What if the alliance splits?

The possible split is no cause for grave concern and should be welcomed

Tony Leon

A split within the ruling tripartite alliance, or indeed within the African National Congress itself, is no cause for grave concern. In fact, it is greatly to be welcomed. It will be a hopeful sign that South African politics is maturing and moving beyond race, patronage and post-liberation nostalgia as the major themes of our democratic discourse.

There are three principal ways in which a split would help our country. Politically, it would liberate South Africa from a creeping one-partyism — and all the cronyism, corruption and conformity that goes along with it.

We will once again have real and open debates about urgent issues — such as economic reform, HIV/Aids and Zimbabwe — that have until now been suppressed by the ANC leadership. There will also be opportunities for new political coalitions to form — coalitions that have a real prospect of wresting power from the ANC.

Opposition parties have proved, in the provinces that we have controlled and the places where we have provided the strongest opposition, that political competition produces more competent government and more efficient service delivery.

Economically, a split would give a tremendous boost to our nation’s growth prospects by freeing President Thabo Mbeki to implement the sweeping economic reforms he has been hinting at for half a decade.

Until now, the president’s liberal macro-economic policies have not been matched by liberal micro-economic policies, because he has lacked the political courage to face down his internal opponents. He has been in economic terms what PW Botha was in political terms: a reformer without gain.

With a free hand to reduce corporate taxes, privatise state-owned enterprises, and cut back labour laws and regulations (while protecting workers’ rights), the president will help our economy create millions of new jobs, attract billions of rands in new inward foreign investment and reach rapid economic growth rates of 6% and higher.

Culturally, a split in the ruling coalition or the ruling party would free our national identity from the narrow cult of ANC self-worship.

Free from the stifling influence of ANC symbols, from the thought-

killing monotony of ANC political correctness and neo-Stalinist ANC rhetoric, South Africans will embrace and enjoy a more creative, tolerant and diverse national culture.

There are some who may fear that a split in the government would cause political instability in the country. In reality, continued ANC power monopolisation would be far more destabilising in the long term than a more open, equal and contested political system.

By undermining Parliament, threatening the judiciary, abusing floor-crossing legislation and appointing party hacks to important executive and investigative posts, it has brought about a crisis of democratic legitimacy.

The fight between Mbeki and Zuma, for all the turbulence and drama it has caused, has already served a useful purpose. It has become the outlet for pent-up frustrations and conflicts that have been building up for years inside the ANC.

Instead of clinging to the vain hope that their ideas and interests can best be represented through the ANC, the parties and groups that the president once derided as the “ultra-left” would achieve far more if they escaped the orbit of the ruling party.

However, damaging a split would be to the ANC’s political fortunes, it would be a great boon for the nation and would be an appropriate way to mark the second decade of our democracy.

A vital policy instrument

Drew Forrest

The tripartite alliance is a messy and crisis-prone affair — but there are good reasons for thinking things would be a lot messier without it.

It would, in addition, be much harder to disentangle than its opponents think.

Scratch most union members and you will find an African National Congress supporter. On the ground, labour activists widely double, or treble, as ANC or communist leaders.

Journalists write glibly of the “ruling alliance” — but that is how ordinary people tend to see it; as a single movement. When Thabo Mbeki took his campaign to “isolate and defeat” alleged ultra-leftists in Cosatu to the ANC regions, he was politely asked to go away and patch up the differences.

This is, perhaps, the main reason the alliance stubbornly refuses to fracture, and why Cosatu continues to throw its weight behind ANC election campaigns, despite recurrent hostilities at leadership level. The expectations of the general membership have fused alliance leaders in a reluctant embrace.

More is at stake than emotional attachment to the ANC’s heroic past. The mass of ordinary alliance supporters are not entirely wrong to see the ANC and its left-wing partners as jointly representing their interests — or at least, as representing them more nearly than anyone else.

Pace the fantastists of the Trotskyite left, organised workers would not necessarily stream to a “Labour Party” in the unlikely event of an alliance split. Research indicates that they would go on voting for the ANC, while the lesson of history is that those who deliberately step outside the ANC’s fire-circle face inanition in the wilderness.

Labour might gain little in terms of direct political representation, while forfeiting the sense of common historical mission, of comradeship in a shared struggle, that currently enables it to influence ANC policy.

It is nonsense to argue — as the ultras do — that Cosatu has received nothing from the ANC government but abuse. In league with other forces, including sympathisers within the party itself, it has wrung concessions on many matters, from the shape of the national budget to black economic empowerment and Aids treatment. It may even have had an impact on Zimbabwe. The shifts have often been slow and grudging — but they have happened.

For labour to go it alone would be to abandon the field to the ANC’s least desirable elements — the slavish Mbeki loyalists and party line-toers, the “racial nationalists” (to use a Democratic Alliance phrase) of doubtful loyalty to our constitutional freedoms, the admirers of Robert Mugabe, the avaricious climbers and the corrupt.

