Champagne campaign

The African National Congress’s 98th birthday bash took place on Saturday. Among the drinks on sale were Johnny Walker Blue at R2 700 a bottle and 15-year-old Glenfiddich at R1 500. Among the rented off-road vehicles outside were Mercedes and BMWs.

And among the discussions was the ongoing feud between the SACP and the ANCYL. Because, you know, that’s really important. Forget our dismal matric results on Friday or the near hate speech uttered against the country’s official opposition in an attempt to wrestle back control of the Western Cape. Focus on your celebrity, firebrand youth leader Julius Malema, and the 35 000-strong crowd gathered in a poverty-stricken area in Kimberley will forget all about shoddy service delivery and the awe-inspiring arrogance and hypocrisy of leaders who lead millionaire lives sponsored by the economically-struggling people they lead.

Of course it would be disingenuous to suggest that President Jacob Zuma didn’t at least try to address some of our concerns. Indeed, he spoke firmly about the need for public servants to focus on their work — not politics.

The blurring of political and administrative roles hampered delivery at local level, he said, speaking at the GWK stadium in Kimberley. ‘We are of the view that municipal employees should not hold leadership positions in political parties.”

In a dream world, the same would be true for our country’s leaders. Less politics, more administration.

But on our continent, the art of political theatre and rhetoric can easily replace meaningful policy-implementation.

Zuma, however, seems to be serious about — if not running a more financially viable Cabinet — at least doing both. Political theatre aside, he wants to remind South Africans that the ANC is really here to serve the people.

And this is something we should definitely hold him to.

The opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) has already launched a “Wasteful Expenditure Monitor” of the ANC (and since July 2009 has already tracked R605-million of wasteful ANC expenditure).

So in the interests of some semblance of accountability — the lot of which has largely fallen to the press in this country — here are a list of Zuma’s promises from this weekend’s celebrations.

The ANC would ‘tighten its deployment procedures” to make it more ‘objective and transparent” and ensure the deployment of “comrades with political integrity and professional competence”. No more crony deployment? Let’s wait and see.
‘Where people are found to be incapable of performing the tasks assigned to them, we must work with speed to either capacitate such people or replace them with more capable people.”
On education: ‘Teachers must start on time, and teach for seven hours a day.”
On health: “We will be providing antiretroviral treatment to all people co-infected with TB/HIV, HIV-positive infants under 12 months and pregnant HIV-positive women”.
On development: ” … Ensuring expenditure of the budgeted R787-billion on improving public infrastructure.” (From the longer document on the party’s website).
On literacy: “We are confident that we will reach our target of eliminating adult illiteracy from our society by 2012.”

That’s the good news. There are other worrying trends: like the party’s determination to implement the problematic National Health Insurance scheme this year, and its false idea that private healthcare takes from the poor and gives to the rich. More on that another time.

There’s more promises in the official document but the above are some of the most measurable. As Zuma may have noticed after his failed inauguration pledge to create 500 000 jobs, South Africans don’t take too kindly to broken promises.

Our singing and dancing president may have completed the show with a performance of Umshini Wami, but it’s going to take more than a machine gun to clean up the ruling party’s service-delivery record. It’s going to take real commitment and I for one am holding them to that.