The digression of the discussion papers that were published last week by the ANC ahead of its important national general council (NGC) in September are the epitome of the curate’s egg — good in places, though not very many.
Although the mainstream media are likely to focus on just one word, “nationalisation”, the economic transformation paper is a reasonably cogent attempt to grapple with some of the key issues hindering social transformation and the restructuring of the economy.
But, on the whole, the papers present a confusing picture about the ANC’s position.
Having read them all, I am none the wiser as to the role that the ruling party sees for the state.
Is it, as I believe it should be, about doing less but better?
The council is a significant event because, with the ANC’s national conference taking place only every five years, there are few occasions for the broader membership to engage the leadership on matters of policy and politics.
The emphasis is supposed to be policy and political strategy rather than leadership, but cast your mind back to the Pretoria council in 2005 and you will recall that it was the beginning of the end for Thabo Mbeki. It was used as a litmus test of his political support and that of his opponent, Jacob Zuma.
Kgalema Motlanthe emerged as an ostensible peace-broker while in doing so astutely positioning himself for the accession — albeit interim — to the presidency when Mbeki was dethroned in spring 2008.
Now many ANC traditionalists long for the stable, composed hand of leadership that Motlanthe provided during those days and weeks. Under Zuma the sense of crisis — of dysfunctional systems, of chaotic political management and of opportunism and ideological superficiality — has deepened.
Speaking at a Jacana-Idasa event last week, Raymond Suttner, ANC and South African Communist Party veteran, spoke in emphatic terms of how the modern ANC has become an ideology-free zone.
At the time it was easy to put this down to Suttner’s sense of personal embitterment but, after reading the council’s strategy and tactics document, his argument appears more convincing.
The document is — or is supposed to be — the centrepiece, the pivot around which all the other policy and political stuff should rotate. But the traditional examination of the “balance of forces” that is the heart of its analytical purpose is at best anaemic, at worst, vacuous and amateurish.
Take this excerpt from paragraph 43: “However, perceptions that we are soft on corruption and of widespread corruption continue to persist, not only in the media but also amongst our people. The more recent anti-corruption measurers through the high-level inter-ministerial committee on corruption and the strategy it must develop and monitor must therefore be profile [sic].”
Answers please, by postcard, as to what the second sentence means. So fastidious in everything, from the grammar to the dialectics, Oliver Tambo must be spinning in his grave. The document must have been written by a committee, because it is one hell of a camel. Bring back Joel Netshitenzhe, all is forgiven!
For those of us who happen to believe, for a variety of reasons — some personal, some less subjective — that it is not in the interests of South Africa or its democracy for the ANC to be in a permanent state of crisis, the ragged nature of the strategy and tactics document and the lack of depth of many of the other six discussion documents are a cause for profound concern.
In response to Suttner last week another ANC veteran, Ronnie Kasrils, told the audience that he had not lost faith in the ANC despite its many problems and argued for a “revolution within a revolution”.
Although Suttner argued for abandoning the ANC and establishing a movement outside of the ANC that sounded remarkably like the original ANC, Kasrils insisted that the ANC can be saved from within, if only it could restore to centre-place two founding documents — the Freedom Charter and the Constitution (the country’s, that is, not the ANC’s), neither of which get more than a passing mention in the NGC papers.
I agree; he is right. There are still many good people within the ANC, there are still many good things that come from the ANC and it remains the only political organisation capable of uniting the nation across class and race.
The Democratic Alliance, despite its impressive gains in the Western Cape and the imminent acquisition of the Independent Democrats, is a very long way from attaining an equivalent or even competitive level of political legitimacy.
But the question is whether the good people have enough political space inside the ANC, or do they get crowded out by the opportunists who are determined to milk the cow dry, accumulating the means to asset-strip the state by accumulating political power within the ANC?
On this front the council’s papers offer only sparse cause for optimism. The paper on leadership renewal, discipline and organisational culture acknowledges the extent to which factional in-fighting has colluded with the financing of those factions to encourage corrupt tendencies, yet offers only tentative prescriptions.
There is a lack of logic in the paper on the media. The analysis of the ownership and lack of diversification is perfectly plausible, but the proposed solution — a media tribunal — will cause far more trouble than it is worth.
The notion that you can regulate the media in this age is something that even the Chinese have pretty much abandoned. Indeed, one cannot resist the temptation that this is the ANC’s old control tendency at work — we will decide which corrupt guys are exposed.
Get your own house in order, clarify the message and the brand will emerge cleaner and more persuasive. That is the way to win the media battle, not through dubious and probably unconstitutional legislation.
But whether the ANC has the courage and the leadership to grasp its own nettles remains to be seen. As well as telling us whether Zuma will survive to the 2012 national conference or not, the council will give us all a fairly clear picture of whether it can do so and of whether the good guys can yet prevail to restore stability, internal accountability and integrity, and the political fundamentals that originally carried it so far.