There are signs that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) is mulling a policy shift that could tilt Africa’s booming economic powerhouse to the left after more than a decade on a centrist course.
The ANC, in power since the nation’s first all-race elections in 1994, is under growing pressure from trade-union allies and its own rank-and-file to make income redistribution and nationalisation the lynchpins of its programme.
To what extent the ANC bows to those demands, if at all, will become clear in late June when about 1 500 party delegates gather outside Johannesburg to draft resolutions at a key national policy conference.
Their recommendations will form the basis of a larger debate at the ANC’s national conference in December, when delegates are expected to anoint a successor to President Thabo Mbeki and approve the party’s programme for the next five years.
In a media briefing this week in Johannesburg, ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama predicted a ”robust debate and discussion” that would hinge on two questions: whether the ANC had veered off course and whether it had delivered a better life to its constituents.
”We have never had a divergence of views as we have now,” Ngonyama admitted, while downplaying the prospect that factionalism could lead to an ugly split or bitter floor battle at the conference in December.
The main push for a leftist shift is coming from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), both of which have been in a formal ruling alliance with the ANC since the end of the apartheid era.
But the alliance has frayed in recent years, with labour leaders accusing Mbeki and his senior officials of acting as little more than business agents for the country’s corporations and its predominantly white elite.
Indeed, the business community has credited Mbeki and Finance Minister Trevor Manuel for laying the groundwork for an economic boom, which has spawned rising investment, frothy consumer spending and the emergence of a black middle class.
Zuma left-wing champion?
Cosatu, which has about 1,8 million members, is urging the ANC to return to the more socialist-oriented approach that had characterised the party during its decades-long struggle to end apartheid and white minority rule.
”If we say that the working class is the primary motive force of the revolution, then we must allow it to lead that revolution,” Cosatu General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said at a media briefing in Johannesburg on Thursday.
Vavi, who is a strong supporter of former South African deputy president Jacob Zuma, said the trade union expected to announce in September whom it would back for the ANC leadership and other top positions.
Zuma was fired by Mbeki in 2005 during a corruption scandal, a move that prompted labour groups to suggest that there was a conspiracy at the highest government levels to block Zuma’s presidential ambitions.
South Africa’s left believes that the heavy public support it gave to Zuma during his separate rape and corruption trials last year could translate into political capital if the 65-year-old Zulu politician succeeds Mbeki.
Zuma has suggested he will run for the ANC’s top job. If elected to the position, he would be virtually guaranteed to become the country’s next president when Mbeki steps down in 2009. The ANC holds an electoral stranglehold.
South Africa’s Constitution prohibits Mbeki from running for a third term as the country’s president.
Some analysts, however, dismiss the likelihood that Zuma or any other leader could trigger a leftist ascendancy in the ANC, pointing to Zuma’s philosophical conservatism and the party’s tendency to skew toward centrist positions as key barriers.
”I don’t think any pressure from the left will be able to force him [Zuma] or anyone else to carry the ANC to the left,” said Aubrey Matshiqi, a political analyst with South Africa’s Centre for Policy Studies.
Even ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe, who is considered one of the party’s left-wing ideologues, would be unlikely to steer the party sharply in that direction, Matshiqi added.
Politician-turned-tycoon Tokyo Sexwale and former union leader Cyril Ramaphosa, now a successful businessman, have also been tipped as possible candidates to replace Mbeki. Both are seen as unlikely to radically change economic policy. — Reuters