As first-year politics students in the 1990s, one of the questions we had to interrogate was whether political studies could be considered a science.
One of the considerations in attempting an answer was that in science the truth was revealed through a methodological process and its outcome could therefore be predicted.
In answering, we had to ask: can we predict political behaviour?
The issue is on my mind given the public appetite to know in clear, categorical terms who won and who lost at the ANC’s national general council (NGC) last week and what it means for the future.
Our media has laid claim to an answer: ‘Zuma triumphs; Zuma klaps Malema”, whereas others such as my colleague Mandy Rossouw insist that, in fact, Julius Malema won.
I prefer to go back to my first-year politics notes and say that because politics is not a science, we cannot reduce it to simplistic equations with deductible sums.
Let’s rather try to narrow down what we know to have come out of the NGC.
What do we know?
That the ANC held a highly successful NGC in terms of the party’s own expectations, as it largely focused on theoretical and practical policy discussions that have laid the basis for future policy decisions.
That even the highly anticipated 2012 leadership battles were fought through the proxy of intense policy debates, which I consider a relative luxury.
The fact that we heard nothing about the removal of secretary general Gwede Mantashe because all we spoke about the whole week was nationalisation does not mean the issue did not form an undercurrent to the discussions, but it was not given room to pervade and distract.
That the ANC is quite clearly not a monolithic party.
The divisions were stark even when big business, represented by the likes of Tokyo Sexwale and Patrice Motsepe, placed itself on different sides of nationalisation.
These divided opinions should caution us from using labels to characterise the ruling party.
Paragons of morality and exemplary behaviour coexist with looters, market fundamentalists live side by side with communists, and conservative traditionalists are forced to get along with impatient but progressive young minds — all in the same party.
The advantage of this is that all these forces are kept inside the mass democratic movement family, leaving little ground to be covered by those on the outside.
That the ANC is either deliberately closing down the media space and pushing it to the periphery, or its current communications unit is highly ineffective.
Journalism teacher Mathatha Tsedu articulated it well in the weekend newspapers, saying we were treated like lepers at the conference.
Not only was the media tent located as far away as possible from the delegates to deny room for interaction, it was allowed a total of six hours of entrance into the plenary hall during the entire five-day conference.
I will resist the temptation to say anything about Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille’s misguided and bold prediction that ‘Zuma will see his coffin in Durban”, given that we agree that politics is not a science.
My unscientific conclusion is that, even if the political egos were at each other’s throats, the delegates refused to drop the ball. They remained focused on re-energising and saving the party from losing popular support, which remains a real possibility.
So, whereas Zuma saw himself as having been mandated by the NGC to act against the likes of Malema and Malema himself simultaneously threw a party in Florida Road to celebrate the nationalisation victory, I didn’t get a sense of delegates choosing one personality over the other.
In other words, even if some delegates were prepared to take on the ANC Youth League’s bullying and call its bluff, it would be a mistake to interpret it as a blanket endorsement of Zuma or Mantashe.
We have been on this road before. After the ANC’s policy conference in 2007, a row erupted concerning whether it had resolved that there should not be two centres of power and the key word was what weight we should attach to the phrase ‘preferable”.
In the conference resolution, the delegates said that ‘preferably” the person elected president of the ANC in December 2007 would be elected head of state in 2009, thereby creating a single centre of power.
This year, the question is whether the ANC has endorsed nationalisation or merely deferred it and effectively put it in the backburner. What a pity that that is all the conference has been reduced to.
We should be conversing about the delegates who came to the conference determined to push several proposals that would turn this government into a welfare state — proposals such as men getting an old-age pension from the age of 60 instead of the previous 65, free healthcare extended to children up to the age of 18, access to medical care for all road-accident victims without payments required or membership of a medical scheme, and the expansion of the time period covered by the Unemployment Insurance Fund.
These are meaningful but controversial discussions given the recession, shrinking tax revenue and the party’s commitment to make an impact on an ever-expanding pool of unemployed poor. They could spare us the embarrassment of conjecture.