South Africans may hope the ruling African National Congress (ANC) finds new ways to fight social ills at its conference this week, but any policy debate will likely be overshadowed by a succession battle that has plunged the party into turmoil.
Political analysts say in public, ANC leaders will emerge from the meeting that begins on Wednesday united, vowing to tackle widespread poverty, high unemployment and one of the world’s worst crime rates.
However, analysts say they expect closed-door meetings to focus on forming alliances ahead of a congress in December that will choose a new leader for the party.
”Now it faces a crisis. Policies won’t be discussed at the policy meeting. It will be driven by self-interest and lobbying,” said Sipho Seepe, a director at the Graduate Institute of Management and Technology.
”You have an ANC elite that has turned on itself.”
At stake is the direction of South Africa’s ”Rainbow Nation”, which is enjoying an economic boom but has witnessed growing divisions between the ANC and its traditional union allies, who are leading a costly public-service strike.
The country’s economic growth has accelerated by an average 5% of gross domestic product a year for the past three years, but so far rising levels of wealth have not trickled down. Officially one in four job-seekers cannot find employment, although analysts put the figure much higher.
Two ANC apartheid-era heroes are widely perceived as frontrunners in the party’s leadership struggle — President Thabo Mbeki and his controversial rival Jacob Zuma.
But analysts say both still rely on their past credentials as freedom fighters to win support rather than fresh ideas to wipe out inequalities left by apartheid.
”We are not fighting against a repressive regime or the forces of apartheid anymore. We are in fact, fighting a common enemy that is called poverty,” Mathews Phosa, national executive committee member of the ANC, wrote in the the Star newspaper.
Test of the left
Mbeki — accused by critics of promoting big business at the expense of the poor since taking office in 1999 — faces a direct challenge from provincial ANC branches pushing to block him from standing for a third term as party president.
South Africa’s Constitution forbids Mbeki from serving as national president for another term when his current stint ends in 2009. But many political analysts believe he could seek a new term as the head of the ANC.
This would give him a big say in who becomes the next national president and thereby set South Africa’s political agenda for years to come in a country where 70% of voters regularly back the liberation-era movement.
Affable and charming, ANC deputy president Zuma remains popular among the party’s rank and file and powerful unions after surviving court cases and scandals, the most damaging of which involves possible corruption charges.
Zuma is widely perceived as the candidate of the left, although analysts say his real political leanings are unclear and the prospect of further court action could cloud his candidacy.
On the heels of a strike by thousands of civil servants which shut down schools and hospitals around the country, the power of the labour movement is clearly reasserting itself.
”It [economic policy] is likely to be one of the most contested sectors … it will be a key barometer to assess the extent to which the left exists within the ANC,” said Jonathan Faull, analyst at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa.
Key will be the concept of the ”developmental state” and the responsibility of government to erase poverty, rather than helping business, and the economy, to grow.
The proportion of the population living on less than R3 000 a year has declined over the last 13 years but still stands at 43%, according to a government report.
That is all too clear in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township, one of the glaring legacies of apartheid.
Kavar Mafu (20) walked past tin shacks and piles of garbage, still looking for work after two months of searching. When asked whether the ANC offered hope, he just held up his arms.
”I don’t know anything about the ANC. I just want a job,” he said. – Reuters