A DOCUMENT that dissects weaknesses crippling the African National Congress’s potential to overturn National Party dominance in the Western Cape and spells out a new strategic path for the party has given a fresh twist to the race for ANC leadership in the region.
The 16-page document, ANC: A Home for Everyone — A Political Plan for the ANC in the Western Cape, is an attempt to raise the level of debate ahead of the ANC’s Western Cape congress on September 27.
It says if the Western Cape is to be “liberated” from NP rule, the leadership debate should go beyond “the sterile politics” of “naming names and putting people into positions”, and seek instead to answer the question of who can provide the ANC with a vision to revitalise the organisation — and a plan to implement it.
“Most of our energy is spent on convening meetings, talking about recruitment and fighting petty fights — and not about building the ANC’s profile, asserting its leadership, discussing the range of issues which confront us politically and planning how we reach the masses of people who look to us for leadership,” the document says.
It decries a lack of political leadership, which saw the ANC unable to capitalise on confusion in NP ranks after the party withdrew from the government of national unity.
While the NP defined the issues around which the local government campaign was fought, the ANC remained defensive, unable to switch the debate to delivery, local issues and the calibre of its candidates.
It relied on nationally produced posters “almost irrelevant to the pace set by the NP” and was “by and large invisible”, with candidates’ posters either absent, late or too few.
Building a majority in the Western Cape meant overcoming a tendency “to be static in terms of our ideas, leadership and organisation”, and recapturing the vibrancy of the eighties “with its feel for mass work and the support we enjoyed”.
The document, coming at a time when the leadership race looks set to come down to being between justice minister Dullah Omar and Western Cape MEC for health and social services Ebrahim Rasool, is a significant intervention. Gauteng-based ANC MP Carl Niehaus this week announced his withdrawal in favour of Omar; support for ANC MP Tony Yengeni is uncertain.
No one disputes Omar’s leadership qualities. But there is concern that the demands of his weighty portfolio will see him function as an absentee leader when the region can least afford this.
There is also speculation that some of Omar’s support lies with those who would want him reliant on deputies to run the region, keeping control within more or less the same hands — people said to push a strong Africanist agenda.
Outgoing leader Chris Nissen says he wants new blood to take the ANC through to the 1999 elections, but it is known his unwillingness to stand lies partly with difficulties he has had from these quarters.
The document sheds light on these and other tensions.
Lamenting a tendency to be “static in terms of our ideas, leadership and organisation”, it urges “a new, open political culture … that treats debates on merit and doesn’t dimiss ideas with labels such as `colouredism’ or `africanism’ “.
This alienated activists, whether “stalwarts in Guguletu or UDF activists in coloured communities”, while a shut-down on debate meant ordinary members were “becoming cynical” about taking part in meetings because they felt decisions were taken by “factions, cliques and cabals”.
A “tendency to increasingly narrow the base of decision-making and power within the ANC” was alienating not only “citizens, members and branches but also anyone in the ANC not privy to a certain group, or an inner circle of the provincial executive committee [PEC].”
Inclusiveness should be the starting point for broadening the ANC’s Western Cape base, which meant accepting the need to make the ANC “comfortable for coloured communities”.
As the majority, and the ANC’s only hope of expanding its one-third support to the 45%, it needed to win an election, and coloured communities had to be at the centre of any strategy. Yet calls for their increased involvement met the “stock response” that the Western Cape was once a coloured labour preference area
This ignored social ills, including gang violence, unemployment and lack of housing — and assumed, falsely, that because apartheid was applied differentially, so should solutions.
Instead, delivery should be balanced to respond to severe backlogs in the African community “and simultaneously affirm coloureds as an important and vital strand in the South African rainbow”. The concept of “African leadership” also had to be examined.
Questioning whether it was still relevant, the document said the notion was a “bone of contention for many progressive coloured activists who believe there are unequal relations within the ANC and unequal treatment of coloured and African communities and comrades.
“We need to assert our common Africanness despite our diversity and to insist the ANC is an organisation of equal members.”
The crux of the problem was the role the PEC should be playing in concert with regional alliance leaders in the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party.
The PEC could no longer operate largely in isolation of ANC government and constitutional structures, believing that it was the political centre and everything else “just levels of deployment”.
It needed to rethink its role as an “inclusive political centre” that made sense of events, co- ordinated the different nodes of ANC power and resources and served as a point of accountability. “If the PEC and the alliance leadership does not play this role, then the ANC is incoherent, leadershipless and without direction.
“This may be the crux of our current problem,” the document says.