The ANC has lost its liberation capital and it has the scandal-ridden presidency of Jacob Zuma and his painful, captured administration to thank for that. This week, the alliance that swept Zuma to victory at Polokwane in 2007 rejected him; Cosatu even booed and heckled him.
How on earth could the alliance partners have continued to support him for all this time? He was meant to be different from Thabo Mbeki, but not in this way. Not in the way that, unlike his predecessor, he has a less-than-healthy respect for the rule of law and the Constitution. Let’s not beat about the bush — Zuma has no respect for anything but his own interests and those of his family. The ANC turned 100 on his watch, and there is a good chance that Zuma will be remembered as the president who hammered the final nail into the coffin of Africa’s oldest liberation movement.
The party has one last shot to avoid that fate; one last chance to turn around its fortunes. That chance is offered by its coming national policy conference.
The conference is expected to kick off with a two-day "consultative" session on the renewal of the organisation. This was proposed by party veterans, who these days are treated with contempt by the ANC leaders who were in the trenches with them.
Nor are they respected by the ANC’s new-found membership, which is largely made up of the "flies" secretary-general Gwede Mantashe often describes as having entered the party. These members are now trusted with the future of the movement and the country.
There is nothing particularly dramatic in the ANC’s policy documents, despite the noise about "radical economic transformation" and "inclusive growth" or whatever other semantics may emerge during the build-up to the conference.
Neither Zuma nor any of his cohorts has actually described what these terms really mean in practice. One need only examine the expensive suit from which the message is emanating to determine its sincerity.
The ANC’s 2017 election conferences is not about Zuma, his former wife and preferred successor; Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, or Cyril Ramaphosa. It is about the party’s extinction or endurance, survival or demise. This year will decide whether the ANC has the ability to repair, restore and reinvent itself. It is a similar question to that faced by the DA in its fight with Helen Zille: its character will have to either change fundamentally or the party will be choked by its past.
It is another Morogoro moment for the ANC, another watershed conference. But this time, the party lacks the leadership it needs to make it out the other side in one piece. The ANC has to choose between renewal and the continuation of a Zuma-style descent into authoritarianism and chaos.
Where did things go wrong? There are plenty of examples. Zuma’s second term election was marred by a Constitutional Court judgment that was an indictment on the party’s internal democracy. The party itself bemoans the shortcomings of its internal democracy: bought members, ghost delegates and more. Ahead of its last conference, it announced that the membership numbers in Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal swelled by 79,000 in just one month. Really? Fast-forward to 2017 and there is speculation that the membership of the ANC’s Mpumalanga region under ambitious chairman David Mabuza has surpassed even that of KwaZulu-Natal.
In the Northern Cape, ANC Women’s League candidate and premier Sylvia Lucas is employing all kinds of tactics to emerge as chairwoman.
Can we trust the outcome of the December elective conference if the party fails to put in place measures at its policy conference to ensure a truly democratic process?
Dirty tactics are at play elsewhere, too. Dlamini-Zuma rolled herself out well before campaigning was meant to start, according to ANC rules. Even during her tenure as AU Commission chairwoman, she was more invested in SA than the continent.
Can we trust the outcome of the December elective conference if the party fails to put in place measures at its policy conference to ensure a truly democratic process? It was in his second term that Zuma began his scorched-earth policy, and no protest marches by nongovernmental organisations or opposition parties, or heckling by alliance partners, will stop it. Zuma’s response to the booing and protests against him — crying racism or dismissing it as democracy at work — indicates that he is not concerned because his fate lies with the ANC elite who will vote in December.
Despite growing noise from select individuals in the party, there is no indication that the party has an appetite to excise the cancer in its belly. And it will pay the price, despite having been warned not only by the electorate in 2016, by its veterans and by its former presidents, but by its own members.
• Marrian is political editor
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.