The African National Congress (ANC) goes into its national general council meeting (NGC) next week facing a convergence of policy debates and leadership battles that is unprecedented in its decade-long rule.
Party leaders will present proposals on the organisational design of the party, economic policy, strategy and tactics, unity and diversity in the movement and the “national question”. But unity — or the lack of it — is likely to colour the entire debate.
The Development and UnderÂdevelopment document deals with ANC proposals to create a dual labour market by relaxing labour laws protecting specific categories of workers, including young employees. It also proposes greater regulatory flexibility for small businesses and enterprises as well as measures to lower the cost of capital.
“Some of the things suggested in the economics paper came as shock to many ANC people,” Minister of Arts and Culture Pallo Jordan (who is also a member of the party’s national executive committee) told the Mail & Guardian, “and there will probably be very heated debate about it, particularly in the closed sessions of the NGC.”
But supporters of the proposals — most of them closely aligned with President Thabo Mbeki and the business wing of the party — appear to be prevailing.
The ANC’s parliamentary caucus, were the proposals initially attracted intense criticism, had come around to the view that they represented a reasonable middle path, communications committee chairperson Mpho Lekgoro said.
The document is nevertheless to be presented and discussed in a separate forum in a bid to control the controversy. Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele, the deputy secretary general of the ANC, said this week that the proposals contained in the document are “imperative” to develop the economy. She brushed aside claims by labour that their proposals at an earlier workshop of the party’s economic transformation committee (ETC) had been ignored.
“What happened is that in the workshop you get different points of view, you debate them and you carry with you the majority. What also has to be realised is that when [labour] come to a meeting like the ETC they don’t come representing their own views, they come to the meeting as members of the ANC. It’s not as if it was a bargaining chamber.”
Asked whether the debate over economic policy, and the Unity and Diversity in the ANC document, could become a proxy for battles over the future of former deputy president Jacob Zuma, and the role of the tripartite alliance, both Jordan and ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama said leadership issues would be kept at bay.
But Jordan said he expected the issue of diverging class interests of business leaders within the ANC, and those of its working-class base to be discussed at length.
Asked whether that trend didn’t suggest the inevitability of a split in the ruling party, he was sanguine. “Subterranean shifts like this might, over time, bring about very wide divergences and lead to a split, which is what eventually happened to the Congress Party in India. But the hope of an ANC split in the immediate future is the worst kind of wishful thinking.”
It seems, however, that it will not be easy to keep Zuma off the agenda. He remains deputy president of the party but he has been pressured into relinquishing his party duties, with the result that he cannot attend national working committee meetings and cannot address ANC rallies until his trial, on two counts of corruption, is completed.
This makes it almost impossible for him to lobby effectively for ANC presidency ahead of the 2007 ANC conference, where new leadership will be elected.
This week the ANC released a programme for the NGC, which focuses mainly on policy discussion and does not leave any room for leadership discussion.
Ngonyama was insistent that the Zuma issue would not be discussed even if it were raised from the floor.
But Zuma supporters in the provinces have been looking towards the NGC as a platform from which to ventilate their frustrations. At least one province was believed to have formally proposed that the issue be on the agenda — a claim Ngonyama denies. At least four provinces — KwaZulu-Natal, Free State, Western Cape and Eastern Cape — are firm supporters of Zuma and could support each other should one raise the issue.
Zuma supporters want the matter to be taken to a logical conclusion. They are asking party leadership “If Zuma is not good or clean enough to be government deputy president, why is he good enough for the ANC?”
Whether or not they will be brave enough to challenge Mbeki and his national executive is not clear, and it appears that some of Zuma’s most vocal supporters in Cosatu and the SA Communist party say, privately, that they have lost patience with him in the wake of what they see as meek accession to the demands of the ANC leadership.
It is precisely factionalism, and the potential for demagogic mobilisation around narrow ethnic and other interests that the discussion of the National Question should deal with, says NEC member and deputy secretary general of the South African Communist Party Jeremy Cronin.