AS THE chaos-charged merry-go-round that is South African current affairs completes yet another loop, it is worth taking a step back and looking at the big picture. What is the current condition of the African National Congress (ANC)? What kinds of overarching, structural pressures are being brought to bear on it?
These are the organisational problems that affect it on an institutional level. It is not a comprehensive list, merely a selection of some of the most pertinent issues.
1. Cosatu (Congress of South African Trade Unions)
The trade union is crumbling. Not only has its biggest union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) been jettisoned by its central committee, but seven other affiliates loyal to it have taken a stand against the federation.
Numsa’s general secretary said of the decision: "It’s a dark day for the unity of workers but it should activate a revolution to move forward."
When an organisation starts to take itself to court, you know things are starting to seriously disintegrate. Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, meanwhile, is trapped in the twilight zone: unable to lead and unable equally to bring himself to leave.
There is much talk from Numsa about this all being driven by an interest in workers rights. No doubt there is some truth to that but, in all honesty, President Jacob Zuma lies at the heart of it. Factionalism around one man, a sickness that has already fundamentally crippled the ANC, now has Cosatu fully in its grip. And it’s spreading fast. The Democratic Alliance (DA) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) will be licking their lips.
The Ekurhuleni metro is home to many Numsa metalworkers and the ANC is already shaky in Gauteng.
2. Gauteng
The ANC in Gauteng has taken on its national counterpart on a touchstone issue: e-tolls. Its newly elected leadership, provincial chair Paul Mashatile and Premier David Makhura, have pinned their colours to the mast. You never would have seen something like this 10 years ago. The giant hegemonic monolith that was the ANC of the early 2000s is now fractured and confused.
In the provincial background, is a party membership that is openly hostile to Zuma, booing him at former president Nelson Mandela’s funeral and, according to a pre-election Ipsos survey, significantly in favour of him resigning over his home upgrades at Nkandla. Both of these things are compounded by waning electoral support in Africa’s biggest urban centre.
And, as the ANC itself has argued, the middle class is key. But it is out of touch with this key constituency and, unless it can turn the reception of e-tolls around, that relationship doesn’t seem likely to change.
3. Cadre deployment
The party’s linchpin policy, for so long able to deliver so much control over so many public and private institutions has, under Zuma, disintegrated into a shambolic bun fight for personal enrichment. Whereas control was once the desired outcome, chaos results. When first formulated, the policy was designed to bypass the constitution, making a mockery of the requirement that the public service be neutral. But with its collapse and Zuma’s use of it to shore up his own position, the quality of cadres has deteriorated — to such an extent that many positions of potential patronage are now legal competence war zones. This has dramatically hastened the tarnishing of the ANC’s reputation in government, where service delivery has regressed from a slow trot, to a stop, all the way to a march backwards into obscurity.
4. The ANC Youth League
The ANC Youth League, once a backbone constituency for Zuma, imploded. The expulsion of Julius Malema brought to a head an internal uprising, and the organisation, once the factory that produced so many stalwarts, was reduced to a wreck. Under administration for the good part of two years, it has started holding conferences again, only for one of the first to erupt in a spectacle of violence. The ANC might be able to patch together the semblance of a youth organisation by its next conference, but it will be the shadow of its former self. The mother body has broken many public institutions; but it seems that inclination has been turned inwards and is self-harming.
5. Murder and mayhem
There have been about 50 political assassinations in the last five years. In the run-up to Polokwane and the 2009 elections, ANC branches countrywide broke down into violence. Over the past month, an ANC councillor has been shot dead in Cape Town; Cosatu reported the body of one of its regional chairpersons was found floating in a dam, and Andile Lili, of the Ses’khona People’s Rights Movement was shot outside his home in Khayelitsha after his organisation’s standoff with the ANC in the province turned ugly. In Limpopo, Tlhalefi Mashamaite was re-elected as mayor of the Mogalakwena municipality, despite using more than R1m of public money on 27 personal bodyguards. When corruption is used to afford personal protection, graft has devolved into gang violence.
When ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu was shot in the face in a nonpolitical crime, the party released a statement in under an hour denying it was the consequence of any political grievance. But the speed with which it acted gives the game away. Rarely does it act so decisively or with such haste. This is a party that now operates under the gun, and the threat of being caught, pales into insignificance when measured against the possibility that one’s life might be snuffed out completely.
6. Parliament
Once the ultimate vestige of ANC control, a giant rubber stamp that uniformly approved everything placed in front of it without so much as a contradictory wink, the ANC national caucus is now trying to put out a hundred different fires. The president cannot appear before it for fear of embarrassment, denuding his standing and authority. It has been forced to resort to the most contorted dissembling to justify its whitewashing of the public protector’s report on Nkandla, further revealing Zuma’s frailty. Speaker Baleka Mbete is completely out of her depth and is without a semblance of control or legitimacy. The Economic Freedom Fighters now dominates proceedings inside Parliament and outside of it, and the president is forced to face a raft of damning litigation from the DA. The ANC’s safe haven has become a torture chamber.
