GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The greatest trick the ANC ever pulled

"Imagine life without the ANC in charge of South Africa," ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule challenged supporters at a party rally this week. They could not. Very few can. But a world without Jacob Zuma? No problem.

The ANC is a modern marvel. Here is an institution that for two decades has wrought profound, all-encompassing and unrelenting destruction. Yet the institution itself, for all the pain and incompetence it has produced, remains largely immune to critical interrogation. Thus, to blame. Instead, enamoured by the various personalities that constitute the party’s hierarchy, the media — the primary facilitators of this lazy myopia — ensure a permanent vicious circle, in which the president of the ANC is the party, and the party is the president. And so, the ANC never falters, only its leaders.

In this way, there is no ANC. There is only the transitory extension of one man’s personality. There is no organisational culture, well-established and set down in writing, only the temporary will of the leader. And there is no organisational history, only the administration of the incumbent president.

Forgetting and remembering are the selective tools through which the party’s legitimacy is maintained. Its sins are constantly re-categorised and re-assigned. Its achievements constantly refashioned and polished. For most, the ANC is more dynasty than political party. There is talk of "regimes" and "ages". "The ANC of Nelson Mandela", for example, is refined every day, to the extent that it fairly glows today with an unblemished radiance. The "Zuma regime" is in the process of being assigned a grave in Amnesia Cemetery. A rotting, poisonous body. The hope is it will soon be buried, so that a new king can be properly crowned. But the ANC itself, eternal and immaculate, lives on regardless.

The election of Cyril Ramaphosa is the latest chapter in this fantasy. How so many in the press have fawned and praised a man fundamentally complicit in all the chaos we are told he is trying to undo. It is now acceptable in South Africa to participate in destruction but not to be personally destructive, to lend your name and credibility to moral depravity but to be personally upstanding, and to meekly watch on in silence as the world crumbles around you, yet to be acclaimed as brave and bold.

All this is possible so long as you promise to rebuild, renew and reconstitute. Because that is how you necessarily forget the ANC is responsible. It’s why Magashule can ask the question he did. We need to re-remember Ramaphosa in order that we might forget Jacob Zuma. So that the ANC might endure.

South Africa outsourced its democracy to the ANC long ago. It is the ANC’s internal political culture that defines it. Occasionally, the party’s private universe may overlap with the formal prescripts of our constitutional dispensation, as if to remind it that, from time to time, it needs to make the appropriate reparations before the Constitution, in order that the pretence can be maintained that it is of the Constitution.

But, in truth, those moments are used only to cleanse the organisation or no more than mere coincidence. Essentially they allow us to pretend it serves at the public’s discretion. It does not.

The ANC’s biggest crimes are now multigenerational. They cut across the dynasty and mark every epoch. Unemployment, education, corruption, crime and many others besides 

You get more answers at an ANC national executive committee (NEC) briefing than you do in Parliament. And that’s hardly any. Both Zuma and Ramaphosa, like Mbeki before them, demonstrate utter disdain for question time. They ooze contempt for formal accountability, because the ANC accounts to no one. Thus, it is the ANC NEC they fear. But we experience them separately and individually because we must. Because the fantasy demands it.

The election of the president of the country is itself a closed shop. Parliamentary committees exist to facilitate and encourage the executive, not scrutinise it. We look to the ANC, not the justice system, to pursue consequences. The party is a surrogate for our democracy, and a disgraceful one at that. But we see only the faces of those individuals who represent it, heroes or villains depending.

Ironically, for all its talk of collective responsibility, the ANC has none, because it shares no collective history. Just epochs, which it is encouraged to draw upon or distance itself from depending on their character.

The Life Esidimeni massacre, in which the state with callous disregard for life violently tore from this world 144 souls through nothing more than neglect and contempt, is a telling litmus test for "the ANC of Cyril Ramaphosa". Not that you would know it. For all the demands on him, and there are many thousands, it simply does not feature anywhere.

Corruption, now there is a thing. The top ten things at least. Maladministration is important, but only so important. Millions, billions, trillions — they are meaningless next to this one number: 144.

