How the ANC wasted victory of the 1994 democratic elections

In his hard-hitting book, ANC veteran Khulu Mbatha reflects on the failure of the ANC to govern South Africa. The book charts the disappointment of an ANC stalwart who, in his own words, believes that ‘after 22 years of freedom, part of our dreams seem to be fading away’

In his message for the 105th year since the ANC was founded, carried in the Sowetan of 5 January 2017, Paul Mashatile remarked:

"Politically, the ANC has had its own share of challenges, including the perception that it tolerates corruption, factionalism, greed, self-centredness and mediocrity.

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"Issues of leadership or lack thereof, unmanaged expectations, trust deficit and the economic reality of the majority of our people also contribute to the precipitation of this crisis. The apparent denialism and a lack of courage to attend to the crisis that engulfs the ANC have plunged the organisation into a deeper morass, the highlight being the loss of trust by our people as expressed through the electoral decline during the recent local government elections.

Given the internal turmoil within the ANC, its 105th anniversary celebrations should offer an opportunity to reflect on how it reached its lowest levels and how best it can be extricated from this ever-deepening political hole.

"Being at the crossroads, the ANC can ill afford to plaster over the gaping cracks within its ranks but should take decisive steps and unprecedented action leading up to and beyond the proposed National Consultative Conference."

I believed this was an open-minded and accurate reflection of the current situation in the organisation. Three days later and in contrast to Mashatile's appraisal, the "January 8 statement" delivered by President Zuma on behalf of the national executive committee of the ANC at Orlando Stadium in Soweto was very shallow and elusive:

"The ANC has remained resolute in our determination to liberate the people of South Africa and we have been consistent - for more than one hundred years - about our strategic objective to put in place a united, nonracial, nonsexist, democratic and prosperous South Africa. Working with the people, we will continue to adapt our strategies and tactics to respond to the prevailing material conditions. The ANC pledges to you that we will continue to fight for the creation of a National Democratic Society, throughout our lives, until we have won our liberty!"

" ... until we have won liberty!"

Is South Africa not free yet? Haven't we established democracy? Has the ANC been "resolute" to fulfil the expectations of our people? But asking more questions will not help. The ANC is in "denial mode" as I have indicated throughout this book. The whole leadership must bear the consequences for misleading the people of South Africa.

I am one of the "group of 101 stalwarts" who are signatories to the document "For the sake of our future". We met with the National Working Committee of the ANC on 21 November 2016 (after a lot of dilly-dallying on the part of the top six of the ANC).

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The next meeting took place four days later, on Friday, 25 November. The outcome of this engagement was an agreement to hold a national consultative conference. It is not clear whether the wish of the stalwarts and veterans to separate it from a policy conference will be realised.

Before I come to my personal position regarding the national consultative conference versus the policy conference, let me attest that 2016 schooled us to expect the unexpected. So much is no longer the same. Many, especially the youth, are longing for a more rational public debate and engagement, based more on facts and less on rhetoric.

Context is everything, and through the advance of technology events are happening so fast that yesterday's happenings form heaps of history and the interconnection of actions and events (and their causes) are easily muddled or even forgotten. It can be difficult to see the bigger picture.

There is no doubt that our past history warrants critical re-evaluation and needs to be compared with what happened in other nations in Africa and the world. Therefore the crisis in the ANC provides us with an opportunity to look into the history of the past fifty years.

I believe that a policy conference is not as urgent as a consultative conference. Even the designation of this gathering as a policy conference is misleading. All the policy conferences held so far - from "Ready to Govern" in 1992 up to the national policy conference of June 2012 - have been inadequate to arm the ANC with the policies that would have made it a better and more modern party, able to fulfil its mandate to govern responsibly and in an accountable fashion.

These policy conferences were meant to be incisive meetings but have turned out to be routine events, thus making it easy for the ANC to be captured by forces other than those wanting to improve the lives of the people.

In this book I have given a detailed assessment of the ANC national conferences and I have also shown that policy and national conferences were not the only causes of the ANC's failures. The truth is that the ANC never found its feet after 1994 and the explanation is that the ANC was only ready to negotiate, not to govern.

Even its readiness to negotiate was punctuated by conspicuous shortcomings. Nevertheless, it had a lot of political ammunition to lead the negotiations to free South Africa from apartheid - but it had no blueprint for building a new society out of the rubble left behind. The ANC was therefore vulnerable from the day the new flag was raised over the Union Buildings.

Even today the ANC has no reliable policy in almost all strategic areas, from the development of the economy and its essential infrastructures to education, health and science. To take this country forward the ANC relies heavily on short-term solutions or - to a large extent - on obsolete doctrines that were advanced during the time when it was still a liberation movement (a fetish that the ANC refuses to drop) and in exile.

block_quotes_start Politically, the ANC has had its own share of challenges, including the perception that it tolerates corruption, factionalism, greed, self-centredness and mediocrity block_quotes_end

So, no policy conference is likely to deliver different results. This is the main reason why the National Development Plan is not helpful to the ANC's efforts in government.

Even when armed with such slogans like "creating one united, democratic, nonracial, nonsexist and prosperous South Africa" the ANC has no concrete plans for uniting all the people of South Africa to a common cause. The ANC needs an introspective platform through which to reflect on its main mission and purpose to exist, but this is unlikely because the majority in the NEC (not the ANC itself) seem to think it is a waste of time.

They want a policy conference that would endorse previous clichés such as recognising the ANC as the vanguard organisation that can deliver true democracy (albeit without economic benefits for the majority) regardless of its evident failures.

