Litnet

The ANC’s succession debate has again taken centre stage in the analysis of all manner of discourse in South Africa. The contest for political power is now firmly within the ANC domain. Opposing factions have once again concretised around personalities and not “policy positions” and “promises for change”, even within the ANC itself. The ANC policy conference that was supposed to create a mandate template which contesting leaders would have naturally used to galvanise support for themselves is a lost opportunity again. Issues of service delivery and serving the nation are backgrounded in favour of personalities and cliques organised around nefarious criteria other than ideology and promise for change.

The construct of the national electoral process to coincide with the various political conferences, elective or policy-making, remains lauded as the best substructure to defend the South African democracy. The synchronisation of the ANC’s affiliate organisations, its alliance partners and its policy conferences all to lead up to its five-yearly elective conference remains one of the policy-making architectures second to few, if any, in the democratic world. The capacity to discourse and chart a path for the development of South African society is thus chiefly serviced by this architecture. The founding fathers and/or early generations of ANC leaders must have had a vision about this construct which the current breed of leaders, at all levels, and members seem not to have grasped and understood.

The ANC policy conference was supposed to have decisively pronounced on all matters where substantial differences existed, thus giving the upcoming elective conference an opportunity to adopt as organisational policy until the next conference. The leadership contest that has become the keynote of most policy interactions of the ANC has thus far robbed members of an established opportunity to influence the direction, pulse and soul of the movement. The intellectual potency and resolve evidenced through past policies of the ANC have now become an exclusive reserve of non-ANC entities that shape the policy decorum of South Africa. Thinking as a native in ANC intellectual land has not only become a refugee but is fast growing into an alien attracting from a strange breed of majorities rejection and disdain.

In ANC parlance, the divisive nature of the current leadership contests would have by now attracted a policy response that envisions a stable South Africa as opposed to the dominant narrow factional interests. The price of government as an outcome of political contestations would have been theorised within a tradition that seeks to understand the balance of forces and how they impact on the national democratic revolution. The continuum of development as triggered by the 1994 democratic breakthrough would also have been a variable used to define the type and calibre of leaders suited for South Africa in the current context. The new and organised “obligations of members to members” has received little to no theorv\etical attention, whence it is now becoming the context of the “new ANC-ness”, which is unfortunately becoming the context of all political contexts in South Africa.

It has been very much un-ANC to fail in such circumstances. The emerging Zuma-Motlanthe divide, which looks set to surpass the Mbeki-Zuma one, demands of the thinkers within the movement a compromise for the sake of South Africanness as a dimensional nexus of ANC-ness. In the thinking process members, and indeed leaders, of the ANC need to distinguish what ANC-ness is becoming compared with South Africanness; a conflation of the two is fast becoming one of the political liabilities for which the ANC may not be able to amass sufficient political capital to balance it out. The ANC’s social capital, with blackness as its biggest variable, is a contested space lacking visionary leadership from the ranks of those who defined themselves as being outside the ANC.

The balancing of the various capital-shaping facets of society (ie political, economic and social), to consolidate national influence is fast occupying centre stage in South Africa. The history of political formations will in the short term be dependent on that entity’s preparedness to shed from its mobilisation arsenal tendencies that defined its legitimacy at particular contexts. The African pattern of accessing opportunities via the political-social-then-economic capital duct has in South Africa been repudiated by the supremacy of the Constitution principle underpinning our democracy. The mere fact that the ANC bequeathed the “South Africa belongs to all who live in it” preamble of the Freedom Charter to the country via entrenchment in the Constitution, makes part of its legacy a national one. Political capital as the context of all contexts can thus not continue to dominate South Africanness; in fact, it should be repudiated by all that envision a South Africa that drowns in equal opportunities with equitable outcomes for all.

The ritual of invoking struggle history to justify all manner of behaviour and discourse should be reviewed, particularly as we construct how the ruling party determines its in-party succession contestations. Since the ANC’s grip on the country’s politics is inextricably linked with how it conducts itself, the movement should thus know that its challenges of leadership actually mirror that of the country. As the murky road to Mangaung assumes a character of a dog-eats-dog fight, unlike a pig that eats its offspring, the ANC needs to demonstrate that its known resilience is equally fit to withstand conditions of legality, “ruling-party-ness” and incumbency. While incumbency is correctly identified as having the potential to churn out sins, ruling-party-ness breeds arrogance that can undermine the very legality of the ANC.

Parallel to the dangers of ruling-party-ness and incumbency is the emerging breed of social segregation, propelled by somewhat in-party class realignment around opposition to genuine pro-poor aspects of being ANC. ANC-ness that seeks to rebalance, in a non-racial sense, the pornographic socio-economic inequalities has lately grown to become an inconvenience to the post-apartheid developmental consensus. True South African citizenship is fast concretising around the “equal opportunities for all with definite and defined unequal outcomes for society”. The fact that true South African citizenship is coterminous with anti-blackness has in recent times, and particularly within the context that has foregrounded leadership succession above any programmatic imperatives of the national development agenda, eroded the pro-poor champion status of the ANC.

Watermarked in these conditions is an in-party-driven reversal of transformation gains at the altar of morally justifiable reasons that are presented by a viable and robust opposition. The unprecedented ideological and political scrutiny of black leadership during the prevailing brutal succession wars is breeding a sense of less worth among would-be future leaders. Politics and political leadership will, if the ANC does not manage its succession properly, be a career option to the “new youth” if it is outside liberation politics. The advent of an MDC-type of youth politics that is at present arrested by the ingenuity of the in-ANC-youth has found a strange platform in the new un-unionisable youth that decorated the Marikana episode of post-apartheid South Africa … eish!

As an African proverb warns, “he that does not obey cannot command”, and the ANC succession debate and contest should thus be conducted in a manner which does not send a message to society that some leaders of the party should not be obeyed as they fail to take their own commands. The first form of command is to respect basic systems of organisation design, planning and management. The construct of the ANC is of such a nature that its supreme command is rooted within its members, thus making its organisational power one of the most diffused. The institutional architecture required to manage such a diffused power structure demands from leadership administrative mechanisms that remove membership registration and credential issues as reasons for failure to finalise conferences, or even so to create certainty of in-party voters long before conferences.

The reliance on archaic systems of membership registration makes the country question the extent to which the party has embraced information technology at the most basic aspect of its existence, membership. The current systems of conference preparation makes the Govan Mbeki statement that “jail was built by us … with our own hands, we dug the stones, dressed them and laid them … we built a veritable fortress, an ultra-maximum security … for our own imprisonment” relevant and revealing. In the clear absence of a broad cadreship that is still enthusiastic about the possibility of a national democratic society, the succession discourse needs to be conducted on a publicly accessible platform in order to match the current in-party turmoil with knowledge of the organisation’s history and policies as well as the nature of ANC-ness as a necessary adjunct for a true South Africanness.

Yes, Nkrumah was right in saying, “When a revolution has been successful, the ideology comes to characterise society … just as there can be competing ideologies in the same [here: ANC] society, so there can be opposing ideologies.” Mangaung should thus not only settle the succession challenges of the ANC but should once and for all bury the ideological vacuum that has characterised ANC-ness. “Wolves in sheepskins” and the many ideological prostitutes that are trading on ANC platforms will have to decide where to ply their ideological trades. The South African state needs such a certainty.