Take a moment to imagine the kind of emotional vacuum that must exist inside an organisation to engender throughout a provincial government department — of health no less — an attitude of such indifference, so lacking in empathy, sympathy, and compassion, that over a long period of time it could slowly and systematically starve the life out of 144 people. It is a litmus test because the massacre revealed the ANC as an institution. And yet, for all that, the party which daily seeks to merge itself and the state into one indistinguishable whole will be kept at an analytical arm’s length.

Some individuals are more responsible than others, to be sure. There are various processes under way to identify them. And there will be a reckoning. But it is doubtful there will be any consideration as to the political and organisational culture inside a government that could produce this kind of environment. It’s how we forget. And how we believe. How we excuse. There is no ANC. But there is only the ANC.

The ANC is Pandora’s Box. And it’s been open for some time now. Only, like its leaders, it’s the various individual and wicked apparitions that constantly flow out of it that we focus our attention on: nepotism, secrecy, disdain for accountability, incompetence, arrogance, neglect, corruption. Each one a singular disease, that can be attached to an individual or faction, a policy or decision. But no one thinks to close the box itself. The box is not the problem.

The ANC’s biggest crimes are now multigenerational. They cut across the dynasty and mark every epoch. Unemployment, education, corruption, crime and many others besides. Each one profound and left for the next ANC generation to do little more than facilitate. A rite of passage as much as an inheritance. Mbeki oversaw the creation of our electricity crisis, he passed the baton on to Jacob Zuma, who added his own brand of ruin to the mix. Soon he will place the problem into Cyril Ramaphosa’s hands. But the ANC is not to blame.

There was the arms deal, Chancellor House, Oilgate and now state capture. But these are each a problem particular to a certain generation. The ANC is not culpable. Whatever the situation in Cape Town, over the next 20 years there is a national water crisis of profound proportions coming to South Africa. One carefully nurtured by the Dynasty. But the Dynasty will not be held accountable for it.

Business is particularly culpable in this regard. A selfish, informal collective that believes that so long as the environment for profit is ensured all is well with the world. They care little for 20 years of educational destruction, for literacy rates that destroy, for crime that horrifies, for hospitals that kill. They can talk to Cyril Ramaphosa. From that all else flows, and thus with a click of the finger Cyril Ramaphosa becomes the ANC and history becomes the moment.

There is currently a sitting commission of inquiry into how ANC members are assassinating each other, primarily in KwaZulu-Natal but, increasingly, elsewhere too. Like Life Esidimeni, is there any thought to examine the organisational and political culture of an institution that could produce this kind of behaviour?

To be sure, there are no doubt many contributing factors but is the ANC devoid of any culpability at all? It has yet even to testify before the commission. No, we must forget. If we do not the fantasy will fall apart.

And what of those policies hardwired into ANC institutional doctrine? Cadre deployment, for example, the desire for the party directly to control such things as the judiciary and the SABC. There it sits, in black and white, in party documents. Should we remember that? Or forget it. Tricky. The compromise we have arrived at is simple enough: if the ANC president deploys competent cadres, we will look the other way. If he deploys the corrupt or incompetent, we will put up a fight. But, either way, we will choose to forget the subversive, anticonstitutional impulse that underpins the policy in the first place. Remember Lawrence Mushwana, Snuki Zikalala, Jackie Selebi? Of course not. They were forgotten, so that we might paint Jacob Zuma as the embodiment of evil. So that the ANC might live on.

What a spell the ANC has cast on South Africa. Magic doesn’t come more powerful than this. But then it does have the perfect audience. Like the hapless magician who looks out from the stage, deep into the crowd, and all he sees staring back at him is the half-dazed glare of a thousand eyes desperately wanting to believe. A seething mass of willing amnesiacs. It doesn’t matter that every trick he pulled collapsed in on itself and that he conjured nothing but failure, for he can convince you otherwise.

"Forget," he hums, drawing on his hypnotic power, the only power he really needs. "Forget." As eyelids close and sleep comes to them all, the warm embrace of the fantasy sinks its claws deep into their subconscious. Truly, this is the greatest show they have ever seen.

• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the Institute for Race Relations.