Wally Mbhele
The African National Congress should radically change its national executive committee (NEC) to accommodate more than double the number of current officials, Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Peter Mokaba will propose to its December conference.
In the discussion document on leadership that he prepared for the conference, Mokaba calls for the reinvention of the ANC. He proposes the NEC should include all Cabinet ministers and their deputies, the parliamentary speaker and her deputy as well as three officials each from the womens and youth leagues.
A range of civil-society representatives from, among others, business, labour, the intelligentsia, rural areas, indians and whites with at least one person from the presidents office and nine provincial organisers form part of Mokabas plans for the reinvention.
His call for a widening of the NEC is part of the same document that questions the South African Communist Partys role and apparently takes a swipe at the Congress of South African Trade Unions for its recent discussions of forming a left-wing party if the ANC continues with its right-wing economic policies.
Referring to these threats of a break-up and the establishment of a labour/socialist organisation … and since the ANC is not going to entertain left-wing childishness, Mokaba says they may as well take an early departure into the wilderness they have chosen for themselves.
He also takes a serious look at leadership strife within the ANCs provincial structures and says the party lacks programmes of socialisation of new members. This failure, he says, led to many problems of ill-discipline within the party.
The last two ANC conferences and the [proportional representation] list processes saddled us with these problems … At present any 100 individuals with R12 each can meet and give the ANC a new branch leader who has no knowledge of what being ANC is.
The fact that President Nelson Mandela will step down as ANC president, says Mokaba, will make the conference a defining moment for the ANC and the party will have to constitute a leadership that must take the country into the next millennium.
The current NEC has 56 members and, according to Mokaba who is an executive member the functions and responsibilities of reconstructing, building and developing a new nation has simply stretched the narrow margin of the ANCs leadership and cadreship.
He cautions the ANC about the practice of individuals amassing several positions for themselves, which he describes as bad management and selfishness, that has nothing to do with either commitment or building the organisation.
According to Mokaba, new tasks require new strategies, even if it means a progressive development of of the old ones. These, he says, call for a complete review of the way the ANC has been doing things, and a review of the entire party.
Mokaba stresses that the ANC cannot respond to these challenges by simply rearranging individuals in leadership.
In the summary of his proposal, Mokaba suggests that the present top six positions remain unchanged. Those are: the ANC president and deputy, general secretary, the deputy treasurer and the national chair.
In total, he sees the NEC with a total of 126 members, including premiers of all seven provinces controlled by the ANC and 10 co-opted members. He does not say where the latter should be drawn from.
BLURB: The ANC will have to constitute a leadership that must take the country into the next millennium