GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The ANC’s culture of concealment

The ANC’s internal political culture is as self-destructive as it is ominous. Antiquated and conspiratorial, the party seems to thrive on subterfuge, suspicion and deception. Political parties the world over have these traits, but in the ANC they are second nature; the consequence of a party that still seems to think it operates in the shadow of some underground revolution, not the glaring light of the Constitution. From the outside, it appears to be a ghastly, amoral place to work.

One of the many ways in which this intrigue becomes manifest is concealment. But it is concealment of a special sort. Whatever the issue, it is never fully suppressed, rather merely alluded to, typically in a language as obscure as it is loaded.

The quintessential example, as ever with the ANC, is Jacob Zuma’s astoundingly casual statement in November 2016 that, "Those are the thieves and I know they are stealing. I’m just watching them. I know them." 

That is quite a admission for a sitting president — the idea that he knows not just about the thievery, but who the actual thieves are, and yet, by his own account, he is happy enough just to observe.

It is a threat, of course.

ANC Women’s League president and walking moral vacuum Bathabile Dlamini understands full well what the president is saying: "Even that family, if people feel it has to be brought to book, structures must do that, the officials must call them and talk to them and give them a marching order not through shouting outside because all of us in the NEC [ANC national executive committee] have our small skeletons and we don’t want to take all skeletons out because hell will break loose."

But it’s not always a threat. Sometimes it just seems to be a way of avoiding accountability — of suggesting some obvious rationale that internal party politics prevents from being articulated.

Zuma made that kind of remark this weekend: "The issue of the unity of the alliance, who ever thought that one day the alliance would say the kind of things they are saying? No one. Why? On the day our friends are not here I will tell you."

The president does this kind of thing all the time. One of his favourite allusions to the grand, unknowable injustice he believes he suffers, is to say all will be revealed in a book one day.

"One day when I am retired I will write my book and you will realise why I said what I said," he said last year. "This is because I know where things went wrong. I know who are the witches at work. It is fine when the enemy is at a distance — but when it is your friend, it is not easy because they know your weaknesses."

He has been harping on about this book for well on a decade now.

Yeah, we are waiting. Always, we are waiting. The truth, for Jacob Zuma, is always a book that is never written

"Maybe I’ll finally get to write a book about my experiences," he would tell the Independent on Saturday in 1994. "I always say I will write a book and tell the story," he told the Sunday Times in 1999. "I’m also looking forward to sitting down and recording my experiences," he told Enterprise magazine in 2004. "Wait for the book," he told the Sowetan in 2006, "It will all be in there." Towards the end of the 2014 elections, Zuma again made reference to a "tell-all book" he was working on, about his life story: "You will read the book, in a few years to come, you will read."

Yeah, we are waiting. Always, we are waiting. The truth, for Jacob Zuma, is always a book that is never written.

But Zuma isn’t the only one who indulges this kind of inference. At the end of July, former finance minister Pravin Gordhan was reported to have said Ivan Pillay was chased out of SARS because he and various officials, "stood in the way of bad things that are still going to emerge". You see these sorts of vague references to profound wrongdoing everywhere.

Dlamini was at it again this weekend, too. She said of disgraced Higher Education Deputy Minister Mduduzi Manana, a man yet to face any political consequences for his actions.  "Don’t start from him. If we want to say everyone who occupies a senior position in government, we must know his track record. Because there are those that are actually worse them him."

Well, it would be helpful, if Dlamini knows who these people are, to name some names. For most people it would be a moral imperative.

But then that is not how the ANC works. On almost every conceivable level, from political back-stabbing, to corruption, to physical abuse, it seems to be perfect happy to allude to the fact that it knows this sort of thing is going on. Indeed, that senior politicians know who is responsible, but that is as far as it is willing to go. No more than an allusion.

They must feign a moral conscience by saying they recognise the transgressions are taking place, but then destroy any possibility of action by refusing to divulge the details.

Has there ever been a bigger collection of cowards? The ANC really is the most contemptible organisation. That is not the character of a political party that operates under a Constitution, but a mob that does its business by thug law and intimidation.

South Africa’s governing political gang, however, has a new problem.

The vote of no confidence will play havoc with the ANC’s ever-present suspicions. It is in many ways the ultimate conundrum for the party: it knows that there are enemies within the walls, but it knows not who. When you shoot a gorilla in the stomach, it is said it will pull out its own entrails looking for the bullet. That might be apocryphal but it is certainly an appropriate metaphor for how this is all likely to play out.

Imagine being inherently paranoid and, for once, actually having a real basis for your suspicions? That is how tinfoil-hat wearing lunatics drill into their own head looking for a computer chip.

And Zuma is only fuelling the fire that burns within by claiming, as he did this weekend, that some grand global conspiracy is responsible for trying to unseat the ANC; that foreign governments are working hard to eradicate the poisonous swamp of mediocrity he wallows in. The truth is, the ANC is held together by distrust just as much as it is being destroyed by it. This is a paradox it will go mad trying to solve.

Watch this space. The ANC’s culture of concealment, for so long a game indulged to excuse its failings, is no longer fantasy, at least not so far as it is concerned

For some time now, this paranoia has been manifesting itself, and everywhere. The former public protector was planted by the CIA, said the MK vets; the economy is being run by a handful of white people, says the minister in the presidency; the Guptas are responsible for all the ANC failures, say party stalwarts; the opposition is run by Jews, says the youth league. All of it has some hateful, racial bigotry at the heart of it. It is how the ANC explains its own failings to the world. But it matters not, because the sickness now has it in its grip and the magnifying glass is being turned on itself.

Worse still, unlike its external fantasies, its internal conspiracies seem true: it is corrupt, it is fundamentally factionalised and it is held hostage to a profound kind of amoral internal politics that protects the incompetent and unethical. The truth is now stranger than fiction.

Watch this space. The ANC’s culture of concealment, for so long a game indulged to excuse its failings, is no longer fantasy, at least not so far as it is concerned. And because it has never learnt or embraced honesty or the value of transparency, it is now trying to conceal nothing more than chaos. Very real and very powerful. But that is a force that you cannot keep contained. Already it is leaking out everywhere. Everything it touches is turning to ash. And the ANC is just watching.

Maybe on some level it knows it is all true. Maybe that is how ANC members resign themselves to it. Perhaps they find some strength in all this allusion, it allows them to pretend they are in touch with reality. Ignorance is bliss. That is, until you take a step back and realise that you are holding your own stomach in your hands.