‘Things cannot continue as they are’

Nominations conferences in all provinces have reduced the contest for the African National Congress (ANC) leadership to a two-horse race — and dealt a stinging setback to President Thabo Mbeki. Jacob Zuma won five provinces and, more significantly, received a total of 2 232 votes for the presidency, against Mbeki’s 1 406. The pro-Zuma provinces also endorsed his slate for other “top six” positions. And in another surprise reversal for Mbeki, the ANC Women’s League endorsed his rival.

The Mail & Guardian asked five senior ANC “elders” to comment on the provincial results, the party’s hardening divisions, and the potential fallout beyond Polokwane.

Jeremy Cronin

ANC MP, NEC member and deputy general secretary of the SACP

The outcome of the ANC’s provincial nomination conferences should be seen as an expression by the party’s branches that things cannot continue as they are. The same message came from the 2005 national general council and the ANC’s June policy conference — only now it is clearer, much more insistent.

Rank-and-file ANC members are saying that we cannot go on in the same way. In the first place this is a rejection of a particular leadership style, but it’s important to realise that the leadership style is not primarily a matter of personalities. It is intimately linked to a policy strategy that consolidated itself around 1996 as the dominant approach in government.

The assumption was that change would be delivered through a close working relationship between big capital and the new governing elite. This has been at the heart of the demobilisation of the ANC, the marginalisation of allies and even of Parliament and Nedlac.

But market-driven growth and bureaucratic, top-down delivery cannot possibly address the crisis of underdevelopment afflicting our country. One of countless examples is the “willing-seller, willing-buyer” land reform programme, which has gone nowhere.

The question now is whether the energy being spent on the internal ANC succession race will result in just a change of personalities, or will force a fundamental rethink on how we are approaching transformation. Will we continue to pay lip-service to popular involvement and consultation, but then leave it to elites, for example, to do the actual drawing of provincial boundaries behind closed doors?

The challenge at Polokwane will be to insist on a different style of leadership — but not for its own sake. A change in leadership style must lay the basis for a more united and collective ANC, grounded in grass-roots work within communities.

This will help foster a more united alliance — one where we don’t spend our lives taking potshots at one another. We need to position the ANC and the movement it leads, so that we are not focused on the politics of politicians, on our ­wheeling and dealing, on our lists, on our career positioning and on ­patronage.

We need to get back to focusing on the politics of the people — the challenges of poverty, unemployment and deepening inequality. If we don’t rise to these underlying challenges at Polokwane, the ANC could be in the same situation at the next conference in five years’ time.

Electing a leadership with warmer smiles might help, but it won’t wing it.

What the other ‘elders’ said