Exactly one year ago the national gaze settled on Sandton, where several thousand people met to register their alarm at the direction of politics in the aftermath of the ANC’s Polokwane conference.
The atmosphere inside the convention centre was electric and all present sensed that it was a historic moment with the potential to chart a new path for the country. The intensity of the weekend even saw President Jacob Zuma get into the action, greeting Soweto Marathon runners and praying with the Shembe congregants at the Jabulani amphitheatre in Soweto. We can only guess what he was praying for.
The Sandton meeting brought together people from within and outside the ANC tradition united by a single desire: to protect the 1994 democratic breakthrough. A month later the Congress of the People (Cope) was born. The first anniversary of these events provides a timely opportunity to reflect on the performance of Cope.
Some have said that Cope came about as a result of angry people who lost power at Polokwane. This is true — but it also had to do with how that power was lost and the subsequent conduct of the victors. After all, no one wakes up in the morning and decides to form a party.
The reality is that the ANC went to — and emerged from — Polokwane as a scarred and divided party, one that had already begun to diverge from the best of its revolutionary democratic traditions. Today the ruling party’s fault lines are not fundamentally ideological, but rooted in a bitter fight over state power, with its attendant access to positions and resources.
Many of those who came to Sandton did so because they recognised this reality and were alarmed by the crudeness, belligerence and demagogy that characterised the new ANC leadership. The common view was that the very survival of our constitutional democracy was under threat.
The convention’s great strength was its attempt to preserve political space and our constitutional rights. The gathering was probably the single most important act to demonstrate a national ”rights consciousness” in post-apartheid South Africa.
And that, it seems, was Cope’s political high point — unless younger forces in the party begin to write a new chapter.
In response to the new electoral challenge the ANC quickly remembered the necessity of at least talking about constitutional rights. Yet its populist rhetoric is increasingly at odds with the Constitution. Take the ”shoot-to-kill” utterances, which seem part of the Zuma administration’s plan to militarise the police under the pretext of fighting crime. Soon there will be renewed calls by ANC leaders for ”discussion” on search warrants, perhaps detention without trial, or even the death penalty, and more vocal attempts to push back women’s rights under the guise of ”cultural values”.
But where is Cope as the ANC pushes South Africa down this road? In the case of the ”safety and security” issue the party has yet to offer a coherent policy response to what is essentially a reintroduction of pre-1994 apartheid policing.
Cope president Mosiuoa Lekota said that the ”ANC had deviated from its path” when he famously served divorce papers last year. Divorce perhaps, but still all in the family tradition.
The new party became largely an ANC clone, shorn of state power and the burden of the SACP leaders, Stalinist residue notwithstanding. And, as a clone, it carries with it the genetic diseases of its twin.
The fallout from Cope’s list process and the reported internal leadership tensions are symptomatic of this. Many people expected to be rewarded (an ANC tradition) for joining Cope and few imagined life without an umbilical cord to the ruling party. But Cope has no access to state patronage and is therefore unable to accommodate everyone
More importantly, as the events of recent months demonstrate, it has no political vision for the country. Its main attraction — that it is not the ANC — is already becoming a declining value proposition.
It has been six months since the party was sworn in as the third-largest party in Parliament, yet one would be hard pressed to identify a single political initiative from Cope. Its MPs have been quiet on nearly everything of significance and much time has been wasted on factional interests and leadership posturing, a terrible carryover from the clone twin.
The party’s strategic and tactical deafness was recently exposed on the contentious issue of labour brokers — the only high-profile issue taken up publicly by Cope since it went to Parliament. With no sense of irony, the party had Willie Madisha, himself a recent critic of ”labour brokers’ when he was Cosatu boss, lead its toenadering with the Democratic Alliance in defence of a system that is deeply distrusted by many working people.
Although it is correct to speak out against populist grandstanding on this matter, Cope seems to have lost sight of whose interests it should advocate. What is wrong with insisting that all workers, temporary or otherwise, be protected under existing progressive labour laws? Cope missed this completely, exposing its lack of depth.
Yet not all is gloom and doom. Provided it can develop a credible political programme, Cope has time and youth on its side. It is only a year old and has potential for innovation. Almost two-thirds of its national leadership is under the age of 50 and most of them grew up in the progressive atmosphere and political ferment that characterised the end of apartheid and the early days of building of a new, nonracial nation.
Many of them left the ANC for the very reason that they could no longer bear the politically exhausted, bureaucratic and self-serving leaders of the ruling party. Why would they put up with the same in Cope? Most also value knowledge and education, the only way to build our future.
But the sooner the party goes to an elective conference the better: younger forces will have an opportunity to assert leadership and hasten the retirement of the old guard. The place to start would be in understanding their political trajectory and putting forward an alternative and hopeful vision for the country.
Palesa Morudu is a writer based in Cape Town and a former Cope spokesperson