The African National Congress will fight an old-fashioned election campaign this year instead of a modern media campaign.
This is partly because the organisation is cash-strapped and simply cannot afford a modern-style campaign. ANC presidential spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama confirmed on Wednesday that the ”organisation faced a number of financial challenges” after ThisDay revealed that the party is so short of funds it could not pay its staff around the country. The ANC finances have suffered from a lack of foreign donor support and the cost of an ambitious restructuring of the organisation.
But it can now call on a reinvigorated network of 2 000 branches around the country — organised along the lines of the new municipal structures. Its paid- up membership has grown to 425 000, up fourfold in three years. Signed-up membership is 600 000, according to the organisation.
This is particularly important in an election likely to be the party’s toughest yet, fought with the slimmest of budgets. The organisation wants to win the election in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape, the two provinces it does not control, in the face of widespread popular apathy about the coming poll.
It also faces tougher battles in urban areas, where apathy is more pronounced and where the social movements opposed to the government and in favour of more radical redistribution policies are strongest. Census 2001 reveals a pattern of rapid urbanisation and the formation of networks alien to the ANC, and in which new forms of organisations have mushroomed.
”Since the local elections, the ANC has invested much effort in revitalising its branches,” writes professor of politics at the University of the Witwatersrand Tom Lodge in Focus magazine.
After 10 years in power, the ANC has an ambivalent identity: it is torn in rhetoric and practice between being a mass movement of debate and contestation, and a slimline party of order and delivery.
”It’s a modern, increasingly electorally oriented party,” says Lodge. During skirmishes with the party’s left in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party, Mbeki’s lieutenants flagged the concept of a ”smaller, better but smaller” party.
But at election time it cranks up its movement machinery — a factor that plays a large role in helping the ANC to achieve what it calls ”overwhelming victories”.
The ANC is likely to stay in power for the ”foreseeable future”, predicts Lodge, but it risks becoming a club of old men and women in the long-term: an analysis of the national lists shows few candidates under 30. In a country where 40% of the population is under 25, the ANC is failing to make itself relevant to the next generation of politicians and voters.
But now its eyes are on the third election. Early last year, an election team was assembled under the up-and-coming Northern Cape Premier, Manne Dipico. He got the top job for making the ANC a force in that barren hinterland, where the party grew its support from barely 50% in 1994 to a two-thirds majority in 1999. Dipico is supported by other ANC leaders, a team at the head office that can run elections with their eyes closed, representatives from the youth and women’s leagues, Cosatu, the SACP and the South African National Civics Organisation.
Since the middle of last year, this team has fanned around the country meeting trade unions, churches, women’s groups, business and all organised sectors to hear their views on the past 10 years and the next. The party has sought out the views of its detractors as well, says spokesperson Steyn Speed, and was particularly keen to get the views of Afrikaners.
”We got feedback from sectors we don’t interact with regularly,” he says, adding that elections are ”the time when the broad movement gets into gear — one of the ANC’s strengths in an election year”. What have been the key messages? While not all those it met with (like the trade union Solidarity) will vote ANC, they are satisfied with broad direction, says Speed.
Reports from the series of meetings formed the basis of the report to the party’s national executive committee, which finally drew up the election manifesto.
Poverty and unemployment came through across the board as the biggest challenges — both are likely to top the manifesto launch on Saturday evening in Durban.
There are unlikely to be any surprises in the manifesto as ANC policies tend to be aligned to the government’s programme, as can be expected from a ruling party.
In fact, the government’s medium-term budget policy statement, released late last year, can be seen as an early draft of the ANC’s material pledges: public works will be a big-ticket item; as will child-support grants, the national skills programme and improved infrastructure.
The ANC is more conservative than it was in 1994, and savvier, too. The 1994 manifesto set targets (one- million houses; 2,5-million electricity connections) to which the young and inexperienced party was mercilessly held every year. Expect no numerical targets this time around; neither is that document’s statement that ”Our country is in a mess” likely to put in an appearance again.
But the party is arguably less conservative now than it was in 1999, when the country was in the middle of the economic structural adjustment imposed by the growth employment and redistribution programme. Now the belt has been loosened and the party is less doctrinaire about prescribed good governance policies like privatisation.
A prominent new policy feature, absent in both the 1994 and 1999 manifestos, is black economic empowerment, testimony to an ANC returning to its middle-class roots. Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel and businessman Cyril Ramaphosa topped the party’s votes for the national executive committee last year, symbolic of a membership that is aspirational and invested in the system the two men represent.
The Human Sciences Research Council survey released at the end of last year suggests the party will win 67,8% in the next election. The ANC is counting on cleaning up the rural vote (with the exception of rural KwaZulu-Natal, which is Inkatha Freedom Party territory), where the benefits of social programmes such as water and electricity have been felt most.