STEVEN FRIEDMAN: Graft and exclusion will be ANC’s undoing in the long haul

Winning a battle does not necessarily win the war. Which is why the short term looks good for the ANC, the longer term less so.

It has become fashionable to complain that despite its leadership change the ANC has not done enough to fix its problems and to convince the country that it should be trusted. So routine is this that a look at media — social and regular — would suggest that, as opposition parties predict, the ANC will lose Gauteng and, possibly, its national majority in the 2019 elections.

That is not what by-election results tell us. They suggest the ANC will win comfortably in 2019, despite serious problems in the North West, which could cost it the province, and rural KwaZulu-Natal. Voters in the cities vastly outnumber those in the countryside, and in urban areas the ANC is regaining the ground lost under Jacob Zuma. If these trends hold up, opposition parties’ predictions of a coalition government in 2019 will turn out to be wishful thinking.

The reason is that most ANC voters, who have no voice in the media bubble, are unimpressed by radical slogans that justify a selfish desire to make personal use of public money.

Again, contrary to the suburban myth that paints most voters as unthinking, township and shack settlement voters are showing that they reject politics that seem to be about enriching some connected people at the expense of everyone else, and they believe the new ANC leadership is willing to change the pattern of the past decade.

So, is talk of the ANC’s problems simply chatter in the echo chamber in which most people in the media debate live?

No, its problems remain very real. Claims that the ANC is now united are a public relations exercise. Factional politics thrives, as recent provincial conferences showed. At times the battle lines are the same as last year’s, at times they take on new forms. But slate voting is still a reality.

This might not be a sign of ill health if everyone agreed that the contest was free and fair. Divisions between factions happen even in well-functioning parties around the globe.

But ANC members are no happier with the way leaders are elected than they were before it began pretending that peace had broken out.

The spate of court cases that greets ANC conferences continues, and the party is stepping up attempts to stamp out this practice.

If it succeeds it will not be because everyone now accepts that the processes are fair but because it may become too costly, politically and financially, to use the courts.

The tension will continue and will be expressed in other ways. Nor is there any sign that the problems that cause the challenges — claims that underhand means are used to get candidates elected, including the use of money to buy support — are likely to go away.

The ANC is a victim of its failure to tackle economic exclusion, which prompts many to meet their economic needs through politics rather than the market, or to protect its elections and decision-making from those who want the ANC and the government to serve them, not the people.

There are no signs yet of a strong willingness to tackle either. This may change after the 2019 elections if President Cyril Ramaphosa and his faction are strengthened.

They could use their mandate to tackle exclusion from the economy and the undermining of ANC elections and processes.

If they do not, a remark by former president Kgalema Motlanthe that the ANC may only be able to fix its problems if it loses a national election — because only then will those who join it to enrich themselves leave it alone — could well prove prophetic.

• Friedman is research professor with the humanities faculty of the University of Johannesburg.