/ 2 December 2011

Snakes and ladders of worrying about leaks

Snakes And Ladders Of Worrying About Leaks

When ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe wailed on Monday about national executive committee (NEC) members being “snakes” and a “fifth column”, et cetera, for leaking information to the media, my instinct was immediately conspiratorial: it means the leadership of the ANC knows precisely who is doing the leaking and they don’t like what is being leaked.

Mantashe was reporting back to the media on the deliberations of the NEC, which met last weekend, and he highlighted leaking as a matter of deep concern for the party. But before Mantashe rages at me too, let me admit that I have no evidence for this conspiracy theory. Yet in the years we have covered alliance politics we have come to know how many of the cliques have their own intelligence networks that spy on each other.

And in this current climate, where survival and the clamour for positions underlie almost every act by ANC public representatives, it is not totally unreasonable to probe further any public utterance. When the ANC says, for example, that the nationalisation research paper should be rewritten, my curiosity is immediately aroused. Did someone actually reject its findings or its ideological inclinations? Could “rewriting” be a euphemism for something stronger?

So when this unexpected missive complaining about leaking appeared, I was slightly dumbfounded. Leaking has been around for as long as there have been politicians in our midst. It is no worse than before. And smart politicians do brief senior journalists and editors on an off-the-record basis about their rationale for certain decisions, information that cannot be easily communicated in a press release or during a press briefing.

Moreover, individual politicians do give detailed information to select journalists. It can be useful in ensuring that the media do not report in a sensationalist way based on wild conjecture instead of solid, contextualised information. But this practice does have its drawbacks, because some such journos often feel beholden to report the information in a manner that pleases their sources, leading to single-source and unbalanced stories.

To use Mantashe’s phrase in describing the actions of the Constitutional Court, it seems the leadership of the ANC is preparing to “pounce”. It looks as though the Polokwane brigade, having thrived on planting all manner of stories about former president Thabo Mbeki when they were preparing to oust him, cannot handle a taste of their own medicine. To his credit, Mbeki did not unleash intelligence agents on those who were bad-mouthing and plotting against him. I cannot but surmise that the rules will continue to be rewritten as we approach the 2012 Mangaung conference.

I recently had the pleasure of reading a paper by one of the ANC’s thinkers, Joel Netshitenzhe, in which he put the spotlight on the tendency to use the vague notion of “the culture of the movement” to justify certain practices:
“Even more relevant to our understanding of history is the tendency to confine the definition of the ‘culture of the movement’ to periods not entirely suitable to the management of the present. There is much that can and should be extracted from the difficult years of ‘illegality’ and underground organisation, in relation to appropriate doses of democracy and centralism.”

“Yet the history of the ANC in the period before its banning and the experiences of other progressive parties are replete with profound lessons in addressing this issue. It is important to appreciate that political ambition cannot be eliminated; it needs to be managed.

“Today, the ANC, with its profound responsibilities for social transformation, cannot afford this level of disorganisation. But if there is any lesson to be drawn from this it is the fact that competition and contestation should be handled in a good spirit and not become a make-or-break issue for the unity and organisational integrity of the organisation as such.

“Parties such as Chama Cha Mapi­ndudzi in Tanzania and Frelimo in Mozambique, among others, undertake processes that include:

    Open declaration by those interested in standing for the presidency, and interviews by an electoral structure made up of senior and impartial cadres;

    Campaigns within party structures, fairly organised and regulated by the party itself; and

    Systems of disqualification if regulations are broken, for instance through the use of money or external platforms in campaigning.

“Quite clearly, the ANC has to come back to this question, and wants to find an open, fair and properly regulated system of managing leadership elections. Appeals to ‘culture’ that conveniently ignore the very history of the movement and the experiences of fraternal parties can in fact be as destructive as the maladies that they seek to eliminate,” Netshitenzhe said in a paper looking back at the ANC’s 100-year history.

So, when the current top six of the ANC clamp down on leaks to the press, ban discussions of leadership issues and discipline an individual or two, I do wonder whether they are not exacerbating the maladies they seek to eliminate. It is a pity no one will listen to Netshitenzhe now because he is Netshitenzhe. These articulations should really be among the discussion documents for next year as the party deliberates ways to sustain itself for another 100 years. Journalists at this week’s NEC media conference asked whether the ANC centre was holding. And what a legitimate question that is.