Gaye Davis
A HIGH-POWERED group of African intellectuals, professionals, trade unionists and corporate high-fliers are spearheading a bid to pull the Pan Africanist Congress back from the brink and provide South Africa with a left-of-centre party promoting Africanist ideals.
Known as the Concerned Africanists, the group spearheaded the notion of a historic national convention of Pan Africanists that the PAC planned to hold, possibly in September, ahead of fresh leadership elections.
Instead, the PAC went ahead with its conference, with predictably disastrous results. The revelations of financial maladministration and near-bankruptcy, the walk-out by its youth wing and the futile denials of disunity by President Clarence Makwetu and his deputy, Dr Motsoko Pheko, served only to reinforce the impression of a party in its final death-throes.
But the decision to hold a convention of Africanists to map a new route for the PAC could offer salvation. Ironically, it was arrived at by way of a compromise, when a no- confidence motion in the PAC leadership tabled by the Pan Africanist Students’ Organisation (PASO) was countered by one from the African Womens’ Organisation.
Effectively, the PAC’s leadership is now in a caretaker role: the convention will be organised by members of the Concerned Africanists group working with members of PAC structures. It will be followed by a PAC congress and fresh leadership elections — at present, only due in 1997.
While the Concerned Africanists group has the interests of the PAC at heart, its agenda for the convention extends much further than sorting out the many internal problems that have paralysed the party.
In its bid to forge a new unity among Africanists, the convention will also provide a platform for former members to “speak bitterness”. Members of PAC breakaway groups, including the youth-led Revolutionary Watchdogs and the United Kingdom-based Sobukwe Forum, are expected to attend.
A convention — with participation extending beyond PAC membership and structures and thus minimising the impact of internal factions — – is seen by the Concerned Africanists as the only way out for the PAC.
The group includes card-carrying PAC members and disaffected former members of the party, but is comprised largely of a floating membership of people who see in Pan Africanism an alternative to communism, narrow nationalism or tribalism.
A 13-member core committee has been meeting regularly since September last year and devised the notion of the convention, spelt out in a discussion document submitted to the PAC’s national executive committee and in the possession of the Mail & Guardian.
The document pulls few punches, describing the PAC as “politically sterile”, with a “petrified leadership” incapable of adapting to rapid political change or even realising that the PAC had been “completely obliterated” from the political scene.
It criticises the PAC’s inability to:
l Offer an alternative to the Reconstruction and Development Programme, instead of just warning people against being cheated a second time;
l Campaign for the release from prison of cadres of its military wing, Apla, who felt betrayed and abandoned;
l Make effective use of its parliamentary platform — leaving voters justified in feeling they’d wasted their ballots.
“At a time when future structures of political power and economic advancement are being mapped out through inter-party negotiations, the PAC is not yet equipped to play its meaningful role,” the document says.
The document suggests a complete overhaul of the PAC, in terms of leadership, organisation, policies and strategies. The ANC was steadily “alienating wide support by roller-coasting on the gravy train and failing to deliver” on its promises; the PAC “should exploit these deficiencies”.
What was needed was a fresh mandate, a clear programme of action and a leader whose image could be packaged to “optimise” the party, its values and its policies.