Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is wearing green as she walks slowly to the podium at a decidedly red event. There is a celebratory atmosphere in Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg, on a day that the sun and rain tag-team each other, leaving the air warm and moist.
The "Mother of the Nation" is introduced by EFF commander-in-chief Julius Malema at the graduation ceremony of party spokesman Mbuyiseni Ndlozi.
Malema’s fondness for Madikizela-Mandela is unmistakable, but he admits that she is solidly black, green-and-gold — she is and will always be an ANC member, despite her closeness to the EFF’s young leadership.
On the podium, she jokes about her party: "I know we are captured." Madikizela-Mandela touches on the ANC’s 54th national conference, describing it as a "captured conference".
Despite her professed loyalty to the governing party, she tells the EFF: "I am hoping that in the near future this youth that is here will be the leadership of SA. We are hoping for a SA that will not be captured."
The leaders of the EFF were expelled from the ANC in April 2012, began working on the formation of a breakaway party in 2013, contested the 2014 elections and played a central role as kingmaker in the 2016 local government elections.
Madikizela-Mandela calling the ANC a "captured" party aptly describes the descent of the liberation movement in the past decade. What she should add, is that the party is no innocent bystander, has been complicit in its own capture and decline.
Former ANC president Thabo Mbeki said in November that it had to deal with the "rot that infested the ANC".
"It is clear that the ANC has been captured by a dominant faction which in fact is not ANC in terms of its values and in terms of what it does day-to-day…. In the end, we have to attend to this matter, what do we do to liberate the ANC from this dominant group, which is [in] fact not ANC," Mbeki told a consultative conference of ANC veterans with decades-long collective service to the party.
The descent began even before Jacob Zuma’s fateful election as leader of the party in 2007, but it intensified under his watch and the ANC’s grip on the hearts and minds of South Africans in urban and rural areas slipped dramatically.
Evidence was its loss of key metros in 2016 — Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay — and a steady decline of the ANC’s share of the rural vote in the 2014 elections.
Since Zuma became leader of the ANC, South Africans have increasingly and boldly shunned the ruling party at the polls. They know that doing so does not spell despair and destruction of the country, or worse, a return to apartheid. Life in SA without the ANC is now possible.
The organisational erosion in the party began almost immediately after the Polokwane conference, with the formation of the Congress of the People, followed by the EFF split-off and the splintering of the alliance through Cosatu’s destruction.
The devastation Zuma wrought was the capture of the party. It started with the election of its national executive committee (NEC) in 2007 and solidified in 2012, when it became a shell for a leadership mostly doing Zuma’s bidding.
Ironically, albeit not an active one, Madikizela-Mandela is a member of this leadership.
The NEC did not question Zuma when he began making curious appointments — such as the elevation of MP Faith Muthambi to the communications portfolio, or the late-evening appointment of Mosebenzi Zwane as mineral resources minister.
The executive ridiculed Public Protector Thuli Madonsela when she released the Nkandla report. It remained silent throughout the Nkandla saga; killed an internal ANC probe into state capture; sat by and watched as state-owned entities became feeding troughs for looters; and attacked the judiciary when it ruled against the excesses of its president.
Zuma had a kitchen cabinet waiting in the wings before taking office, with key lieutenants who emerged to play prominent roles such as Tom Moyane, the South African Revenue Service commissioner. Madonsela had also been part of this group, but she became one of Zuma’s strongest opponents.
The capture of the NEC led to Zuma’s wanton destruction of key state institutions and the complete erosion of the centrality of the ANC in the government’s decision-making.
This capture was largely enabled by dubious provincial strongmen and the party’s leagues Ace Magashule, David Mabuza, Supra Mahumapelo, Sihle Zikalala and Bathabile Dlamini, who were his loudest defenders in meetings of the party’s top leadership structure.
Zuma’s most vociferous and public defenders on the NEC were Lindiwe Zulu, Nomvula Mokonyane and Edna Molewa.
His cabinet appointments of political nobodies, elevated from largely obscure provincial positions to high office, went unchallenged by the rest of the party’s leadership. These ministers ran amok without accounting to the NEC. Muthambi shunned the ANC’s leadership more than once when called to account for the shenanigans at the SABC. Zwane’s new Mining Charter was promulgated without consulting his department’s officials, let alone the ANC’s top brass.
On being challenged for the first time in the NEC in November 2016 — after the structure was jolted by the party’s electoral losses, which Zuma apparently laughed off — he expanded his power base outside the ANC. Now the likes of former convicts Gayton McKenzie and Kenny Kunene are his most ardent defenders, unleashing a propaganda war in his favour ahead of the party’s national conference starting on Saturday. It includes rewriting accounts of the negotiated settlement that led to SA’s democratic breakthrough.
Members of the ANC’s top leadership have also spoken at cross-purposes — the structure takes a decision communicated by the secretary-general, but individual members go public with their factions’ positions.
While Zuma has been captured by business interests, including but not limited to the Gupta family, his capture and control of the NEC has enabled him to get away with it.
In the document For the Sake of Our Future, party veterans delivered a scathing indictment of the current leadership.
"The leadership of the ANC as a collective has failed the people of SA," it reads.
"It has presided over the downward spiral of the organisation and given rise to widespread national anxiety by defending, among other things, the personal interests of some leaders at the expense of the public good and the credibility of the organisation."
The NEC has shunned the party’s own veterans.
Zuma’s capture of the ANC is so complete that he recently defied it and brought his own legal opinion to a meeting discussing whether or not the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal should appeal against the setting aside of a high court judgment that found the 2015 election of his minions in the province illegal.
That conference was another example of the NEC pushing Zuma’s agenda — his backers pushed for the KwaZulu-Natal conference to go ahead while it was clear that processes had not been concluded, leaving it vulnerable to court challenges.
ANC leaders began admitting their failures, with Parliament’s chief whip Jackson Mthembu declaring in 2016 that Zuma and the NEC should step down — but again, this was largely motivated by the prospect of further election losses. Doing what is right has long been a foreign concept to the ANC’s current leadership — expediency has been the primary driver of the party’s decisions, not principle.
The question the electorate will have to answer in 2019 is the extent to which they will punish the party — even its new leadership elected this weekend — given the damage to the economy and its institutions wrought by its leaderships’ complacency in the past decade.
Undoing the capture of the ANC, Africa’s oldest liberation movement, will be an arduous, near-impossible task.
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