If the ANC rejects the diagnostic and hopefully therapeutic criticism even from its devoted members, it will continue to crumble and fall. (Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
As a student of philosophy at university, I didn’t take an interest in Karl Marx’s writing. My focus was analytic philosophy, epistemology and logic. Political philosophy, which I thought Marx’s writings were about, did not seem to add value to my worldview.
It perplexed me that Marxism still had dogmatic believers despite its apparent ideological failures. Later, I found his writings quite invaluable for making sense of our world. A world where truth is relative.
There are many opinions about our world and our lives within it. But, as Albert Einstein put it, the shape of clothes is not independent of the human form they are made for. Political ideas and ideologies are not independent of the human condition.
Of course, there is nothing intrinsically bad about perspectives or relativisms, until we refuse to admit that our fingers are pointing at the same objects even if they are pointing in different directions.
The planet Venus is the same whether you call it a morning or an evening star. But if those who gaze at Venus in the morning do not agree with evening gazers, the dispute needs to be settled through objective methodologies — passions aside.
I was one of millions of South Africans who voted for the first time in 1994. I did not know much about politics. I was born to labour tenants on a white man’s farm. As a child I thought it was natural for us to be the servants of white people.
After all, my father and his father before him were servants in the same farm, and our “baas” and his father before him, were always masters on the farm.
I thought it was as normal for baas to beat his servants as it was for parents to spank their children. Baas was correcting his wayward servants, and the question from the servants who heard about the assault would always be, “What did he do to upset baas?”
By 1994, I was aware that black people were not always servants to anyone. There was a time, they said, when black Africans ruled over their own lives. From that point onwards, my view of Nelson Mandela changed from being a “terrorist” to being a Moses for the oppressed people
As I stood in that long queue on 27 April 1994 waiting for my turn to cast my vote, I was single-minded about my goal. I was voting to bring back the good old days when we, the people, governed ourselves. I was too young to vote for abstracts such as black pride or black consciousness.
I was voting for freedom to achieve the same standard of living as the white farm owners my parents once served. Since 1994 every instance of casting my vote for the ANC was an act of putting trust in a political party to administer state affairs justly.
Making mistakes is as certain as suffering death and taxes. This is not problematic if we are aware and prepared to admit that mistakes are being made. We are frustrated more by the refusal to admit mistakes than we are by the mistakes themselves.
The redemptive power of repentance seems underestimated by the ANC. It is not the ANC’s mistakes or even mismanagement of state affairs that frustrates us most. It is the absence of admitting its failures and wrongdoings.
From their relative comfort, most, if not all, ANC politicians demonise service delivery protests as politically motivated. They seem unable to believe that hunger alone can move communities to protest the government they elected.
I have not given up on the ANC as a totally lost cause, because I have held onto the hope that they will be open to criticism and correct — and be seen to correct — their mistakes.
I was therefore relieved when the Mail & Guardian on 26 June 2023 published an article by Donovan E Williams, “The demise of the ANC is the death of ideology in SA politics” critically evaluating the ANC.
One of the most fundamental themes I discerned from Williams’ article was the subordination of political ideology and hope to the politics of fear-mongering. The voter is seduced with fear of what could happen if they elected the “other party”.
This logic, if I understood Williams accurately, should hold true only if fear of this “bogeyman” was based on a perception that the bogeyman will make things bad or worse for the electorate.
Alas, the fear of the bogeyman seems to do the trick despite no evidence that the bogeyman will bring harm. It seems therefore that there is something more pathological about the bogeyman mentality. Separation anxiety or Stockholm syndrome?
With the exodus of black leaders from the Democratic Alliance, I believe that racism and white supremacy are still alive and well in the party. But no rhetoric can convince me that either the DA or the Freedom Front Plus can bring back the apartheid regime.
And I doubt that the militancy of the Economic Freedom Fighters’ Julius Malema can turn him into a Lyndon B Johnson in the Vietnam War or George W Bush in the Iraq War.
Something else must be implicated in the perpetuation of my support for the ANC, despite the crumbling world around me under its stewardship. The crux of the matter is that the ANC was my liberator and therefore my “first love”, so to speak.
And holding on to it may well be because of some pathology in the form of separation anxiety. An irrational fear that separation from the ANC can somehow make me vulnerable.
We are seduced into believing and reproducing lies about the failures of the ANC in power. Even among poor people who live in squalor, there is no scarcity of ANC apologists.
Williams’ article gave me hope that the ANC could be on the road to recovery through this critical analysis, directed at the machinery of the ANC and the danger of opportunistic post-election coalitions of convenience.
On the other hand, the response to Williams by Sikhumbuzo Thomo, “Demise of the ANC’ article misses the mark”, (Mail & Guardian: 7 July 2023) did the opposite. Thomo’s defensive approach appeared to reduce Williams’ article to factionalism or downright assault on the ANC.
Thomo seemed to represent a paranoid ANC, who views any criticism as an attempt to divide it, and that all ANC comrades must just close ranks. It may be that there is an ideological framework the ANC employs to interpret critical evaluation.
Perhaps that ideology is “ANC above all” and is based on some principle that the ANC is always correct and its members are either with it or against it. If this is the case, then the ANC is talking about the “masses” in the abstract — not masses of real people who can talk to, or back at, the ANC leaders.
Thomo made me question (again) if intellectual discourse is dead in the ANC? Or is the ANC too fragile to withstand criticism? If the answer to both questions is “yes”, then we have a big problem — because it is impossible for people in any organisation to always be correct.
I do not agree with every implication of Williams’ analytical framework. For example, it is an undernourished ANC that I fear most. I prefer an ANC that does not break mirrors and look outside to explain its problems.
The problem with Thomo’s response is that he exposes his world as ANC-centric, when the consequences of the ANC mistakes — or any others for him — can only be discussed within the ANC. But the consequences are felt more in South African society than within the ANC. By overlooking this fact, Thomo misses the mark fundamentally. We the people, led by the ANC, solemnly declared that our Constitution “lays the foundation for a democratic society in which government is based on the will of the people”.
The ANC must therefore prove capable of listening to the people. An ecosystem of dialectical discourse needs to return to the ANC. Closing ranks and shutting off criticism when it is obvious that you are fallible, takes away all hope you can ever be a people’s organisation again.
If the ANC rejects the diagnostic and hopefully therapeutic criticism even from its devoted members, eventually it will fall. In that it might as well join the political bandwagon of fear-mongering, with the hope that the gullible will be persuaded to believe that your political enemies are their enemies — which is not true necessarily. Otherwise, it is selling hope to lead us to the promised land when it can barely stand.
What Thomo is asking for, is for the ANC to continue navel-gazing, when it should be placing the people and society’s needs at the centre of its gaze. This navel-gazing will drive the final nail on the coffin of the ANC.
Mzwandile Manto is the secretary-general of the Mgwali Development Forum.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.