Wreckers, spies, saboteurs, diversionists … the hunt is on within the ANC.
The August 8 motion of no confidence marked the start of the purge. The ANC will root out MPs who voted against President Jacob Zuma — the comrades who forgot they are members of the party and not members of Parliament.
On August 17, the ANC dismissed MP Makhosi Khoza from her position as the chairwoman of Parliament’s portfolio committee on public service and administration. The party’s structures in KwaZulu-Natal will continue to grind her out in a disciplinary process.
The Hawks are circling around Pravin Gordhan again. This time, they are trying to drag Jabu Moleketi and Trevor Manuel into the fray. Jimmy Manyi must be pleased.
In 2016, Manyi complained to the public protector against Manuel, Gordhan and Nhlanhla Nene over Eskom’s loss of R100bn. The matter had nothing to do with Eskom and everything to do with Manuel’s 2011 open letter, in which he called Manyi "a racist in the mould of HF Verwoerd".
Does the EFF’s Floyd Shivambu remember his 2011 remarks about that letter?
Back then, when he was in the ANC Youth League, Shivambu said: "We now do not know who Trevor Manuel represents because his remarks fall squarely into the political agenda of right-wing political forces opposed to the ANC."
One must also appreciate the irony of Derek Hanekom’s impending fate. In 2012, he spearheaded the ANC’s purge of Shivambu, Sindiso Magaqa and Julius Malema. Magaqa’s crime was that he had insulted Malusi Gigaba.
Purges are not new to the ANC and the tripartite alliance. Thabo Mbeki and Manuel strangled the Reconstruction and Development Programme at birth and made sure exiles dominated the government.
During the 1990s, Blade Nzimande and Jeremy Cronin purged elements within the South African Communist Party (SACP) who were seeking to leave the alliance and contest elections as the SACP.
At first glance, the ANC seems to be tearing itself apart — and has been doing so for 20 years. In a 1941 lecture, political philosopher Leo Strauss provided a definition of nihilism, "to will the nothing, the destruction of everything, including oneself, and therefore [it is] primarily the will to self-destruction".
With the ANC bleeding votes in the urban centres because of its internal squabbling over resources, there might be something to the thesis that the party is in the grip of a kind of political nihilism. The government’s management of Transnet, Eskom and South African Airways appears to be designed to obliterate them.
The ANC has even connived to stuff up its propaganda machine, the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
If there is a textbook on how to tank an economy, the ANC seems to be following it to the letter. Growth is effectively zero, the unemployment rate remains high and the debt to GDP ratio has rocketed from 27.8% in 2008 to 51.7%.
The grim reaper of capitalism stalks the land, feasting on the misery and despair of the growing poor.
There is a better explanation than collective nihilism: the ANC has a Leninist internal structure. The most profound and honest political statement of 2017 came from the ANC’s chief whip, Jackson Mthembu. In June, on the radio station 702, he indicated that ANC MPs must put the interests of the party first, not their oath of office, and vote against the motion of no confidence.
His view on the duties of an MP is a clear illustration of Leninism: the party is above the state. The party does not represent society but leads society as the vanguard of revolution. Those opposed to the revolution are enemies who need to be repressed.
The ANC sees itself as the vanguard of the National Democratic Revolution. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the ANC gained power through the ballot box instead of armed revolution.
But due to its continuing electoral dominance, power is not derived from representation but from dominating the party from within, especially as the president’s position is dependent upon the party and not the electorate.
SA’s problems are not due to communist or socialist philosophy per se, but rather to its history and the cumulative effects of constant internal purges, which are inherent in Leninist political structures.
The SACP and the ANC grew up under the worst of communism. Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin exported their paranoid politics to SA and developed a culture of purging internal opponents.
What we are experiencing are the consequences of decades of factions purging each other within the ANC and the alliance. Idealists, humanists, pacifists, constitutionalists and technocrats do not survive. Those with a ruthless desire for power come out on top. And only the more ruthless can defeat the ruthless.
Yet the ANC has forgotten its Lenin. He said communism was Soviet power plus electrification. The National Democratic Revolution is state power plus candlelight. Leninist revolutionary theory is predicated on the notion that the likelihood of revolution increases as the economic and social conditions of the populace deteriorate.
With rising poverty and corruption and persistent inequality, the ANC is creating the conditions for a nasty revolution. Despite all the crude communist insults and the sloganeering around radical economic transformation, Luthuli House is beginning to resemble the tsarist court. That is the greatest political irony of our times.
• Taylor is a postdoctoral fellow at Stellenbosch University
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