Steven Friedman
WORM’S EYE VIEW
Trevor Ngwane makes an unlikely national trend. Ngwane is a Johannesburg councillor who was suspended from the African National Congress because he criticised the city’s iGoli 2002 plan, which includes privatising and commercialising public assets.
Since Ngwane is hardly a household name, and union or South African Communist Party leaders who level similar criticism have not been suspended, why is this of interest outside the Johannesburg ANC?
Firstly, because Ngwane is the first ANC member since 1990 to be disciplined for voicing a policy difference. In exile, dissent on policy could mean expulsion. But, since the ANC again became a legal movement, it has been held together by an implied bargain in which policy differences are allowed, but attacks on the leadership’s ethics (Bantu Holomisa) or alleged co- operation with the apartheid police (Sifiso Nkabinde) are not. Now loyalty to policy is also, it seems, expected.
It may be no accident that this coincides with the ascendancy of the ANC exile group – it does seem like an attempt to revive the exile approach.
Second, Ngwane’s fate seems part of a wider attempt to impose more uniformity on the ANC.
One example is the opening speeches to their legislatures of ANC premiers: all echoed the themes earlier struck by President Thabo Mbeki rather than proposing their own agendas. The fact that this generation of premiers was chosen by the national leadership does not seem coincidental.
Another is the messages by party high- ups to the unions and the SACP, urging them to fall in line – perhaps most significant was the call to the Congress of South African Trade Unions by national chair Mosiuoa Lekota, who owes his position to a rebellion against uniformity imposed from the top, to exercise “revolutionary discipline” by resolving policy differences in private.
Does this matter? Yes, but not in the way which ANC opponents claim.
In a multi-party democracy, there is nothing undemocratic about parties insisting on policy uniformity since those who do not like the line are free to join or form other parties.
Whether parties demand uniformity is a matter of tactics, not principle. ANC leaders could claim, with justification, that all they are doing is heeding the call of critics that it become a political party with a common position.
But principle never operates in a vacuum – it needs to be applied in concrete conditions. And in this society the move towards an ANC “party line” is a threat both to it and to democracy.
To understand why it may be a problem for the ANC, consider a similar movement, the Indian Congress Party. Shortly after the Congress’s ascent to power, a faction won control and used it to try to silence internal differences. The result was a series of breakaways by Cabinet members. The rot was only stopped when prime minister Jawarhalal Nehru regained control of the party and used it to insist on respect for internal difference. Courtesy of Nehru, Congress politicians could, and did, express differing views. This made the Congress government often raucous and discordant. But it did maintain it in power for almost three decades.
So movements such as the Congress and the ANC hang together not despite but because of publicly expressed differences. Stamp on them and dissenters may leave – respect them and they stay.
There is, perhaps, also a less obvious lesson – that liberation movements can usually retain coherence without imposing a line because that which unites them is more important than their divisions.
Not that differences over, say, economic policy are trivial. But parties such as the Congress – or the ANC – are bound together by common symbols and loyalties, no matter how much members differ over policy. That is why commentators who continually see in policy disputes signs of an ANC split repeatedly get it wrong. The bonds remain stronger than the divides – as long as no one tries to silence the differences.
Therefore, if we want to check the health of the ANC alliance, we need to look for the opposite signs to those now emphasised -the more differences are expressed openly, the longer the alliance is likely to last. Only when diversity is no longer expressed in public may the ANC be in trouble. So, the more Ngwanes there are, the more the ANC may be in danger.
If the new approach to ANC difference does signal a revival of the exile approach, ANC leaders may care to consider that it is far easier to impose uniformity in exile than in open politics. That is why the ANC operated in exile with a tight policy line but, whenever it has functioned openly, it has respected internal difference.
Surely, now that the ANC is in government, the leadership can impose a common line because it hands out posts? But in contrast to many other countries on the continent, ANC figures who are passed over can opt for business or other private activity, as scores have since 1994. A common line may not split the ANC – but it could weaken it severely by ensuring that talented members pursue other interests.
Why is this a threat to democracy?
So far, there are few Ngwanes because ANC leaders know that wholesale purges would destroy it. So, the odd example is made of junior figures, while high-profile leaders who dissent remain within the ANC and subtler measures such as the allocation of posts – or perhaps, getting someone such as Lekota to send the message that public dissent is discouraged – are used to signal that too much difference is undesirable.
As long as that persists, the alliance is held together by the bonds many analysts fail to understand.
That could leave us with the worst of both worlds. If the alliance dissolves into several parties proposing differing policies, the result may be more vigorous democracy. But a likelier outcome is that it will survive as long as too heavy a hand is not used to impose a line – but that differences will increasingly be discouraged.
The result could be a period of complicated and shadowy politics in which important differences, over issues ranging from economics to traditional leadership, social issues such as abortion, or principles such as the degree of discipline the society needs, are suppressed and democracy is reduced to a ritualised exchange between the party of liberation and an opposition expressing racial minority fears.
If the ANC were to loosen up and return to a recent past in which difference was far more tolerated, it is highly unlikely to threaten its unity on its core concerns. Without internal discipline, are ANC representatives really likely, for example, to oppose racial redress?
The more likely consequence, ironically, would be a healthier ANC – and a more vigorous democracy.