In a Financial Mail column last week, I set out the ANC’s dire record as an opposition party, focusing primarily on its performance in Cape Town, and then arguing that the same pattern seems set to be repeated in Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay.
The reason, I argued, was the ANC does not conceive of itself as a modern political party, but rather as a revolutionary or liberation movement ordained by God and predetermined to govern until the End of Days. Thus, it appears incapable not just of mastering but even of learning how to behave and function in opposition. The party’s political DNA just doesn’t cater for it.
As a result, where the party is in opposition the position of the governing party is consolidated and the ANC’s percentage of the vote implodes.
Cape Town makes the case: The ANC has now been in opposition in that city for a decade. During that time its percentage of the vote has dropped from 38.7% in 2006 to 24.5% in 2016; while the gap between it and the DA has grown from 3.6 to 42.2 percentage points over the same period.
Because the ANC is incapable of behaving like a modern, democratic opposition party, it cannot adapt to loss. The only offer it can make to voters is its generic, rigidly enforced national agenda — in effect, a return to the past and the very thing that lost it power in the first place. Any opposition party must be able to offer change. The ANC cannot. Thus it remains trapped by its own immutable nature.
Unable to offer change, or any policy programme tailored to a specific metro or province, it resorts to type. Typically, this is a repertoire forged in the pre-democratic period, a return to "struggle politics", whereby the governing party is treated like an illegitimate force and disruption, violence and chaos are the only responses the party is able to muster. To this end, it develops and promotes surrogates, such as the Ses’khona People’s Rights Movement in Cape Town or the recently formed Johannesburg Social Movement, which sow discord on its behalf; that is, when it isn’t doing so itself.
The absolute and total electoral failure of this strategy in Cape Town seems to have escaped the ANC. Clueless and completely out of its depth when in opposition, it seems set to persist with it in the three metros it lost in 2016.
Subsequent to that article, a number of developments would seem to reaffirm this thesis.
This week, in a piece for the Business Day, Genevieve Quintal set out the extent of the ANC’s disarray in Gauteng: Metros make a troubled shift to era of coalitions. It would seem to confirm the ANC’s lack of direction and purpose in opposition.
Also this week, the ANC released a series of policy documents ahead of the party’s mid-year policy conference. They are a tiresome read, replete with much antiquated rhetoric but little conviction.
Their most telling feature is not what they contain, but what they omit. For all the "strategy and tactics" and descriptions of the "battle of ideas" there is not a page, paragraph nor sentence dedicated to opposition politics. It is a gaping hole.
It’s as if the ANC doesn’t realise it is the opposition, as well as in power. Perhaps it is in denial. If so, it’s a profound mistake.
If the Community Survey 2016 is anything to go by, DA-lead governments in Tshwane, Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay and Cape Town (ignoring its other councils) now have a direct influence over the lives of at least 12,248,456 people. That’s more than the ANC’s total share of the vote in 2016.
"In total, the metros had a budget of R233bn in 2016, of which ANC-controlled councils command 24%, down from 83% before the election," financial analyst and columnist Stuart Theobald argues.
In short, the party has lost a staggering amount of power.
Yet it seems blissfully unaware of it all. So much so the party doesn’t offer a word towards addressing the problem or any attempt to analyse its performance on this front to date. That is nothing short of remarkable. Whoever drafted its strategy and tactics document should be fired.
Some of this might be little more than arrogance. "Winning" is so integral to the ANC’s self-conception, if it begins to actually describe losing and the consequences thereof in its policy documents, it might constitute the final crack in a collective identity as fragile as it is fraught.
Paul Mashatile says "the ANC is suffering an identity crisis". He would know. Yet, Minister of Sport and Recreation Fikile Mbalula says the ANC is "preparing to remain in power forever".
The ANC is confusing its ego with reality if the organisation thinks bravado alone will see it through this mess. It is an immense ask. The party needs to fundamentally change the way it conceives of itself. That kind of change almost requires a blank slate. And there is little sign of that.
But then there is the bravado; so much conceit and superiority.
