Twelve questions SA should be asking of the ANC’s leadership

As South Africa hurtles towards the end of the year, we are holding our collective breath ahead of the ANC elective conference.

“After December” or “let’s see what happens at the conference” are the kinds of things heard not only in our households, in Parliament or in boardrooms, but also on the airwaves and among commuters.

This is testimony to the centrality of the ANC in society. At the same time, it expresses a hope — ANC member or not — that this venerable organisation will get its act together and clear up its internal mess. Or in ANC parlance, “self-correct”.

I am probably among the growing number who feel that, notwithstanding who assumes the mantle of leadership, given the problems the nation, government and the country face, it actually is not going to make a huge difference who takes over from President Jacob Zuma.

I am taking a pessimistic view. It is in the interest of all South Africans that the ANC holds a successful conference in December. A properly managed conference with minimum or no loss of lives, free of allegations of “brown bags” and without court challenges about the status of branches or their delegates may seem a low barrier for the ANC to jump over.

But, given the current state of play, where the thrown chair has earned a place on the ANC’s logo and where ANC leaders are becoming more familiar with courtrooms than the needs of ordinary South Africans, this may not be all that low an expectation. Sadly, this is our reality.

A successful conference is not negotiable. It is a critical requirement for our national interest and it is urgent that the ruling party appreciates this in their actions. Hosting a successful conference in which the ANC unites around a democratically elected leadership will have an incredibly positive effect on our collective spirits. With the Bloomberg Misery Index describing us as the second-most miserable country on Earth — second only to Venezuela — our collective psyche is in serious need of a lift.

A successful conference will allow whoever inherits this poisoned chalice to focus on leading us into a post-Zuma future that can only be better for all our lives. Having had some familiarity with all of the presidential hopefuls, I have no doubt they are all men and women who could be great leaders of our country.

At the moment, we seem to be looking at how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In this case the nub of the problem is how to deal with the current incumbent after 2019. I wish to appeal for us to widen the spectrum of the debate.

I have therefore developed a checklist of 12 questions — the Clean Dozen, compared with the film The Dirty Dozen that my generation watched. I have been asking fellow comrades to use them as the checklist against which they must rate any of the contenders. I call it “clean” because I have no doubt making the right choices we will finally move us into a future where corruption will be steadily reduced and more money will flow towards meeting the needs of our society.

On the basis that we are all committed to a nonracial, democratic South Africa, we should ask of our candidates:

• What are you going to do to restore broad-based respect for democratic values in South Africa? The 2016 Afrobarometer Survey shows that support for democracy among our citizens is down to 64%, whereas it had reached a high of 72% in 2011. It will have to begin from within the party, where the ANC’s own constitutional provisions and decision-making processes must be respected and divergent views acknowledged.

• What are you doing to deepen nonracialism? The Mandela era may have helped us all to find a place in this rainbow nation, but the Mbeki era highlighted the colour of poverty versus the colour of privilege. Yet the period since 2008 has been marked by the rise of ethnic chauvinism, racism and decreasing commitment to national unity. Researchers have shown that among whites, especially Afrikaans-speakers, a deepening sense of victimhood, a sense of loss of political rights and a refusal to take collective responsibility for the past is taking hold. Professor Melissa Steyn of the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies warns of a new Great Trek inwards. We are seeing more and more social and psychological Oranias.

• What are you doing to promote social cohesion? Overcoming the racial and ethnic divides will have to occur in the context of rising inequality and poverty. The latest August 2017 Statistics SA report shows that, although poverty declined between 2006 and 2011, it rose to 55.5% in 2015. That means that 30.4-million South Africans had incomes of less than R992 a person a month in 2015 prices.

• What are you going to do about the state of school education? Recent Stats SA figures show that almost half of 25- to 35-year-olds have lower than a matric certificate, 33% hold a matric certificate and about a fifth have a post-secondary school education. Among 20- to 24-year-olds, 16% are in primary and secondary education, 12% are in post-secondary education and 21% are employed. That leaves more than half who are among the “not employed” or “in education or training” categories.

• What are you going to do about tertiary education? Pali Lehohla, the outgoing statistician general, pointed out that this generation is less equipped than their parents. This can be seen in terms of various indices — over the past two decades the number of black professionals and specialists in the 25-to-35 age bracket dropped by 2%. The younger cohort below 25 years old is showing similarly disturbing trends.

• What are you going to do about unemployment? The country’s unemployment rate is worryingly high at anything between 27% and 37%, and the 15-to-35 age group unemployment figure is almost 70%. In a stagnant economy, this can only lead to widespread social unrest.

• What are you going to do to engage with civil society? Constant ANC-led attacks on civil society, the drying up of sources of funding as well as the migration by activists into state structures denuded NGOs of vital resources. Yet today we are seeing the heightened mobilisation of civil society, especially around fighting corruption and state capture such as Future SA, promising never again to allow the weakening of civil society.

• What are you going to do about the increasing levels of violent protests? In the period 2004 to 2008 there were, on average, 21 violent protests a year. That has increased to 164 a year between 2014 and 2016. Adele Kirsten and Karl von Holdt have pointed out in their 2011 research report The Smoke That Calls that “many of those who participate in the violence are unemployed, live in poverty and see no prospect of a change in these circumstances. Impoverished young men, in particular, experience this as the undermining of their masculinity as they are unable to establish families”.

• What are you going to do about addressing patriarchy in society, and especially gender-based violence? The 2016 demographic and health survey of Stats SA shows that 17% of women aged 18 to 24 had experienced violence from a partner and a similar percentage for women 65 years old and older. And this affects all strata, with more than 24% on women in the poorest households as against 13% in the top-earning homes experiencing physical violence in their homes.

• What are you going to do about the rising prevalence of HIV and Aids? Research shows that women in the 15-to-24 age group are eight times more likely to be HIV positive than their male counterparts. It was this age group that bucked the trend of declining HIV infection and the successes in slashing the levels of babies born infected to 6 000 from 70 000 a decade ago.

• What are you going to do about crime? Although there has been a downward trend in some types of crime, we cannot be proud of the fact that an estimated total of 1.5-million crime incidents were experienced by approximately 1.2-million households in 2016 and 2017.

• To complete the Clean Dozen, the 12th question — the most fundamental question — is: What are you going to do about economic growth?

South Africa is rapidly becoming an investment pariah in the eyes of domestic and foreign investors. The South African public is pessimistic when investors look at the rampant corruption. With ANC factional fighting breaking out not only in its conferences but also in the legislature, the executive as well as in the economy, and security agencies seemingly impotent to restore law and order, we cannot expect anything different from those responsible for investing their own or other people’s money.

There is little room for point scoring. We all need to urge the ANC conference to be held in the best manner possible so that the entire country can do what it does best: unite as a nation and put all our energies into solving the most burning challenges of the day.

Yacoob Abba Omar is head of strategy and communications at the Banking Association South Africa