-opt a black bourgeoisie as a buffer against nationalisation or revolution was hijacked and repurposed instead by a foreign family. Congolisation nearly destroyed SA too.

For ordinary ANC members there was ordinary patronage. Its “cadre deployment” at even the lowest level, in the service of the age-old ideal of a national democratic revolution was policy from the start of its rule, as shown by James Myburgh in his book The Last Jacobins of Africa. Especially under Zuma, aided by his vice-president, Cyril Ramaphosa, the public service was decimated by substitution with the “pliable and domesticated” revolutionary types that Guevara so loathed.

The late Linda Bozzoli, an MP and a leftist stalwart in the anti-apartheid struggle, described parliamentary debate in a Business Day article in words that could have been used by Guevara for the Congolese commissars: “Few can derive a true grasp of any possible ministerial vision from these long, fragmented, defensive speeches. They are often impenetrable ... these speakers are cheered on from the backbenches by a veritable army of women with extremely loud voices and a capacity for foul language and obscene hand gestures.

“These often depend upon the words of others to make their point, which means they might read out their speeches from scripts that it is clear they don’t always fully understand. Because of all this, the listener struggles to grasp the essence of what many ANC MPs have to say. They tend to descend into a fuming tirade before their speeches are over, shouting at the opposition in a furious display of ire and resentment.

“By the end, almost inevitably, a hatred of white and sometimes Indian people ... is expressed by someone or other — to loud cheers, if not screaming, from the backbenches. Who knows what those bemused guests in the visitors’ gallery make of it all. Perhaps they surmise that it is a worthy display of the nation’s psyche: angry, uncomprehending, incoherent, filled with resentment and verging on war.”

Calamitous decisions

The result of the widespread BEE-induced corruption and cadre deployment was a stuttering economy nowhere near reaching the growth targets set by economists aligned to big business. Unemployment steadily increased until it came in at 32.1% in the fourth quarter of 2023, though this has to be set against a vast informal economy, which few know the size of.

What is very visible is the slow collapse of infrastructure and state-driven services to the point where power cuts are destroying businesses in depression-like numbers, poor wastewater treatment causes sporadic disease outbreaks, only 50% of the railways still operate, the ports are described as among the worst in the world, hospitals are death traps and pupils regularly feature among the worst educated in the world.

The profile of the know-it-all political commissar/cadre sketched by Guevara regularly pops up in calamitous decisions and actions by the government or its entities. The “bad comedy” he wrote of was provided by the likes of Hlaudi Motsoeneng, who just about destroyed the SABC.

A fake engineer, a graduate in little more than ANC political technology, ordered locomotives in the wrong gauge.

The worst probably remains Thabo Mbeki’s obstinate interpretations of short-lived medical theories during the HIV/Aids pandemic, which led to his obdurate refusal to allow the early distribution of antiretrovirals on the grounds that they would merely enrich Western multinationals. Some call his policies a crime against humanity, and activists blame them for 300,000 preventable deaths. 

Recently, Mbeki added his voice to those contending that the ANC’s downward spiral is due to just a few bad apples. It would be remiss to call him a cadre in the sense that Guevara meant it, but the know-better, triumphalist, hubristic arrogance instilled by ANC political technology had long made him a bad apple too.

If the ANC deploys cadres who can forget the political tech they had to wield to get where they are, and there are probably some, SA might still have a great future. But that is hoping against hope; such exceptional people will always be, well, the exception. The ANC cannot save itself, or the country, any more. It has served its purpose and should go.