I might be new around here, but I can tell you one thing: the noise emanating from the ANC ahead of its elective conference in a few weeks is loud. Distinguishing between the jostling of contenders and the news that actually matters is taking up a lot of editorial bandwidth.
Dismissing the elective conference as a mud-wrestling contest among a 1950s communist cabal of incompetent oafs high on the hog is probably a comfortable balm for simpler minds. Actually, it matters very much indeed, and we should pay careful attention because for those who care to look there are also points of light visible from within the abyss into which the governing party has fallen.
It’s been a long year, and a bruising one for all of us. We’ve all spent some quiet time in the dark in 2022. During the worst rolling blackouts the country has ever seen, with cellphone networks around us falling apart and our UPS batteries dying, we’ve all had compulsory time to reflect on the scale of the damage done by the Zuma administration in particular, and how it was all avoidable.
I sympathise with readers who tire of the drama and disappointment coming from our senescent political elite, and with those who choose to tune out. There came a time — especially during the Covid shambles — when I stopped bothering to listen to the president’s televised ramblings. It just felt irrelevant. He promised things that wouldn’t happen, and then somebody would be overcome by vibes — digital or not — and steal the money anyway.
As much as all this is true, the ANC will be in government in some form after the 2024 elections. It is common cause that it is likely to lose its majority. This is exactly why, just as we all go on a summer break, it’s important to remember to care about the ANC’s elective conference.
Over the 20 years I’ve been watching political commentary in this country, it’s often struck me how vulnerable we all are to analysis by wishful thinking. We all want the ANC to do better, so sometimes people see its imminent renewal. Some want it to go away altogether, and so sometimes people write it off as a spent force. Some would like SA to be overrun by fascism or some other radical idea, and so conjure a red tsunami from the ripples they see in the political waters. Some see a cold-blue, rationally better alternative and presume everyone else can see it too, or are just stupid, and so they say so.
Fortunately, polling has improved to such a degree that we’re now forced to contend with what is likely, not with what we’d like. The likelihood we’re presented with is some kind of coalition government, of which the ANC will be the senior partner, or the less likely option of a ragtag coalition of opposition parties dominated by the DA, EFF and ActionSA.
As my colleague Natasha Marian pointed out in yet another cracking edition of the Financial Mail last week, we are seeing in the shambolic coalition politics playing out in the metros of Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni a kind of worst-case scenario. SA’s political class has 18 months to sort itself out, or we could see this kind of bedlam play out at national level, which is a far more worrying prospect than most of us have contemplated.
Appalling political behaviour in the metros appears to be entrenched. It is appalling that the ANC in Johannesburg deliberately blocked the motion for the extension of a critical tender, which means the city has had to return 2,000 leased cars to their owners — including, if you can countenance it, a fleet of cars run by the metro police. All because the ANC does not like the fact that the original tender is under investigation for — you’ve guessed it — “irregularities” from when it was awarded during the ANC’s time running the city.
This is just disgraceful. It is infuriating to see elected officials steal money meant for services, but we are somewhat inured to it. It is doubly maddening to see elected officials vandalise service delivery — policing, nogal — in some cartoonishly ham-fisted attempt to embarrass a political opponent that wants to investigate corruption.
None of this is helped by the personal animus that exists between the leaders of various parties and groupings, which I think may be an under-analysed factor. I doubt Mmusi Maimane, Herman Mashaba, Helen Zille and Julius Malema exchange Christmas cards, let alone ideas on compromises. The idea of a united opposition lies in tatters, and that only helps the ANC.
Coalition politics
And so then, to the ANC. It has shown it is incapable of behaving in coalition politics at the metro level. Whether it is able to do so in a national coalition government after 2024 depends entirely on who’s running the party. That, perhaps more than anything else, is what makes this such a consequential elective conference.
Like the ANC or not, and putting aside everything egregious it has done, it is objectively true that this conference will either produce leaders capable of a collegiate approach that will result in compromise and accommodation, or it will not. That is the difference between chaos and order.
There are good young people in the ANC with the emotional intelligence and worldliness to manage a coalition government, and equally there is a risk that the cantankerous old warhorses — and the occasional princess who likes to ride them to her palace — may get in the way of something approaching renewal.
So on to Nasrec we go. Like it or not, it matters.
• Parker is Business Day editor-in-chief.
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