Once revered in Africa and respected around the world, the African National Congress (ANC), the oldest liberation movement on the continent and the political home of greats like Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, is in shambles.
The ‘party of Madiba’ is headed towards a year-end elective conference that is more likely to lead to yet further divisions than heal its deep splits.
That the ANC was ‘in trouble’ has been evident since around the middle of the first decade of this century, and matters have only become more dire since.
Part of the problem was that ordinary South Africans, as represented by Cosatu’s 1.8 million members, have been under the whip economically, especially during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Anti-apartheid leader and African National Congress member Nelson Mandela is released from Victor Verster Prison outside Cape Town, South Africa after 27 years as a political prisoner on February 11, 1990.
Photo credit: File | AFP
In a society where the ‘social contract’ with a once-revered liberation movement, in government for 28 years, has frayed to the point of collapse, the ANC’s ‘liberation premium’ had long since evaporated.
Efforts at board-based economic empowerment have failed to produce a large emergent ‘black’ middle class – ‘black’, in this context, being a political term with pseudo-racial connotations.
With repeated multi-hour power outages becoming part and parcel of ‘daily life’, and with dozens of municipalities in financial crisis – some so dysfunctional that they have been taken over by regional authorities – there is no more reserve of goodwill left for the ANC to draw on.
The local government elections of last year showed beyond question what was already evident from previous polls: the ANC’s fortunes are in a tailspin of decline, which may become terminal.
Supporters of the South Africa ruling African National Congress (ANC) party at an election campaign rally.
Photo credit: EyePress via AFP)
They were angered by the ANC government’s failure to live up to a three-year wage agreement with unionised government employees. And the ANC itself, which has repeatedly failed to pay its own workers’ salaries, is a month behind even as the congress kicked off, with September salaries unpaid.
Women wearing African National Congress regalia dance as they wait to be addressed by former South African President Jacob Zuma following the postponement of his corruption trial outside the Pietermaritzburg High Court in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, on May 26, 2021.
Photo credit: Phill Magako | AFP
With the economy barely operating, the second quarter GDP declining by 0.7 percent off a first-quarter growth of just 1.9 percent, there is hardly anyone, rich or poor, not asking that same question in various ways.
Before Zuma was a major national and African figure, he was a little-known provincial official in his homeland KwaZulu-Natal province, a former member of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and generally considered “an affable fellow who is likely to ask for a loan, given half a chance”, as one ANC former senior figure, also with an MK background, put it.
Read: In S. Africa, it’s full-scale battle for heart and soul of ANC
During apartheid and as an underground member of MK, one survived, literally, on the goodwill, offerings and help, including financial, of a small circle of trusted friends – anything else led inevitably to disaster.
African National Congress (ANC) President Cyril Ramaphosa (R) toasts with former President Jacob Zuma (C) and Secretary General Ace Magashule (L) during the African National Congress' (ANC) 107th anniversary celebrations at the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban on January 12, 2019.
Photo credit: Rajesh Janitilal | AFP
Civil organisations involved in poverty alleviation and educational outreach, most non-governmental organisations, most journalists, many academics and even university student union bodies were all under constant observation and subject to disruption from agents provocateur, another of apartheid Pretoria’s specialities.
In the late 1970s, for example, more than half of the National Union of Students of South Africa (NUSAS) executive committee of about 30-plus students at the University of the Witwatersrand turned out to be police spies, most paid, some blackmailed.
The situation was no different at the University of Cape Town or any institution where any view other than the state’s might be heard in public.
The repression was so severe that one could not publish images of people designated by the apartheid authorities – the obvious instance being Mandela himself – or quote him verbally or refer to him without running the risk of indefinite political detention and prosecution for ‘promoting terrorism’, attracting a lengthy prison term if found guilty.
In such an environment – with ‘askaris’ , the name the apartheid state gave to ‘turned’ anti-apartheid operatives – paranoia ran rife among underground operatives.
Mbeki, the arch diplomat, had maneuvered a young Cyril Ramaphosa, Mandela’s pick as successor, out of the deputy ANC leader’s position in the ANC’s first post-unbanning internal elective conference in Durban in 1991.
No one, it seemed, could restore peace to South Africa without stopping the warring among Zulus in particular, along with some parallel conflicts drawn along similar lines and affecting the Xhosas of the Eastern Cape and even Cape Town, where many Xhosas had sought a better life.
It was that role that led him to become a senior figure in the ANC leadership in the 1990s and put him on the path to the presidency.
Removed as South Africa’s deputy president by Mbeki to “deal with his personal problems”, Zuma seemed to be done as a politician, but the sidelining only gave him time to plan his comeback.
In this file photo taken on August 2, 2008 former South African president Nelson Mandela (C) ANC president Jacob Zuma (L) and South African president Thabo Mbeki (R) arrive on stage during the Mandela 90th birthday ANC celebration at Loftus stadium in Pretoria, South Africa .
Photo credit: Gianluigi Guercia | AFP
That matter, for Zuma, is still pending. The trial proper started only recently after lengthy pretrial stalling tactics by Zuma’s defence team, a strategy he has used repeatedly and which has been characterised as the “Stalingrad defence”, which is to dig in and fight over every inch.
Like Zuma, after the latter’s jailing last year for contempt of the Constitutional Court, Shaik, who is said to be in relatively good health today, was given early release from his long jail term on highly questionable grounds of his imminent demise.
Oliver Tambo, President of ANC, holds a baby, on September 27, 1987 during the Children Under Apartheid conference, in Harare.
Photo credit: AFP
Read: Gloves come off in fight for future of Mandela’s ANC
The sorry tale of the demise of a once ‘glorious revolutionary movement’ seems now relentless – almost regardless of any success in getting the power back on reliably and giving services to frustrated and angry citizens – the ANC is now saddled with an entirely different aura than it once had.
Even then, the problems for Madiba’s beloved ANC will not be over – the party has been kicked out of power positions in several of the country’s major metros and does not look likely to regain it any time soon, except perhaps briefly as coalition alignments shift around.