The problem is worsened by its own mismanagement of that caucus. The party has been through myriad chief whips. Its biggest intellectual heavyweights have deserted national politics, leaving in their wake a series of bumbling, ill-prepared and poorly equipped novices who have neither the political wherewithal nor inclination for a real fight. Secretary-general Gwede Mantshe has taken to watching proceedings from the gallery, such is the chaos. On a good day, Parliament cannot even cobble together a quorum, as bill after bill is not passed due to its own disinterest.
7. Cabinet
Zuma runs the executive like a lottery. Only 12 members of the executive have retained their position over the course of his first five years. Since he was first elected, Zuma has overseen seven executive reshuffles — a staggering 101 changes. An environment like that negates stability and policy certainty and it trickles down, too. As of August 2013, 114 different directors-general served in either permanent or acting capacities since Zuma first came to office.
Corruption and maladministration have played their part, but the biggest contributing factor to the instability is Zuma’s personal politics: he thrives in chaos; it is how he retains control. If you never know when you are going to be fired, that engenders deference and loyalty; certainly acquiescence before his will. But the consequences for service delivery are catastrophic. And it shows.
8. Money and power
The ANC’s drop in support in the 2014 election, particularly in Gauteng, might have been laughed off as inconsequential by the party but it could do that only because it was a national election. In a local government election, a further decline, even by the same margin, will result in many more jobs being lost for the party. And as Zuma’s ANC is all about jobs and patronage, this is where you will see the real pain. Who knows what that kind of pressure will result in.
This year has cost the ANC a fair amount of money. Fewer MPs and MPLs mean less income for the party from the state. The party denies it is bankrupt but there is a clear trend over time, of more examples of its private financial distress. If you build a giant machine held together by patronage, you need something to dispense, or things fall apart. Money talks and the ANC has less of it.
These are some of the big factors exerting pressure on the ANC. You will notice that at the heart of the majority of them is Zuma.
Almost all parties are blind to objective analysis — their leader is always right and good, and would take a monumental amount of evidence to convince it otherwise. But Zuma is the golden thread running through the ANC’s problems.
It can continue to willingly suspend its disbelief. The evidence suggests that is a sure path to further disintegration. But if it doesn’t come to its senses soon enough, the centre will no longer hold. And, by that time, just like with the ANC Youth League, the resultant mess will not be fixable for a long time.
ANC deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa and President Jacob Zuma work up the crowd at the ANC’s Siyanqoba election rally at FNB Stadium in May. Picture: PUXLEY MAKGATHO
AS THE chaos-charged merry-go-round that is South African current affairs completes yet another loop, it is worth taking a step back and looking at the big picture. What is the current condition of the African National Congress (ANC)? What kinds of overarching, structural pressures are being brought to bear on it?
These are the organisational problems that affect it on an institutional level. It is not a comprehensive list, merely a selection of some of the most pertinent issues.
1. Cosatu (Congress of South African Trade Unions)
The trade union is crumbling. Not only has its biggest union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) been jettisoned by its central committee, but seven other affiliates loyal to it have taken a stand against the federation.
Numsa’s general secretary said of the decision: "It’s a dark day for the unity of workers but it should activate a revolution to move forward."
When an organisation starts to take itself to court, you know things are starting to seriously disintegrate. Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, meanwhile, is trapped in the twilight zone: unable to lead and unable equally to bring himself to leave.
There is much talk from Numsa about this all being driven by an interest in workers rights. No doubt there is some truth to that but, in all honesty, President Jacob Zuma lies at the heart of it. Factionalism around one man, a sickness that has already fundamentally crippled the ANC, now has Cosatu fully in its grip. And it’s spreading fast. The Democratic Alliance (DA) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) will be licking their lips.
The Ekurhuleni metro is home to many Numsa metalworkers and the ANC is already shaky in Gauteng.
2. Gauteng
The ANC in Gauteng has taken on its national counterpart on a touchstone issue: e-tolls. Its newly elected leadership, provincial chair Paul Mashatile and Premier David Makhura, have pinned their colours to the mast. You never would have seen something like this 10 years ago. The giant hegemonic monolith that was the ANC of the early 2000s is now fractured and confused.
In the provincial background, is a party membership that is openly hostile to Zuma, booing him at former president Nelson Mandela’s funeral and, according to a pre-election Ipsos survey, significantly in favour of him resigning over his home upgrades at Nkandla. Both of these things are compounded by waning electoral support in Africa’s biggest urban centre.
And, as the ANC itself has argued, the middle class is key. But it is out of touch with this key constituency and, unless it can turn the reception of e-tolls around, that relationship doesn’t seem likely to change.
