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Howard Barrell:OVER A BARREL
Try as I might – and try I have – I can find no upset or sensation in the electoral lists agreed by the leadership of the African National Congress last weekend (February 14). The party’s left wing appears happy and so, too, does the right. In that lies a triumph of political party management.
So the broad church that is the ANC holds. It holds until at least after the election, likely in May, when circumstances will again invite it to confront the difficult issues before us. Among the more significant are proposals to deregulate the labour market to ease the creation of badly needed new jobs.
It is not certain that the ANC will, even then, take up that invitation. It is quite capable of merely giving history a wave and muddling on, as it has for most of its 87 years. For to take up the challenge of the future may mean losing old comrades in the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).
Whether or not the ANC’s courage fails it then, on the evidence provided by its lists and until at least after the election we can all sit back and relax. We will not be required to think much over the next four months. The survival of the ANC as a broad front means that the politics of stupefaction are still upon us. Worn-out old standards of broad front politics, such as the “national democratic revolution”, will fly over the ANC’s kraal during the election period. Unity around loyalties formed in a bygone era will remain the party’s bedrock. And our politics will continue to be preoccupied largely with the past and with whether we share the same skin colour now or shared trenches before the flood of 1994.
The politics of the future – of precise choices made to advance or retard particular interests and outcomes regardless of race – are still some way off in South Africa.
There are, notwithstanding this, some curious placements on the ANC’s lists for the nine provincial legislatures, for the 200 seats in the national assembly for candidates representing it from the provinces, and for the remaining 200 in the national assembly for its national representatives, its A Team.
Most attention has fallen on the last – the “national to national” list. For example, how does Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Pallo Jordan come in at number six on this list? Given that the reason can’t possibly be hard work, which of his virtues has escaped our notice?
Moreover, how do people such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, found guilty of being an accessory to assault and kidnapping, and Pat Matosa, a Free State ANC member with a conviction for attempted murder, appear on the ANC’s lists despite the organisation’s very public undertaking to us to exclude people with non-political criminal records?
Why do people like Alfred Nzo, Andrew Mlangeni and Laloo Chiba – who have seen better, healthier days – persist in standing again for the National Assembly? And why are they voted on to the lists when there is younger and more vibrant talent available?
And how are members of a party which steadfastly refuses to test its own support at the polls, namely the SACP, allowed to occupy at least nine of the top 30 positions on the ANC’s national list for the National Assembly? These are all members of the SACP’s politburo or central committee: Minister of Welfare and Population Development Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi (number nine on the list), Cosatu president John Gomomo (14), Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi (19), Minister of Public Works Jeff Radebe (20), Deputy Minister of Defence Ronnie Kasrils (22), retiring Cosatu general secretary Mbhazima Shilowa (24), SACP chair Charles Nqakula (25), SACP deputy secretary Jeremy Cronin (26) and Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin (30).
The answer to all these questions, as suggested at the outset, is party management. It’s a case of balancing this thing with that, the left with the right, the brain-dead with the sentient, and the far out with the centre to achieve your aims as party manager.
In this endeavour, the South African electoral system, as it is now evolving, is a party manager’s dream – particularly if you are a leader of the ANC.
As an ANC leader, you can allow – and the ANC leadership has allowed – quite a bit of democracy from below in drawing up the lists for provincial legislatures and for provincial representatives to the national assembly. Why? Because you can afford to feel quite safe doing so. ANC rules allow you to change the top fifth of the names on the two lists and empower the ANC president to appoint the party’s candidate for premier in a province. And you can change your list more or less at will before or after the election.
Moreover, your party’s “deployment committee”, on which you have placed a majority of allies, enables you to move an individual from one party post or position on a party list to another – or to a job in a parastatal corporation, given that you are in power. Your control of the national government also means you superintend the provinces’ purse strings. Together, these mechanisms give you any number of ways to control dissidence – actual or potential.
But the final sanction at your disposal is expulsion of an individual from the party. Under the rules governing provincial legislatures and the national assembly, this would mean that the individual concerned would lose his or her seat in Parliament and, with it, probably his or her livelihood.
In the case of your national candidates for the National Assembly – your A Team – you would have almost all these party and state-based controls, plus one more. And that is that you, as leader, would see to it that you controlled far more than just the top 20% of this particular list. In drawing up this list, you would insist on more intrusive “strategic political intervention”, as Kgalema Motlanthe, the ANC secretary general, delicately termed it on February 15. Under any number of guises – such as getting sufficient women, intellectuals or workers on the list, or appointing a new chair for, say, the Potato Growers’ Benevolent Fund – you could weed out the awkward squad with ease.
What this means is that there are considerable opportunities to create a party of fawns and mindless apparatchiks. Moreover, the mechanisms are in place for a dangerous gulf to develop between people and their legislative representatives. The system arguably makes those representatives more answerable to their party leaderships than to any social or geographic constituency among the population.
Much as I might bemoan the ANC’s continued existence as a broad front, it is to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s credit that the awkward squad are still well represented on the ANC’s lists – this time around. But it must be oh so tempting to have done with them, and it will become ever more so.
In that sense the party manager’s dream could become the democrat’s nightmare.