The shape of the future ANC is unfolding before us. Yet opposition parties and lazy analysts will say that nothing new has come out of the recently concluded ANC conference.
A serious party should not be expected to change its policies suddenly and dramatically at every turn, but it should be assessed on whether it is responding to the issues of the day.
The coming few months will tell us whether the ANC has succeeded in doing that, especially as it battles to implement its many laudable policies.
What has become abundantly clear from the outcome documents is that the movement is preparing to be the governing party until 2032 and beyond. The fact that the ANC has what it calls a “Vision 2032” and roadmap to get there was stated several times in its post-conference statements.
The conference acknowledged that the ANC has to deal with the quicksand of current reality by tackling state capture and corruption, by changing its internal processes in encouraging wider public participation in its work, and by addressing service delivery.
There has been much debate on whether the ANC should remain a broad, national liberation movement or a tighter political party focused on winning elections. ANC members have often complained that the former approach, allowing all and sundry to join on the basis of a R12 membership fee, has been the main source of its integrity issues.
The “get out the vote” focus would mean the ANC would have to give up its claims to be the leader of all of society, focusing on constituencies whose votes it wishes to capture. Some have argued that this is already happening.
That is the backdrop to the sentence that the ANC needs to transform into “a renewed, responsive, modernised, well-governed, well-resourced, ethical, caring and effective political formation”, which featured in the conference declaration and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s January 8 statement.
There were some significant shifts in the language around gender issues and identity, with “LGBTQI+” featuring in the declaration. Equally important was the issue of women’s representation in the ANC’s leadership structures, with three of the top seven leaders being women.
Febe Potgieter, GM at ANC headquarters, made a brave and powerful statement explaining why she followed the example of former speaker Thandi Modise in declining nomination for the deputy secretary-general position, pointing out that women tend to be nominated only for deputy positions.
The ANC itself acknowledged that, given its mass character, it would continue reflecting the patriarchal society SA is. But as delegates argued, the ANC has achieved a dramatic turnaround in racial and gender representivity in the public service and so should be able to do the same within the party itself.
Similarly, the voices of the youth seemed to have been heard loud and clear, given the issues highlighted in the statements as well as in the internal elections.
Former ANC Youth League leaders Fikile Mbalula and Meropene Ramokgopa were elected to the top seven, but 39-year-old Ronald Lamola was not elected to the deputy president position he stood for. He claimed not to be disappointed, saying he had stood “to inspire a younger generation across the country that the ANC belongs to young people and to everyone”.
The rhetoric of radical economic transformation may have been subdued during the conference, but the various documents show a commitment to dealing with key structural impediments to growth, with a special focus on the highly concentrated nature of the SA economy.
This was coupled with the need to continue implementing the Economic Recovery & Reconstruction Plan, unveiled by Ramaphosa in October 2020, which includes an infrastructure build programme, adapting to green technologies and energy sources such as hydrogen, as well as revisiting BEE programmes.
The ANC that is emerging is expected to be more gender-sensitive, more focused on youth, and more focused on achieving economic growth. It has less than 18 months to convince a sceptical public that it can pull all that off.
• Abba Omar is director of operations at the Mapungubwe Institute.
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