Shirley de VilliersThe ANC just doesn’t learn.
Remember its birthday celebrations in 2012? That was when the party’s then deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, quaffed champagne while telling the assembled – parched – proles that they could take pictures of the leaders toasting if they didn’t have bubbles of their own.
“The leaders will now enjoy the champagne, and of course they do so on your behalf through their lips,” he said with a straight face. It was one of the ANC’s more memorable Marie Antoinette moments.
Then Fikile Mbalula said, “hold my beer”.
Last week, while assorted elites took the ferry to Robben Island to mark the ANC’s 113th birthday, the party’s secretary-general was nowhere to be seen. Not one to slum it, he had reportedly taken the 12km trip to the heritage site on a luxury yacht – provided for free, according to the Sunday Times, by a businessman with government contracts.
It’s a gaffe made all the more glaring by the ANC’s ostensible attempts to “reconnect with our people” by holding its January 8 statement – an annual declaration of its priorities for the year ahead – at Khayelitsha’s Mandela Park stadium on Saturday.
The Khayelitsha stadium, which can accommodate just 22,000 people, is a step down for the party, which is accustomed to filling the large, mostly white-elephant World Cup stadiums.
Still, size apparently doesn’t count in the world of the ANC; getting down with the people does. Or so the party would have us believe.
In fact, it later emerged that the ANC only ended up in Khayelitsha because it left it to the last minute to try book Cape Town Stadium, and then Athlone, only to discover they were already spoken for. Mandela Park was a distant third choice.
Strangely, what the party didn’t have a problem booking was the popular Cape Town International Convention Centre. That’s where it held its swish, R57,000-a-head gala dinner on Friday night. After a good few rounds of golf, of course.
And then on to Khayelitsha, to rub shoulders with the people.
The golf, the gala dinner, the yacht – it’s a disjunct that speaks to the continent-wide chasm between the ANC and its rank-and-file supporters. And one of which the party is keenly aware. As national executive committee member Mzwandile Masina told Newzroom Afrika, the “strategic setback” – a handy euphemism for dropping 17 percentage points in the May 2024 election – required a “different mechanism” to reach the people.
Which, in part, is why it’s on a “renewal drive”. Yawn.
Renewal redux
Renewal, as you may know, is no new thing for Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC.
The president has been promising it as a “priority” in every January 8 statement he’s made since his first in 2018. It’s no new thing for the party either. Remember, 2012 was supposed to herald the “decade of renewal”. That the ANC hasn’t been made anew in that time is testament to just how ineffective its interventions have been.
In any case, as a pillar of renewal, the party is going to revitalise its branches so they are “grounded in everyday struggles of ordinary South Africans … by participating and supporting key community organisations”.
Branch renewal, in fact, has featured in pretty much every one of Ramaphosa’s January 8 statements. As has the quality of members and the not-at-all Orwellian-sounding need for their “ideological development” and political education. Go back 10 years and the party’s then president, Jacob Zuma, was banging on about the branches too.
It says much that the ANC has also prioritised water security and local government. The statement doesn’t actually say anything about how the party plans to fix our dire municipalities, so we assume it’s just going to leave them in the capable hands of its cadres. But water is the issue de jour – never mind that it has featured in various forms in January 8 statements since 2019, including through a “massive” infrastructure programme in 2021.
The other perennial issue is inclusive economic growth (still elusive) – set to be fixed through the perennial solutions of public employment programmes, entrepreneurship and SMME support, industrialisation, and a focus on high-growth industries among others. Oh, and, like last year, the digital economy too.
Then there’s crime and corruption. There’s little said in the statement about the corruption that dogs the ruling party – though you’ll be happy to hear the integrity commission is still being strengthened, as it has since 2018. There’s more detail on crime – rhetorical handwaving at an issue that undermines the economy.
There’s also the old chestnut of “national unity” – this time in the guise of the National Dialogue. Only, the ANC can hardly claim credit for that idea alone; it’s part of the statement of intent of the parties to the government of national unity (which Ramaphosa was at pains to defend in his address).
There’s more on international priorities, with South Africa chairing the G20 this year and seeking to leverage that position to speak out for the Global South, and advancing the African Agenda 2063. The rest is talk, making all the right noises about ongoing conflicts on the continent and, curiously, about the “consolidation” of democracy in, for example, Mozambique. Also curious is the ANC’s punting of the Liberation Movements Summit this year as a means to “strengthen the people’s liberation gains”. Tell that to the people of Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
So much for the priorities and tasks ahead.
A mediocre mash-up
The problem with the January 8 statement is that it always feels like a mash-up of previous years’ programmes of action. And that speaks to a particular kind of stasis: if it’s a peephole into the crises facing the country – and the ANC – then these remain unchanging: poor economic growth, crime and corruption, service delivery challenges, local government, infrastructure, poverty, inequality, unemployment, societal divisions, ineffective public institutions, education, land reform, gender-based violence, factionalism, integrity, credibility … and a partridge in a pear tree.
One could claim, as Ramaphosa does, that the “strategic task of advancing the National Democratic Revolution does not change year after year because this is based on the resolutions of the National Conference”.
That may be an attempt to deflect such criticism, but it belies the fact that nothing changes; progress is elusive and the party remains trapped – and the country with it – by the ANC’s factional battles, corruption, inefficiencies and organisational disarray.
And it is this that lies at the heart of the ANC’s abysmal election performance last year – the democratic revolution is failing the people on the ground. This, and a leadership that is entirely out of touch with the reality of its supporters.
Arguably, a focus on the branches could actually restore the ANC’s links with the people. But all this talk of fixing the branches means precisely nothing when Fiks is swanning around on a yacht and Motlanthe is guzzling champagne.
Ramaphosa’s claim that the ANC is the only organisation that can hold state power will be sorely tested if that remains the trajectory the party.
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