The people needed to be the makers of their own destiny

THE attainment of democracy in 1994 is still very much a cause for celebration by all South Africans. The event was the crowning achievement of the struggle, led by the ANC, against white minority rule.

So, for the organisation's centenary this year, three issues need to be separated and assessed. The first is to showcase our achievements. The second is to interrogate our past so that we understand ourselves better. Lastly, we should be scrutinising the challenges ahead as we face the future.

Let us not become complicit in an internalised sense of inferiority that whites-only rule sought to drum into our psyche. Cynicism about the present cannot rewrite the past.

Walter Sisulu often reminded us that the ANC had to forge itself in a twofold struggle: the principal one against the system, the secondary one internal, to shape the organisation capable of leading the fight.

It has been a long journey, involving grappling with issues in our society that divide us.

The ANC's primary weapon in both these "struggles" was unity: unity of the African people. Driven by this requirement, it had to broaden its vision to unity across socially engineered class and colour divides. Purpose and action were the glue binding together the interests of these diverse forces, even though the glue was sometimes volatile. Regardless, all these forces, despite their competitive interests, understood that freedom was indivisible.

Democracy thus - both in the case of the country and the internal dynamics of the ANC - is the sum of rules, procedures and practices for mediating conflicting interests so that movement forward does not cause volatilities to explode into conflagrations.

The ANC history reverberates with the sound and fury of "internal struggle".

Each president of the ANC in his own era had to steer the organisation to finding the right balance that would take us forward. Some were more successful than others. But each laid a brick in the foundations of our freedom.

In the 1920s, the ANC almost became a forgotten entity when the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union, led by Clements Kadalie, captured the imagination of working people.

The same happened when a breakaway group in 1958 established themselves as the Pan Africanist Congress, under the leadership of Robert Sobukwe and Potlako Leballo. Who would have predicted that, come the democratic elections of April 27 1994, the PAC would garner a mere 243478 votes of a total of 19.7 million votes cast?

When the "Gang of Eight" were expelled by the ANC in 1975, it was seen as a formidable threat to the ANC, but they soon vanished in the political wilderness.

Such "internal struggles" are neither pleasant nor edifying. The challenge is not to kill debate, but to ensure that it is rooted in mutual respect and rational discourse. This is not an easy task, as each generation has to pass through a learning experience.

These examples suffice to make the point that it is not so much that the ANC survived, but rather to understand what enabled the ANC to grow stronger from these experiences.

The idea that unity of purpose and action could bind diverse and even conflicting interests was reinforced immeasurably by a growing commitment to mass action. This became an enduring strand in the strategic thinking of the ANC and its allies.

In the 1950s, it assumed organisational coherence in the Congress Alliance and the mounting of the Defiance Campaign. Today, this coherence is anchored in the alliance of the ANC-Cosatu and the South African Communist Party.

This reliance on united mass action gained further impetus when the Freedom Charter was drafted in 1955. The charter tapped into the experiences of the people. The leadership had come to understand that the people needed to be the makers of their destiny. It was not enough to know what they were against, but also what they stood for.

This became an inherent part of the thinking and the actions championed by the ANC, even when it turned to the armed struggle.

It remained imbedded in the way the ANC and its allies kept their membership and the public briefed on developments in negotiations, and engaged in the crafting of the final constitution of 1996, as well as in the functioning of parliament. We see it today in the way the National Planning Commission is putting together its proposals, and in the persistence with which President Zuma engages with communities to see first-hand how they live and work and to address deficiencies in the workings of government.

And so we are compelled to acknowledge that the ANC and its allies remain best placed to carry forward the vision and programme of liberation.