What is the ANC doing to win power back? The answer, going by its own policy papers: absolutely nothing. It seems to think power will fall out of a tree. It should talk to its members in Cape Town. They have been sitting below that particular tree for ten years now.
Shortly after the ANC lost the Western Cape in the 2009 election, then-chief whip in the National Assembly, Dr Mathole Motshekga, addressed the ANC caucus in the Western Cape legislature.
"Our role as the opposition party in this province must be constructive and informed by the multitude of challenges and problems faced by our communities. We must not copy and adopt bad political habits of criticising and opposing for the sake of scoring political points. The ANC is not in a publicity contest with anyone, we have a political programme to implement, and we should therefore advance sound and superior arguments for our criticisms and give credit whenever it is due. As the ruling party, our task is to remain exemplary to all South Africans, including the DA," he said.
Whatever you make of that, it is as close as the ANC has ever been to defining a role in opposition. It fell on deaf ears. The party’s screeching, banal, petty and generally pathetic attitude to debate in the province is now so well set it seems incapable of anything else. There’s no impactful Western Cape policy, if it has one at all; no particular plan for the province; no superior ideas or argument; nothing. Just screeching.
The recently elected ANC leader in Nelson Mandela Bay, Andile Lungisa, seems set to adopt a similar attitude there. He has lovingly embraced an outdated approach that has resulted in nothing but electoral loss for the ANC elsewhere, as if he has just discovered it for the first time.
"As early as Monday," he declared, "we are going to rally on our communities that they must undermine the government of white minority which represents the white interests which they have no interests of representing the majority of the population in this city."
Are ANC leaders incapable of learning the most basic democratic lessons, rammed home election after election? The facts are indisputable: This kind of revolutionary nonsense doesn’t work. If anything, it helps, not hinders the DA. The party will be licking its lips at the prospect of the ANC systematically alienating itself from favourable public sentiment in Nelson Mandela Bay, as it has done so successfully in Cape Town and the Western Cape.
The ANC in opposition needs a vision and a purpose, particular to each metro it has lost. That is what wins votes. Not violence and mayhem. People need something to believe in.
One person, at least, seems to have learnt something. Jacob Zuma, in a rare moment of honest reflection, said this week of the ANC’s performance in Nelson Mandela Bay: "Because [we had] internal problems, rest assured, there would be consequences and this is what happened. I can tell you. Of all the metros, I won’t talk about the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, because you know all about it. We ruined it for years, bit by bit. Now the opposition is in charge. We cannot say we are surprised by that."
Well, he must be a little surprised. After all, this is the same man who stated prior to the election "it is crystal clear that we are taking this metro", because "God and Jesus are with us [therefore] who can defeat us?"
The ANC can see only revolution and power and Jesus and God. The one thing it can’t see is the democratic vote count or its own limitations
Loss brings honesty. It turns out the ANC ruined Nelson Mandela Bay. But it brings only so much honesty for the ANC, no more. The ultimate truth, that the ANC is now, like the DA, a party of government and opposition, has yet to register at Luthuli House, or anywhere else for that matter. Its two blinkers, ego and arrogance, have resulted in a kind of tunnel vision. The ANC can see only revolution and power and Jesus and God. The one thing it can’t see is the democratic vote count or its own limitations.
The DA will be the first to tell you power corrupts. It has been preaching that for years. It too needs a strong opposition, every political party does. It is a key counterbalance on which our democratic order rests. As difficult as it is for the ANC to digest, SA needs it to become a better opposition party. It has a duty to all South Africans to do better, and a good place to start would be by accepting it has not lost God’s grace but the trust and faith of the electorate in key centres of power.
That, however, would require something called courage. It takes great bravery to be in opposition, to embrace that you no longer enjoy majority support and to accept there is something wrong with what you offer to people. The ANC does neither. Even its in-house critics end their every condemnation with a bow and a scrape before the alter of denialism. No, its all systems go in the ANC. Not so much to the future as back to the future. This is what the politics of failure looks like.
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