Arts and Culture Minister Pallo Jordan fears that the politics of the African National Congress is being “Yankeefied” by a growing fixation on personalities rather than policies. And he blames the media for fuelling the process.
“You have to get away from this personalised contest between [Jacob] Zuma and [Thabo] Mbeki,” he told the Mail & Guardian this week. “We and our broader movement are getting sucked into this circus of personalities which could lead to entrenched positions.
“The Polokwane conference has to deal with policy issues, the direction the movement and country are going to take and the direction they’re going to give the continent.”
Jordan said the differences between ANC president Mbeki and his deputy, Zuma, were “so slight as to be hardly noticeable”.
Yet the media had magnified their rivalry into the central conference issue and ANC members had bought into this. “It’s the American style of politics and completely alien to our culture.”
He contrasted Nelson Mandela’s smooth handover to Mbeki — with the latter taking the reins of government as early as 1996 — with the current “noise and hubbub”.
In a Sunday Times interview Jordan suggested that the Polokwane conference should consider whether the ANC needed a “stable transition” to a younger leadership echelon better adapted to conditions of democracy.
Party elders such as Zuma, Charles Nqakula and Zola Skweyiya were in their sixties, he told the M&G. At 65 Mbeki falls into the same age group, although Jordan did not mention him.
“Many of us — I include myself — came into the ANC 40 years ago. We featured in the first phase of Umkhonto weSizwe; we were sent to foreign universities to acquire the requisite skills; we led various ANC departments in preparing to govern. We’ve had a very good innings.”
Among the new challenges facing the ANC was its relationship with the black business and professional classes that had burgeoned since 1994, Jordan said.
“One of the democracy dividends has been the emergence of a black property-owning class, which is growing by the day. The approach is one of laissez faire; no one is debating their role.
“Are they going to be coupon clippers, looking out for their stock exchange earnings? Or are social tasks going to be assigned to them — uplifting the masses, growing the economy and creating a new corporate culture?”
Empowerment beneficiaries were doing nothing to change the country’s economic direction, corporate ethos or the relationship between business, labour and the state. The new classes had to be persuaded to buy into the ANC’s agenda.
Jordan said the party was also failing to engage the new black leadership of the tertiary education sector.