3. Cadre deployment
The party’s linchpin policy, for so long able to deliver so much control over so many public and private institutions has, under Zuma, disintegrated into a shambolic bun fight for personal enrichment. Whereas control was once the desired outcome, chaos results. When first formulated, the policy was designed to bypass the constitution, making a mockery of the requirement that the public service be neutral. But with its collapse and Zuma’s use of it to shore up his own position, the quality of cadres has deteriorated — to such an extent that many positions of potential patronage are now legal competence war zones. This has dramatically hastened the tarnishing of the ANC’s reputation in government, where service delivery has regressed from a slow trot, to a stop, all the way to a march backwards into obscurity.
4. The ANC Youth League
The ANC Youth League, once a backbone constituency for Zuma, imploded. The expulsion of Julius Malema brought to a head an internal uprising, and the organisation, once the factory that produced so many stalwarts, was reduced to a wreck. Under administration for the good part of two years, it has started holding conferences again, only for one of the first to erupt in a spectacle of violence. The ANC might be able to patch together the semblance of a youth organisation by its next conference, but it will be the shadow of its former self. The mother body has broken many public institutions; but it seems that inclination has been turned inwards and is self-harming.
5. Murder and mayhem
There have been about 50 political assassinations in the last five years. In the run-up to Polokwane and the 2009 elections, ANC branches countrywide broke down into violence. Over the past month, an ANC councillor has been shot dead in Cape Town; Cosatu reported the body of one of its regional chairpersons was found floating in a dam, and Andile Lili, of the Ses’khona People’s Rights Movement was shot outside his home in Khayelitsha after his organisation’s standoff with the ANC in the province turned ugly. In Limpopo, Tlhalefi Mashamaite was re-elected as mayor of the Mogalakwena municipality, despite using more than R1m of public money on 27 personal bodyguards. When corruption is used to afford personal protection, graft has devolved into gang violence.
When ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu was shot in the face in a nonpolitical crime, the party released a statement in under an hour denying it was the consequence of any political grievance. But the speed with which it acted gives the game away. Rarely does it act so decisively or with such haste. This is a party that now operates under the gun, and the threat of being caught, pales into insignificance when measured against the possibility that one’s life might be snuffed out completely.
6. Parliament
Once the ultimate vestige of ANC control, a giant rubber stamp that uniformly approved everything placed in front of it without so much as a contradictory wink, the ANC national caucus is now trying to put out a hundred different fires. The president cannot appear before it for fear of embarrassment, denuding his standing and authority. It has been forced to resort to the most contorted dissembling to justify its whitewashing of the public protector’s report on Nkandla, further revealing Zuma’s frailty. Speaker Baleka Mbete is completely out of her depth and is without a semblance of control or legitimacy. The Economic Freedom Fighters now dominates proceedings inside Parliament and outside of it, and the president is forced to face a raft of damning litigation from the DA. The ANC’s safe haven has become a torture chamber.
The problem is worsened by its own mismanagement of that caucus. The party has been through myriad chief whips. Its biggest intellectual heavyweights have deserted national politics, leaving in their wake a series of bumbling, ill-prepared and poorly equipped novices who have neither the political wherewithal nor inclination for a real fight. Secretary-general Gwede Mantshe has taken to watching proceedings from the gallery, such is the chaos. On a good day, Parliament cannot even cobble together a quorum, as bill after bill is not passed due to its own disinterest.
7. Cabinet
Zuma runs the executive like a lottery. Only 12 members of the executive have retained their position over the course of his first five years. Since he was first elected, Zuma has overseen seven executive reshuffles — a staggering 101 changes. An environment like that negates stability and policy certainty and it trickles down, too. As of August 2013, 114 different directors-general served in either permanent or acting capacities since Zuma first came to office.
Corruption and maladministration have played their part, but the biggest contributing factor to the instability is Zuma’s personal politics: he thrives in chaos; it is how he retains control. If you never know when you are going to be fired, that engenders deference and loyalty; certainly acquiescence before his will. But the consequences for service delivery are catastrophic. And it shows.
8. Money and power
The ANC’s drop in support in the 2014 election, particularly in Gauteng, might have been laughed off as inconsequential by the party but it could do that only because it was a national election. In a local government election, a further decline, even by the same margin, will result in many more jobs being lost for the party. And as Zuma’s ANC is all about jobs and patronage, this is where you will see the real pain. Who knows what that kind of pressure will result in.
This year has cost the ANC a fair amount of money. Fewer MPs and MPLs mean less income for the party from the state. The party denies it is bankrupt but there is a clear trend over time, of more examples of its private financial distress. If you build a giant machine held together by patronage, you need something to dispense, or things fall apart. Money talks and the ANC has less of it.
These are some of the big factors exerting pressure on the ANC. You will notice that at the heart of the majority of them is Zuma.
Almost all parties are blind to objective analysis — their leader is always right and good, and would take a monumental amount of evidence to convince it otherwise. But Zuma is the golden thread running through the ANC’s problems.
It can continue to willingly suspend its disbelief. The evidence suggests that is a sure path to further disintegration. But if it doesn’t come to its senses soon enough, the centre will no longer hold. And, by that time, just like with the ANC Youth League, the resultant mess will not be fixable for a long time.
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