Jeremy Cronin, SACP leader,writes that the ANC cannot sit back and enjoy its honeymoon
AT least three complex dynamics will be at play in the ANC’s conference. The first, the leadership issue has, rather tediously, been the focus of considerable media attention.
Emerging out of three decades of illegality, the ANC has had to develop a working unity across several generations of leading cadres. The past 45 years have, after all, been punctured by sharp discontinuities, periods of deep retreat and of rapid advance.
This is reflected in the current leadership of the ANC. There are distinct generations: roughly the Mandela, the Mbeki and the Ramaphosa generations. These are leaderships thrown up by the hectic periods of struggle. There are also some gaps between them.
It would be surprising if there were not some differences in habit and outlook, generated by diverse political experiences. This diversity is a source of strength. But the diversity has also meant that, over the last four years, the ANC leadership has had to learn to find each other … and sometimes it hasn’t. Much of what has featured, often superficially, in the press as personality battles, and as succession struggles, has its deeper roots in this objective reality.
A second dynamic concerns the place of an emergent South Africa in the world. It marks the return of an internal inquiry into the legacy of liberation movement ideology. Progressive Third World liberation movements, like the ANC, have been effected strategically, no less than communist parties, by the rapid demise of the old two-bloc global system. The theory was that, post-independence, the liberation movement would be able to use state power and the existence of an alternative bloc, to achieve a relative delinking from the imperialist system. In this way it could hope to gain breathing space for national development. This was sometimes, and inaccurately, called the “non- capitalist” path.
We can debate the merits of this paradigm, but it would now be an academic debate. Clearly, we have to reconstruct and develop South Africa in a world as we find it, not how we might dream it to be. Does the ANC’s historic anti- imperialism remain valid? Or are we now, unproblematically, returning to that benign global picnic, the “family of nations”?
The acclaim our negotiated transition has received, and the domestic need for the Mandela magic among a number of failing Western leaders (Major, Mitterand and Clinton), can easily lead to misperceptions in our ranks about current global realities. Perhaps President Nelson Mandela’s recent frank characterisation of United States aid to our country (“peanuts”), and the present wobbles around the Rooivalk helicopter are the signs of something else.
But the most challenging dynamic, which maps itself partly on to the first, is the ANC coming to terms with its own substantial electoral victory. Nice problem to have, you will say. True. But it is a complex challenge nonetheless.
Since the April elections, the ANC has found itself strung out across a series of institutions (governmental and parliamentary), at national, provincial and now increasingly at local levels. We are now confronted with the challenge of maintaining and deepening a common strategic sense of purpose across this wide terrain.
More seriously, we also have to find a balance between the ANC as the overwhelmingly dominant party of government, and the ANC as the movement and mouthpiece of the historically oppressed majority. Who can doubt that, if we threw enough matches about, we could ignite a Bosnia in our country? Reconciliation, reassurance, building a common sense of nationhood across deep divides, remains important responsibilities, and only the ANC can lead the way.
But we cannot also just mark time while we savour the post- April honeymoon. Real redistribution, real reconstruction, based on the needs and driven by the aspirations of the majority, have to happen. Otherwise the honeymoon will be engulfed by the all-round social, economic, ungovernable, and just plain moral crisis that still afflicts our country.
The ANC conference will be debating how to get the balance right between reconciliation and redistribution, between ruling party and movement. There are no neat formulae, just some general advice. The best I’ve heard comes from a grassroots activist who said it in three syncopated sentences, as he poked me in the chest: Don’t rock it. Row it. With both oars, dammit.