Africa-Press – South-Africa. VOICES
The party’s spiral into massive corruption, factionalism, and unwillingness to implement its own policies has damaged its effectiveness, it’s credibility – and its future, writes Omry Makgoale
The unity of any political party is defined by its adherence to its policies and by it implementing its decisions and resolutions. When a party makes resolutions at a conference, but fails to implement them, that party is paralysed.
This is the situation of the current ANC leadership. These are effects of the “unity slate” conceived by Deputy President David Mabuza at the national elective conference in Nasrec in December 2017.
That unity slate was and remains a toxic mixture of factions, all fighting for access to Treasury. The fighting takes place within the ANC, within government and within state structures.
THE NEC BELONGS TO THE GUPTAS AND WATSON
The majority of the members elected to the national executive committee (NEC) at Nasrec were blessed by the corrupt Gupta families and the late Gavin Watson, CEO of African Global Operations (formerly Bosasa).
Their movements reflect meetings with these people at various locations, including Saxonwold in Johannesburg, Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla compound, Port Elizabeth, Dubai and many other places.
An NEC with such a background cannot implement the ANC’s Through the Eye of the Needle policy, nor Nasrec resolutions such as those calling on members alleged to have committed a criminal offence to step aside until their cases are cleared.
The majority of the current NEC are now implicated in all sorts of wrongdoing, such as the asbestos and Vrede Farm projects in the Free State, the VBS heist in Limpopo, the municipality waste disposal tenders in KwaZulu-Natal and the mobile clinic contract linked to Mediosa in North West.
In Mpumalanga – the second “province of assassinations”, after KwaZulu-Natal, where izinkabi (hitmen) decide who should live and who should die – those who demanded accountability for the tenders for the Mbombela Stadium, such as Jimmy Mohlala, former speaker of the Mbombela council, and Sammy Mpatlanyane, former head of communications and spokesperson for the provincial department of culture, sport and recreation, were mysteriously eliminated in 2009 and 2010, respectively.
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To date, nobody has been arrested for the murders. James Nkambule, chairperson of the Congress of the People in the Ehlanzeni region, was poisoned with organophosphate in 2010. The perpetrators are still free.
NEC members alleged to have presided over mysterious killings on their watch are hardly likely to step aside from party and government activities when accused of wrongdoing, or even when charged in a court of law. One is more likely to meet a crook than an honest comrade in the NEC of the ANC today.
PROVINCES AND STRUCTURES IN DISARRAY
The North West provincial executive committee (PEC), formerly under Supra Mahumapelo, was dissolved after mass actions against corruption by the people of that province.
Since then, there has been no provincial elective conference or any democratic elections to replace the PEC. The province is still under interim leader Job Mokgoro, who was also elected premier in last year’s elections. There is no hope of a successful elective conference in the near future. Accountability of leaders to members has vanished.
Equally, the required Free State ANC provincial conference has still not taken place since the last one in 2018, which was presided over by former premier Ace Magashule and declared null and void by the courts. Free State branches challenged the validity of the conference after widespread rigging in the elections of delegates. Yet Magashule was elected secretary-general of the ANC the previous year without the provincial mandate.
In the Western Cape, the provincial elective conference has also not yet taken place. An interim provincial structure appointed by Luthuli House is still running the ANC in the province.
Members must prepare for this provincial conference after the worst provincial performance since 1994, with the ANC getting a mere 28% of the national and provincial votes.
In the Eastern Cape, the ANC elective conference deteriorated into a free-for-all, with delegates hurling chairs at one another. The conference eventually proceeded with an estimated one-third of delegates locked out of the venue. The provincial elective conference will now take place after the general elections.
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Meanwhile, Mpumalanga, with the second-largest ANC membership, had 223 branches that abstained from voting for the new leader after Mabuza was elected deputy president. With bogus branches that were formed purely for use as voting fodder by various slates, it has become a “Potemkin village” – an elaborate façade.
These are signs of a desperately sick political party.
Over the same period, the ANC Youth League has been run by a task team since the term of Collen Maine expired. The divisions created by factions in the mother body have ravaged the league, which has never recovered since the era of Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu, who left to form the EFF nearly eight years ago.
Task teams comprising former leaders have been assigned to resuscitate the structure, but – splintered by divisions – these have failed to convene a successful elective conference.
WITHOUT ELECTORAL REFORM, THE ANC WILL DIE
The lesson here is that without democratic reform, making MPs and provincial legislators individually accountable to voters and party leaders accountable to members, the ANC will die. The party cannot be rescued or renewed without both parliamentary and internal electoral reforms.
Parliamentary electoral reforms will empower the citizens of South Africa to elect MPs with integrity and hold them to account. The citizens themselves will decide on integrity standards without having to follow the definition of the ANC’s integrity commission in KwaZulu-Natal, which recently reinstated former eThekwini mayor Zanele Gumede, despite the charges she is facing relating to municipal waste tenders.
For its part, the integrity commission in Limpopo, which reinstated provincial treasurer Danny Msiza and Vhembe mayor Florence Radzilani, apparently sees nothing wrong with being implicated in the VBS Mutual Bank saga.
In 1955, the Freedom Charter proclaimed: “The people shall govern!”
But the lesson of this year is that in South Africa, the people do not govern. Neither do members in the ANC. Radical reform is needed to clean up the party and the nation. Only the citizens of the country can do this, because it is clear that a captured and fractured ANC is unequal to the task.
Discipline, integrity and trustworthiness are lacking in the current ANC leadership. It is a mere shadow of the ANC of Chief Albert Luthuli, Reverend James Calata and Professor ZK Matthews.
Restoring the integrity of the party requires a new way of electing leaders internally.
This means “one ANC member, one vote” in electing leaders from the president and deputy president to the chairperson, secretary-general, treasurer-general and other executive committee members. The present conference format method of branch delegates for electing leaders is obsolete.
We need to empower the ANC members to clean up and rescue the party – and our democracy.
Makgoale is an ordinary member of the ANC
