KHAYA SITHOLE: In limbo between ANC resolutions and hard realities

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s victory in the 2022 ANC elective conference at Nasrec has been backed by a far stronger internal mandate.

In 2017, having survived a bruising contest for the presidency against Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, Ramaphosa found himself having to work with a mixed leadership slate made up of those who had backed his candidacy and those who had formed the opinion that another leader was more suited to the role. The core leadership team was split in half, with Ace Magashule, Jessie Duarte and, to a diminished extent, David Mabuza one side of a fragile alliance.

That presidential victory did not come with similar victories on the policy front. Various resolutions that had been championed by Ramaphosa’s opponents ahead of Nasrec — the state of relations with Israel, expropriation of land without compensation and the Reserve Bank nationalisation question — emerged as conference resolutions that Ramaphosa and his leadership team needed to implement during their term.

In an ordinary sequence of events the assessment of the implementation status would have been central to deliberations at the ANC’s national general council. Luckily for Ramaphosa, the Covid pandemic led to the abandonment of the council itself. Had this not happened, difficult questions relating to the resolutions would have had to be addressed by Ramaphosa.

The Israel resolution seems to have bypassed the president himself when then international relations minister Lindiwe Sisulu announced that SA would indeed downgrade the embassy in Israel to a liaison office in 2019. The decision was never reversed despite Ramaphosa himself indicating that the cabinet had not approved it by the time Sisulu announced it. She was shuffled away from the ministry and would later claim she was penalised for doing her job of implementing a conference resolution.

The difficulty associated with such a sequence of events is that Ramaphosa cannot do much to reverse this position as any change would be at odds with the conference resolution. Surprisingly, given its contentious nature, this issue does not seem to have merited much debate at the recent conference. The tension of squaring the resolutions of a conference with the practical realities of being in government seems to be a major albatross that Ramaphosa will still have to deal with in his second term.

During the course of his first term the ministers responsible for the other contentious resolutions — on land and the Reserve Bank — were sufficiently in lockstep with the president to avoid pressing for implementation. On the land question, the ANC used the parliamentary process to turn the conversation into a terminal debate that lasted longer than the term of the national executive committee (NEC). On the Reserve Bank front, nothing was said except for occasional questions over the feasibility of nationalisation.

Luckily for the president and Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago, the 2017 iteration of the resolution was ill-conceived anyway, as it focused on the question of the Bank’s shareholding rather than what the institution does. Whether influenced by the benefit of hindsight or a better understanding of the actual issue, the 2022 resolution at least deals with the question of what the Bank actually does.

In its conference declaration the ANC refers to the need to revisit the mandate of the Bank to “implement monetary policy in a balanced manner, taking into account growth employment and exchange-rate factors”. While this indicates a more granular understanding of the uniquely complex role of a central bank, it does not seem to capture the essence of how the ANC wants monetary policy to interact with fiscal policy to achieve better political and socioeconomic outcomes.

Until such interactions and contradictions are understood by those in charge, expect this resolution to yet again meander in limbo until the end of this NEC’s term.

• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.