The African National Congress has embarked on its most sweeping recovery plan since it took power in 1994, aimed at winning back the hearts and minds of members pushed to the brink of rebellion by the party’s leadership divisions.
The party is on an all-out charm offensive to rejuvenate policy and ideological debate at the level of branches to break down the obsession about personalities that has gripped the party as a result of the succession battle between camps aligned with President Thabo Mbeki and those supporting ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma.
This coincides with a bitter public exchange between the ANC and its left allies, which have accused it of abandoning its socialist principles and the Mbeki presidency of drifting towards dictatorship. The ANC’s national working committee hit back at the South African Communist Party this week, using Marxist categories to stigmatise its analysis as ”subjectivist” and ”ahistoric”.
A series of articles published in the latest Umrabulo, the ANC’s political journal, will form the basis of the debates to be kickstarted in ANC branches and regions. This is in line with a national executive committee decision three weeks ago ”to clarify and reiterate key policy positions of the ANC”.
An article in Umrabulo on the role of intellectuals, penned by Gauteng legislature chief whip Mandla Nkomfe, said the ANC was seeking to reclaim ”[its] moral, ethical and intellectual capacity [that] has historically ensured that the movement inspired [its] people … The idea of promoting intellectualism and the appreciation of ideas within the ANC-led liberation movement is critical for the survival of the organisation.”
The national executive committee (NEC) has charged ANC provincial leaders with convening ”compulsory political schools” that will be held monthly for branch executives and quarterly for members of the provincial legislatures, provincial ministers and members of the ANC provincial executive committees. National ANC leaders will be deployed to the provinces to lead the debates.
”We want to re-educate members about the principles, tradition and ethos of the ANC to stop them from following individuals,” said Supra Mahumapelo, the North West ANC secretary. ”When leaders go off the track, we must speak to the principle, not the individual.”
The ANC was plunged into crisis by Mbeki’s dismissal of Zuma a year ago as national deputy president. Zuma loyalists have accused Mbeki of using state apparatus to conspire against Zuma and thwart his presidential ambitions — a perception reinforced by Zuma’s acquittal on rape charges.
Mbeki has countered by emphasising at every opportunity that the party’s leadership must be incorruptible — a clear dig at the graft charges Zuma faces.
ANC members’ alienation from party structures as a result of Mbeki’s authoritiarian leadership style have crystallised around Zuma.
Despite this, the ANC’s battle plan — to take the party back to the people — has Mbeki’s blessing.
At the heart of the strategy is an appeal to the moral judgement of party members, which, it is hoped, will curb the blind support for Zuma. ”We are engaged in a struggle to build a society founded on a new set of progressive values and will not succeed unless the cadres at the forefront of that struggle embody in their own pronouncements and practice the very values we seek to inculcate across society,” said the latest edition of ANC Today.
The party’s weekly newsletter, written by Mbeki, will be used to maintain the strategy’s momentum.
Each province has adopted a name for the strategy. Gauteng, the Western Cape, and the Eastern Cape have called theirs Invuselelo (Xhosa for revival); in the North West, it has been dubbed Sigijima ne ANC (isiZulu for we’ll run with the ANC); in the Northern Cape Unity and Cohesion in the ANC and in Limpopo Invuselelo Phuselotse (Sotho for revivial).
Neville Mompati, Northern Cape ANC secretary, said the province would convene its first political school this weekend in two of the ANC’s provincial regions. Next weekend, a second political school would bring together the other three regions, while a provincial general council would be held at the end of July, where discussion documents emerging from the political schools would be presented.
Mompati said deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel and NEC member Jessie Duarte would attend next weekend’s political school.
The North West kicked off its re-education campaign last weekend, with NEC member Enoch Godongwana leading the debate. Transport minister Jeff Radebe will be in the province next weekend for the launch of a political school called OR Tambo.
Limpopo will launch its strategy this weekend.
This week, notes from Monday’s national working committee (NWC) meeting were circulated to ANC structures, both as part of the party’s revival strategy and as a response to the SACP’s discussion document, published in the May edition of the Bua Komanisi, the information bulletin of the SACP’s central committee.