But vital as it is as a humanitarian ginger group, Cosatu has not been elected by the majority of adult South Africans. It is not the government and there are reasons for thinking it would not make a very good one.

It is hard not to see in its economic prescriptions shades of the macro-economic populism that sank Chile in the early 1970s, through a pegged exchange rate, price controls, over-mighty public sector unions and land invasions.

As Robert Mugabe is discovering to his cost, the government cannot simply tell the International Monetary Fund to go hang. And Mbeki cannot simply halt Jacob Zuma’s corruption trial.

Alliance processes might be less acrimonious if ANC leaders rethought their relationship with Cosatu.

In the infamous “briefing notes” on the union “ultra-left”, Mbeki’s hit-men complained that the labour movement was infiltrated by elements alien to the congress tradition. Quite so. South Africans can be grateful that Cosatu arose in the vacuum left by the banning of the ANC, with its own leadership, organisation, ideology and democratic traditions.

The federation is not Sactu, the ANC’s former labour wing, which mainly served to harness workers to the nationalist cause. Mbeki et al should get their heads around Cosatu’s right to think for itself and to press its demands by all constitutional means — even when it is wrong.

The sparks that fly from alliance encounters can be seen as the by-product of an essential policy-forging process, in which conflicting class interests and political realities are reconciled. South Africa needs the ANC and its left allies to temper each other.

It’s not going to happen

Jeremy Cronin

The controversy within the ANC-led alliance around the Jacob Zuma affair has breathed fresh hope into the if-only brigade. There are basically two headlines under which most political commentary deigns to acknowledge the existence of the South African Communist Party.

The one headline reads “growing marginalisation” of communists or unionists within the African National Congress. The other, headline “alliance about to split”, is a back-handed admission that the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions are not as irrelevant as hoped.

So, I welcome the opportunity to discuss the hypothetical question: “what if the alliance breaks?” As always, I take it as a back-handed acknowledgement.

After all, over the past three years, the government has shifted away from its privatisation drive. President Thabo Mbeki has articulated an increasingly robust critique of free market fundamentalism. Worker strikes for higher wages have seen growing non-racial worker solidarity and broad public anger directed, not at the workers but at management for their inflated salaries and perks. The ANC’s national general council has rejected labour market flexibility. Following the land summit, and the SACP’s Red October campaigns, the government is supporting an urgent review of the “willing-seller, willing-buyer” land reform approach.

These and many other positive developments are what really lie behind the question “what if?” (which is, in fact, a wishful “if only”).

But what about the Zuma matter? It underlines my point. The alliance is not divided along organisational boundaries, nor neatly into a centre and a left. Anxiety over the Zuma matter cuts through all our organisations, not least the ANC itself. We are united strategically, but also, as we are being reminded, by the shared challenges of combining internal democracy and collective leadership with a progressive rule of law with corruption-free but strong governance, and with the capacity to mobilise and engage poor communities across our country.

An alliance break-up, we are told, will be “good for democracy”. Citizens will finally “know what they are choosing”. The assumption is that democracy is a market-place in which we are periodic voters exercising individual “choice” between competing brands — the more the better. I don’t have a problem with multi-party democracy and I know it is fashionable to brand everything, including sports grounds — such as Vodacom (formerly Securicor) Loftus. But is the “choice” between a Heinz Soup Kerry, for instance, and a Halliburton Bush really the pinnacle of democracy?

Here in South Africa, a democratic breakthrough has been won and a new society is being consolidated on hostile terrain. In townships and rural villages, communities are trying to give substance to this democracy through community policing forums, school governing bodies, water committees, co-ops, health forums, ward committees and integrated development plans. Things are not easy. There are partial advances and failures. Local government helps, but not always. There are problems of official corruption and of community gate-keeping. Most government policies are well-intentioned, but not all are appropriate. This is where the battle to consolidate a vibrant democracy will be won … or lost.

As we struggle to build this democracy we are up against a powerful antagonistic force. Economic power remains obdurately in the same hands. Our country is still in the grip of an accumulation path that is reproducing concentrated personal wealth and a persisting crisis of underdevelopment.

In the face of these realities, the best hope of workers and the poor is preserving a solid 70% democratic majority with which to consolidate a developmental state buttressed by and strengthening its mobilised popular base.

If the alliance breaks (but it won’t) that potential will be considerably dissipated. And if the alliance breaks, it won’t be neatly into a left and a centre. We will see, rather, a proliferation of personalities and competing factions, mobilised around grievance and frustration, behind which will be the real power-brokers. An Nkobi Holdings left? An Elephant Consortium congress? A Standard Bank dark-horse? A Brett Kebble youth?

But this isn’t going to happen. Sorry to deprive you of the choice.