partners
Jaspreet Kindra The African National Congress this week hatched an action plan to mend troubled relations with its alliance partners and to bolster links between the party inside and outside of the government. At the ANC’s national general council in Port Elizabeth this week, the ruling party announced plans to increase the capacity of its party structures to exercise control over government policy. ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe said the party would be setting up its own policy institute to facilitate this. The move is a response to widespread criticism within the ANC and among its partners in the tripartite alliance that many of the policies pursued by the government have been generated by civil servants, and the executive, and bear little resemblance to what party members want. Motlanthe said in his report for the national general council that the party was hampered in its ability to assess and control policy and its implementation. Reasons for this included poor communication between the government and ruling party, and the party’s lack of capacity to analyse at national level. His comments echoed those made by the ANC’s ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), which said in a discussion document released last week that there was a “lack of decisive control” by the ANC as a party over policy development and implementation. The executive arm of the government – the president and the Cabinet – was emerging as the dominant voice in deciding on the government’s actions, Cosatu said. It was this state of affairs, said Cosatu, that had set the stage for the “shift to the right in economic policies after 1996” – a reference to the Cabinet’s adoption that year of the market-friendly policy on growth, employment and redistribution strongly opposed by the left in the tripartite alliance. Cosatu’s document added: “The ANC as a party has neither its own technical expertise nor policy-making processes that involve its mass base.” This made it difficult for the party to assess official proposals or to offer policy alternatives. Motlanthe said it seemed that different members of the ANC’s economic transformation committee had different understandings and expectations of their relationship to the government on policy matters. He disclosed that the ANC’s national executive committee had, in principle, approved the establishment of a party policy institute to improve the party’s input on government policy. Motlanthe’s report, a brutally frank piece of public introspection by a South African political party, also acknowledged the problems in the tripartite alliance that were publicised in Cosatu’s recent discussion document.
Motlanthe said there was no “coordinated alliance activity” at provincial and lower levels. Discussions and decisions taken at national level rarely filtered down to subordinate structures. “In some areas there are tensions between the alliance partners,” he said. Motlanthe said that all the partners in the tripartite alliance were “politically and organisationally weak”. He said: “These weaknesses impact negatively on the political cohesion and leadership capacity of the alliance – as a result of the organisational weaknesses of the ANC, it has not been able to effectively and positively give leadership to the alliance.”
In his report to the gathering, Motlanthe then sought to identify the source of the ANC’s problems with each of its alliance partners. He said Cosatu tended to regard the government “simply as an employer and not as its ally, capable of being persuaded and influenced”.
While acknowledging that Cosatu took this approach to further its constituency’s interests, it led to misunderstandings within the alliance as a whole. A Cosatu official declined to comment on Motlanthe’s criticisms, saying: “We are guests here – but we will have our say next month at our national conference.” Cosatu, in its discussion document, said the relationship between the government and the alliance was “dangerously undefined”. It noted that the alliance summit scheduled for August 1999 had been postponed indefinitely. The Cosatu document said: “Some in government seem uncomfortable about consulting the alliance partners on major policies. They adopt the refrain that government must govern.” Interviewed last week, Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel, however, rejected Cosatu’s accusation in the case of economic policy, saying that under the government’s Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, the draft budget for 2002 had already effectively been tabled in Parliament earlier this year. “It is already a public document available for criticism and suggestions,” said Manuel. “How can they accuse us of not consulting them?” Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi pointed out that it “was only fair” that the party should exert influence over government policy. “For we have been sent out to govern by it,” he said. Dealing out its judgement on its other alliance partner, the South African Communist Party, Motlanthe’s report said that, while it appreciated the need for the communists to challenge capitalist ideology, “this should at all times also reflect the need for identifying sources of capital and methods of mobilising and accessing it for transformation”. Earlier in the proceedings ANC president Thabo Mbeki said more about the need for socialists to be responsible. A confident Mbeki gave the gathering a lesson in elementary economics, which set the agenda for discussions during the four-day conference. He seemed to be expressing mild irritation with the left in his party’s ranks when he said: “We … have to understand that there is nobody in the world who formed a secret committee to conspire to impose globalisation on an unsuspecting humanity.” He said that the globalisation that Marx and Engels tackled in The Communist Manifesto 150 years ago was “quantitatively and qualitatively” different from the form it now takes. Mbeki said it was critically important that South Africa fully integrated itself into the world economy and did so in a way that could help it meet the needs of its people. SACP deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin said Mbeki had, however, “extended a hand to the left” within the alliance by expressing support for the National Union of Mine-workers (NUM) when he argued that “in our country, mining is a sunrise and not a sunset industry”. The NUM has long argued against the general perception that the mining industry in the country is in irreversible decline, maintaining instead that it has been “mismanaged.”