funding, resources and training for ANC members from the SACP’s main backer, the Soviet Union, and brought dedicated strategic thinkers, such as Joe Slovo, into the ANC.
Unfortunately, as the ANC celebrates its centenary, antidemocratic leaders and groups seem to have a stranglehold on the party. Members are deeply divided over the spoils of government and its current leader Zuma is being accused of using state resources to enrich his family, friends and political allies.
Key ANC leaders wrote South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution, which set out a clear framework for a new South Africa. Globally it is accepted as among the most progressive, but the ANC appears to find it very difficult to internalise its democratic value system and apply it to its own day-to-day practices. The intelligence and security forces, as well as the police, are routinely used in ANC leadership battles. Corrupt officials appear to be selectively prosecuted as part of campaigns to sideline opponents. One fears that these cloak-and-dagger-style operations are a sign that rogue elements within the ANC’s military and intelligence wings have now become dominant.
Control of the leadership of the ANC has now become a no-holds-barred war between different factions. Winning office increasingly translates into control of state patronage and the ability to put oneself above the law. Or, at least, some ANC leaders seem to think this way.
The contrast between the moral authority of a Nelson Mandela, an Oliver Tambo or an Albert Luthuli, and the murkiness of a Jacob Zuma, who is seeking re-election as party leader this year, shows how far the ANC has regressed. In his 2007 campaign to become leader of the ANC many Zuma supporters went ‘100% Zulu’ in their support for the man from KwaZulu-Natal – out of the window went the inclusive ethos of the ANC of old.
The DA is currently appealing to the Supreme Court of Appeal to have corruption charges against Zuma, which were dropped in 2009 on a technicality, revisited. If successful, Zuma, a standing president, may have to reappear in the dock.1
In the midst of the grinding poverty endured by the ANC’s bedrock constituency, levels of corruption, wastage of public resources and conspicuous consumption by elected officials have rocketed. The ANC in government appears to have made the mistake that all the failed African liberation movements have made – enriching the few, mostly those who are politically connected, rather than the poverty-stricken masses.
Increasingly, top leaders in the ANC are chosen by small cliques – and at lower levels on slates attached to the top leaders. Leaders are elected not on their holistic leadership merit, but for how best they can balance factional and patronage interests. This means that the most dynamic leaders are unlikely to reach the top.
Blade Nzimande, the general secretary of the SACP, and a close ally of Zuma, has said publically that leaders of the ANC, COSATU and his SACP are now regularly using money to buy votes in internal ANC elections. ‘It is blood money, often gotten corruptly. They go around buying delegates. If those people can capture our government they will sell this country to the highest bidder,’ said Nzimande.
COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi has warned: ‘If we do not do something about corruption we will find ourselves in a predatory state, where the social order of feeding will be as it is alleged in Angola and Kenya.’ This was after a multibillion-rand ArcelorMittal deal in which family members and friends of President Jacob Zuma controversially received valuable shares in the Sishen mine. In such a predatory state, Vavi said, ‘the first family becomes the first to feed, followed by the cabinet and provincial leadership, and our people come last to find absolutely nothing – not even bones’.
In the past, genuinely democratic leaders have sprung up from within or come from outside to move the ANC back onto the right path. Recently, a number of new civil groups have been formed to try and do just this. Corruption Watch, launched last year by trade unions and civil groups, and the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC), launched by such luminaries as the former speaker of parliament Frene Ginwala, are examples of two such organisations. But unless truly democratic groups take control of the ANC, and elect a better calibre of leaders, the ANC may lose its way completely.
ARISE magazine, March/April 2012
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