organisation must appeal for support. Implicit in the primacy of the organisation over society is a deeply held belief in the indispensability of the ANC. As if attesting to this, Tshwete treated parliament as nothing more than a temporary inconvenience, declaring: ‘I have to fly to Pretoria now.’
He could do this because he has the backing of the party bosses in parliament. But, contrary to the leadership’s expectations, the insistence on unity has often led to party fragmentation as voters compete over interests. As the sociologist Alvin Gouldner cautioned, ‘organisational survival is possible only in icy stasis in which security, continuity, and stability are the key terms’. Needless to say, the ANC members of the portfolio committee on safety and security chose to err on the side of ‘icy stasis’ and let him off the hook.
I welcome the attempts by the head of the ANC presidency, Smuts Ngonyama, to own up to the damage that the minister’s statements have done to the country. But the instinct for organisational face-saving kept showing through his retractions, which sometimes sounded like ‘non-retraction retractions’. I mean, it’s rather ludicrous for the ANC leadership to commit a major blunder such as implicating three senior public figures in a plot to oust the president, and then to turn around and blame the media. It is equally irresponsible to suggest that Tshwete’s comments were a matter of opinion. As for the argument that Tshwete did not have the benefit of hindsight that his critics have, may I simply suggest that we elect leaders precisely because they presumably exercise the political judgment needed to avert political disasters?
I have deliberately juxtaposed Nyamie’s and Smuts’s responses to suggest a choice for the president, the person where the buck ultimately stops. The choice is between the politics of organisational survival which has inevitably culminated in the current politics of intrigue on the one hand, and a politics of adaptation in which the party leadership goes beyond its narrow organisational concerns to address those of the broader society on the other. I submit that the mounting crises in the ruling party and government are intricately bound up with the politics of organisational survival.
And yet, potential crises will only be averted when there is a more open, less defensive organisational culture within the ANC. The question is whether the president will embrace and lead this politics of adaptation, or this will require a new leader. Mbeki has three more years to either dig us further into this rut or to permanently lead us out of it. The countdown begins.
Hybrid child Mbeki would do well to use selective retrieval
Sunday Independent, 13 January 2002
Ninety years of a struggle that culminated in a victory over one of the most heinous political systems of the 20th century do indeed call for a celebration. But history is important also because it can serve as a guide to present and future action. Indeed, a cursory look into the history of the ANC has helped me develop my own theory of President Thabo Mbeki’s leadership. The essence of my theory is that Mbeki is a hybrid child of the three different strands of African nationalism that have evolved since the late 19th century.
The first strand goes back to the early conservatism of ANC founders such as John Dube and Pixley ka Seme. Those leaders studied in the United States and became part of a growing global African nationalism led by people such as W E B Du Bois and Booker T Washington. Those early ANC leaders had a complete disdain for any notion of a radical mass politics. Dube even warned that ‘unless there is radical change soon, herein lies a fertile breeding ground for hot-headed agitators amongst us Natives, who might prove to be a bigger menace to this country than is generally realized today. Let us all labour to forestall them.’ How does this early history link to Mbeki’s leadership today, and what historical lessons can the president take from it?
There is indeed in Mbeki’s leadership style the patrician, cerebral politics of those early leaders. Contrary to the dismay we often express about tensions between the president and his socialist alliance partners, the historical record shows this is not a new tension in the ANC. After all, Mbeki’s idol Pixley ka Seme ousted the ANC president Josiah Gumede because Gumede suggested links with the Soviet Union. But Seme also presided over the most precipitous decline of the ANC. As Gail Gerhardt has put it: ‘Under his autocratic leadership, the ANC had declined in the 1930s into an annual conclave of his own sycophantic personal followers.’ The first historical lesson is that the current president must avoid Seme’s fate, much as he admires him.
Paradoxically, the second strand of African nationalism to inform Mbeki’s leadership comes from the radical nationalism of the ANC Youth League of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede, A P Mda, Robert Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. This generation ushered in the mass politics of the 1940s and 1950s. The more radical among them formed the PAC. Mbeki’s critique of white racism could only have come from the legacy of this generation. Seme would have recoiled at such audacity. But even for this second generation of nationalists, ideas such as pan-Africanism were still the domain of the political elites. It is of no small social significance that Sobukwe was called ‘Prof’. The historical lesson for Mbeki from this period is that even the most radical nationalism is not exempt from the demands of political decentralisation.
If the president is to overcome the limitations of the two nationalisms, he must look to the third strand of the community-based cultural nationalism of the black consciousness movement. This movement produced a new cultural vision of society through everyday popular culture, even though the movement itself was started by student elites. That’s the way to go, Mr President! As an academic friend of mine puts it: ‘While futures are indeed created, they are not typically created on a clean slate. It is hard for nations to leave their pasts behind. The ideological task is to retrieve that which is valuable, and to make this selective retrieval a political reality.’
II
THE STUMBLE
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