Many South Africans think it is already too late because the ANC and its leadership have become too arrogant, self-serving, soft on corruption and increasingly distant from its social base. The NEC's statement after the August 2016 local government elections arrogantly identified these failings as "perceptions" that will be dealt with by the leadership when they visit provinces, regions and branches.

The stalwarts have not given up. Even if I may want to agree with ANC Youth League president Collen Maine "that those who went into exile were owed nothing by the ANC", I found it disrespectful and insulting that he believes his generation "might have done a better job than the party's stalwarts if they had been there in the 1960s". As Thabo Mbeki put it:

"Within itself this collective contains invaluable, multifaceted and irreplaceable experience in terms of the struggle both to defeat the apartheid system and to construct a democratic, nonracial and nonsexist South Africa. It is made up of cadres ... whose involvement in our all-round struggle spans a period of over 60 years.

These cadres belong among that eminent succession of principled generations of revolutionaries which ensured the survival, growth, development and victory of the ANC, at all times loyal to the injunction that their strategic task was and is to serve the people of South Africa."

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I have been with the ANC for over 40 years now and I agree with my fellow stalwarts on the urgent need for such a consultative conference - and on the opinion that the ANC's constitution is antiquated. It hardly differs from the time when the ANC was a liberation movement. The ANC is a governing party now.

This is a qualitative change and must reflect the type of organisation that understands leadership obligations and responsibilities and what it means to govern for the purpose of serving the people. One of the fundamental changes to be considered in the constitution is how - and by what criteria - ANC leaders, from branch level to the top officials and NEC, are elected. As Ranjeni Munusamy commented in the Daily Maverick of 11 January 2017:

"While in exile, the issue of leadership was never really a problem for the ANC. Oliver Tambo was president of the ANC for 24 years, from 1967 to 1991, and was widely respected within the organisation and internationally. After the ANC's unbanning, the shift in leadership to Nelson Mandela was natural and necessary. Even though the world and its leaders changed, the ANC maintained its process of choosing by consensus rather than open contestation that allows for campaigning and interrogation of the candidates.

The first real contest for the ANC presidency (post-exile) was in 2007 in Polokwane, but all the campaigning happened covertly. There was no questioning or proper examination of the two candidates, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, on what their plans were for the ANC and the country for the ensuing five years.

"The same occurred in 2012, when Kgalema Motlanthe was nominated to challenge Zuma.

"The ANC's leadership selection process is therefore based on what the members know historically of their leaders and what the conduits purport would be their game plan. The flaw in the process revealed itself when the leader elected at both those conferences immersed himself in scandal and proved ineffective in leading both the organisation and the country.

As it turned out, his tremendous record during the liberation struggle had sweet nothing to do with his ability to lead a modern economy with great challenges. Neither did it give him the inclination to conduct himself ethically and in compliance with the Constitution.

"The ANC veterans stepped forward a few months ago due to concerns about the decline of the organisation, its electoral performance and the overwhelming evidence of the state being surrendered to the Gupta family. They proposed that the ANC hold a national consultative conference to confront its problems openly and honestly. While the ANC leadership initially dismissed the idea, the national executive committee (NEC) decided to extend the midyear policy conference to accommodate a two-day consultative conference."

block_quotes_start The ANC's leadership selection process is therefore based on what the members know historically of their leaders and what the conduits purport would be their game plan block_quotes_end

There are other points where I agree with the stalwarts and veterans. But then there are some areas where I differ from them (which include some of the issues covered in the January 8 statement).

Firstly, there are those who want the current leadership to be changed because they are worried that the ANC could lose the next national elections in 2019. This is certainly a valid concern. But to change the leadership for this reason alone could increase the problems of factions and divisions within the ANC.

From the losses suffered in the local government elections and the shenanigans taking place almost daily, it is obvious that the ANC stands to lose in 2019. Even if you change this current leadership and the ANC survives the next elections it will probably not be able to deal with its core problems. The leadership rot has permeated the entire ANC, and despite good intentions of a "new leadership" the ruptures are only likely to deepen because of the embedded culture of corrupt factionalism.

Secondly, some comrades, confronted with the challenges of today, especially Zuma's presidency, want to revive the traditions of struggle and bring back the ANC of Tambo and Mandela and even Luthuli. This conservative standpoint is not possible. That kind of ANC would never be able to deal with the current challenges.

The ANC of the past made liberation history, but it also carried a lot of baggage from the past, influenced as it was by ideologies and practices that were not necessarily democratic. Although the leadership of Tambo was unquestionable and in Morogoro and Kabwe the leadership resigned to let a new leadership be elected, other structures were simply imposed and many functions and responsibilities were not given in democratic ways to individuals - partly understandable because some aspects of the struggle demanded clandestine operation.

However, it affected the accountability of those individuals to the organisation as a whole. That's why some of the abuses took place in Angola and elsewhere, and why certain individuals became bigger than the organisation itself.

Thirdly, there are those who assert that the ANC's problems arise because those in positions of power and influence have not been vetted. This vetting business, which sometimes goes under the name of "lifestyle audit", has become fashionable within the organisation.

It is something closely associated with organisations that work in a secretive way, like the state security agencies. We have to be cautious when we employ practices like "lifestyle audits" when actually the problems are related to corruption, ethical conduct and abuse of office. While vetting and "lifestyle audits" are important, they will not solve the other problems of the ANC.

All the above interpretations (and others like those that consider the low levels of discipline within the organisation as the main source of problems and in frustration are calling for the "Through the eye of a needle?" document of 2001) are projecting a one-sided and single-cause crisis, not realising that the crisis engulfing the ANC is a combination of ... factors that developed and multiplied over many years.

• This is an edited extract of Mbatha's book 'Unmasked - why the ANC failed to govern' (KMM Review Publishing Company, R265)