Over the past few days President Cyril Ramaphosa’s mission to unite the governing ANC has once again shown itself to be an exercise in futility.
When he was appointed president of the party in 2017 Ramaphosa took over an organisation that was living through its greatest schism, the origins of which predated his time in frontline politics.
The ANC’s Polokwane conference, where Jacob Zuma unseated Thabo Mbeki as ANC president, ignited division that gradually escalated across ideological and political lines. While Zuma did not pursue a third term, as Mbeki had been ill-advised to do, the candidate challenging Ramaphosa on the ballot, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, was seen to be favoured by the outgoing president.
Ramaphosa’s victory alienated many supporters of Dlamini-Zuma’s slate and informed his quest to reunite the party. The intention of the plan was to unite and draw the ANC towards himself and what he said he stood for. However, since then the flaws in the grand unity strategy have been easy to see.
The latter days of the Zuma administration unleashed enough chaos on the party and country for even the most staunch members to acknowledge that the party was in crisis. Its public perception — which can be measured in many ways but ultimately becomes a question of outcomes at the ballot box — was gradually diminishing. A key root cause was the inability of the ANC to extricate itself from association with members implicated in corruption and criminality.
The party’s model — where delegates appoint public representatives — makes it difficult for anyone to veto the election of another. The answer to the matter was to introduce a step-aside rule, which requires that those who are implicated in objectionable conduct step aside until they are cleared.
Yet while ANC leaders such as Ace Magashule reluctantly stepped aside in line with this rule, the disconnect within the party remained. Zandile Gumede, Danny Msiza and Mandla Msibi had matters pending that fell within the ambit of the step-aside rule, but delegates from their jurisdictions still insisted on nominating them for party roles. This created the new farce where the ANC had to watch such leaders being elected and then immediately remind them that they needed to step aside.
The rule remains tricky simply because it farms out political decisions to a judicial process, which the party can only observe and hope for eventual finality. This has led party insiders to question its fairness. The one development few would have expected is the rule being invoked against the president himself. Former spy boss Arthur Fraser’s complaint with the police is laden with issues the president needs to explain to the public, even if they do not ultimately result in criminal sanction.
This makes Ramaphosa’s battle a two-pronged one, where he has to explain himself within the party and to the country at large. Of the two battles the one that’s easy to win is the internal one, because the party’s overwhelmingly toothless integrity commission will simply not act against its president and cripple his chances of re-election.
The more difficult battle will be the public one. As a president who has been trying to convince the public that the ANC can reform, Ramaphosa’s current troubles are undermining the message. During the local government elections the ANC resolved to use his image in electioneering because it acknowledged that using the motley crew of accused and implicated members standing for office would be a PR disaster.
That admission turned the president into the last remaining ANC poster boy. The fact that the poster boy has turned out to be someone with such a poor understanding of managing the finances associated with his game farm is yet another disaster for the party. Its members may be left with the president’s unity mission wavering under yet another self-inflicted crisis.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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