Left-wing activists have welcomed the planned launch by the African National Congress of a broad ‘front for developmentâ€, saying it will help restore the party’s character as a mass movement.
The ruling party announced after its extended national executive lekgotla last weekend that it was establishing a broad front to ‘harness the energies and efforts of a broad range of groupings and sectors behind a minimum programme of poverty alleviation and social developmentâ€.
ANC head of presidency Smuts Ngonyama said the front would be styled along the lines of the Mass Democratic Movement of the 1980s, by inviting a broad range of organisations to help the government halve poverty in South Africa by 2014.
The ANC’s alliance partners, Cosatu and the South African Communist Party, have consistently complained that since taking power in 1994, the ANC has abandoned its mass character and allowed the priorities of government to direct its activities.
In an apparent bid to placate its critics and mend the breach in the tripartite alliance, the ANC says the new formation will draw on the experiences of the broad fronts that were critical in the fight against apartheid.
The initiative is, however, similar to one suggested by Cosatu’s Western Cape region in 2005, one that was cold-shouldered by the ANC and eventually collapsed. Dubbed the New United Democratic Front, the extraparliamentary movement was intended to comprise civil society organisations and agitate for economic reforms that favoured the poor.
However, the national Cosatu leadership withheld its support from the structure, which was largely portrayed as anti-ANC. Cosatu president Willie Madisha failed to attend its national launch in Cape Town and, within months, it faded, failing to launch the other eight provincial branches as initially envisaged.
Tony Ehrenreich, who led the Cape Town initiative, said this week he did not understand why the ANC had then been critical of the civil society grouping, when it was proposing the same thing now.
‘Do they want to be the ones initiating things, believing that nothing happens without them? Or is it because they felt there was no crisis then,†Ehrenreich asked.
‘Nevertheless, we welcome the front — it will broaden the democratic space and make government listen to other voices. We might even get the Basic Income Grant.
‘But government must appreciate that some of these social problems were born out of its macro- economic policies, and that the ANC has lost credibility because it has not been able to direct government to respond to key challenges confronting our people,†he added.
A leading SACP member in Cape Town, Mazibuko Jara, said he hoped the movement would not become another short-lived ANC project like Letsema, the ‘people’s contract†launched in 2002 which saw initial successes but ultimately fizzled out.
‘For that not to happen, people must drive it,†said Jara. ‘The [new] initiative will fill a void created since the ANC moved to an elite form of mobilisation, cutting business deals. It should be about bringing alternative proposals rather than confrontation and protests.â€
Another SACP leader said the popular backlash over Jacob Zuma and demarcation conflicts in Khutsong and Matatiele had alerted the ANC to the prospect of losing its mass appeal.
Ngonyama insisted, however, that the front was being set up in pursuance of a resolution at the ANC’s Stellenbosch conference in 2002. It would not affect the functioning of the ANC’s alliance with Cosatu and the SACP, which would continue in a separate vein.