The SACP document had accused the ANC of abandoning its socialist principles. Both the party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) have suggested the only way working-class interests can be protected is if the SACP contests elections.
In one of two responses, adopted officially by the NWC, key Mbeki-aligned ideologue Joel Netshitenzhe questions the intellectual standard and the motivations of the SACP. In a hard-hitting monograph, he argues: ”The [SACP] document posits an outdated proposition that South Africa could have had or should have a ‘socialist orientated’ or ‘non-capitalist’ path to socialism … this error is a consequence of a subjectivism that informs most of the treatise: great revolutionary things could have happened had it not been for the cadres who betrayed the revolution!”
However, another document, written by ANC secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe, strikes a far more conciliatory note — pointing to the acute tensions in the ANC as it struggles to define itself in relation to its allies. The SACP and Cosatu are seen as Motlanthe’s allies in the ANC succession battle.
The SACP and the ANC have engaged in intensive bilateral meetings this week, which were understood to have been acrimonious.
Party observers say the public nature of the latest spats and discussion documents is a deliberate strategy to cultivate Mbeki’s successor through intellectual, policy and ideological discussion, rather than populist mobilisation around personalities.
Commented one of the Umrabulo articles, ”Challenges of Leadership”, written by Netshitenzhe, Godongwana and Nkomfe: ”The natural tendency for any organism is to grow and annex space. Yet, if the ANC in its evolution into the future merely responded as an unthinking object of natural selection, it may become soulless and rudderless — a dinosaur so shorn of ideological rooting that what defines it are battles for leadership positions,”
Among the other Umrabulo contributors are ANC NEC member and senior communist, Jeremy Cronin, ANC political education secretary in Gauteng, Zwelinzima Sizani, and ANC Western Cape chairperson James Ngculu.
Why Sanco lost its head
South African National Civics Organisation (Sanco) president Mlungisi Hlongwane was suspended from the organisation because he was gradually driving it into oblivion, says acting Sanco president Ruth Bhengu.
Bhengu’s damning statement this week, which accuses Hlongwane of manifest and wide-ranging failures of leadership, tends to counter perceptions that he was suspended because of his support for a third Thabo Mbeki presidency.
Hlongwane was suspended at a meeting of Sanco’s national executive committee on Saturday, despite his vehement insistence that he remains in charge.
Hlongwane and his spokesperson and fellow NEC member, Donovan Williams, contend that the meeting was not properly constituted, as some provincial chairpersons did not attend.
The Eastern Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Northern Cape, North West, Limpopo and Western Cape proceeded with the meeting in the absence of the Free State and Mpumalanga delegations.
North West chairperson Letsepe Boweni said they held the meeting because they felt Hlongwane was neglecting Sanco and was not interested in its activities. Hlongwane is mayor of the Sedibeng District Municipality in Gauteng.
In her statement after the meeting Bhengu said: ”The once mighty Sanco has been turned into an invisible and less influential sleeping giant that fails to take up issues affecting people. In the past five years Sanco has not confronted any of the bread-and-butter issues that affect most of the communities who live under rural and urban abject poverty.
”The NEC observes that a few individuals seem to be concerned about the creation of personal wealth at the expense of members.”
Bhengu said that besides the pandemonium created by lack of accountability Sanco suffered because leaders made major policy statements without internal engagement. This was a clear reference to Hlongwane’s proposal that the Constitution be changed to allow the president a third term.
Hlongwane claims Sanco has six million members, but even the provincial structures say they are frustrated by the lack of its organisational visibility.
Williams countered that it was unfair that only Hlongwane was blamed for the poor functioning of the organisation. ”Why do you cherry-pick which office bearers to suspend? Why not suspend all of them? They are looking for an easy way out.
”All leaders must ask themselves what they did when they saw the organisation suffering.”
Hlongwane is also said to have attacked Cosatu, saying its marches were unnecessary. ”Some of these statements have affected the relationship among components in the ANC-led alliance. They have further positioned Sanco as machinery to derail the advancement of people struggles,” Bhengu added.
In the letter to structures explaining Hlongwane’s suspension, Sanco said Hlongwane had failed to convene the national office bearers’ meeting in almost two years and that NEC meetings had not taken place in over 12 months. – Rapule Tabane