Of the many things coming out of the ANC’s fifth national general council (NGC), the most troubling was the party’s response to the hoisting, by workers, of placards outside the Birchwood Hotel.
It was a protest rich in meaning. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone that a party trying, or so we must believe, to come up with solutions for our country’s myriad challenges couldn’t care enough for its workers, the people helping it succeed.
As leaders drove past the workers in their shimmering German-made machines, going into a hotel where the NGC is being held, an event ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula told the media the day before did not come “cheap”, many would have wondered where the ANC’s beautiful soul had disappeared to.
If liberation movements had hearts, the ANC’s was bigger. It is the party of Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani and Walter Sisulu that forgave apartheid architects and enforcers; that told us accessing the truth was, in and of itself, worth reconciling with the verkrampte. It would have taken people with big hearts to not institute Nuremberg-style trials.
Those who gifted us the ANC cared enough to create a congress of the people to spearhead solutions to society’s ills.
This week, the ANC’s leading lights in the persons of Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe, Cyril Ramaphosa, Gwede Mantashe and others, who frequently remind us of the priests, teachers and nurses who were moved by human suffering to form the ANC in 1912, drove into the Birchwood Hotel & OR Tambo Conference Centre without their hearts skipping a beat.
As the ANC wrestled with the complexities of waning support, intensifying battles for leadership positions, stubborn patronage networks, leading in a geopolitical world where facts don’t matter, the ANC’s relationship with its own employees should have been on the agenda. After all, these are the people who will implement much of what the leaders agree on.
As ANC leaders met, a perennial ill within the party spilled, not for the first time, into the public. The question for many, including the ANC’s detractors, was: how is the ANC going to solve society’s challenges when it couldn’t move an inch to solve a simple internal salary issue?
Put differently, how will the ANC help strangers (the so-called motive forces) when it couldn’t help those from whom the ANC gets something/labour in return?
Is it any wonder service delivery is at its lowest ebb, regardless of it being the most talked about at ANC events?
Shortly after the dawn of democracy, the ANC government led by Mandela came up with Batho Pele, which means “People First” in Setswana/Sepedi, in 1997. Its purpose was to improve the quality of services to people regardless of colour and to inculcate a culture of caring and responsiveness in a government that previously demeaned, dehumanised and drew perverse pleasure in deepening inequality.
When the Mandela administration embedded Batho Pele as a public service initiative, it earned a lot of goodwill. Here was a government led by a party that acknowledged the inherent humanity in all of us. In truth, Batho Pele was one of the many programmes it came up with that made millions of people feel seen.
Outside the Birchwood Hotel, the workers wanted to be seen. Theirs was not a protest motivated by hate or even a desire for the ANC to lose elections. They wanted their plight to be acknowledged and hopefully attended to. Some told reporters they are owed salaries dating back to 2023. Others told of how they arrived at doctors to be told their medical aid memberships were suspended because the ANC failed to pay what was deducted from their salaries. Others feared the worse about their pensions.
That ANC with a heart, the ANC the priests and teachers created, was now a horrible employer. It has morphed into what ANC allies such as the SACP and Cosatu should be fighting on shop floors. The fact that Cosatu leaders drove in without as much as a two-minute pause to acknowledge the pain their comrades, their constituencies, are going through is telling of the type of leaders who gathered at Birchwood this week. Ditto the SACP, modelled, we are supposed to believe, on the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who preached workers of the world should unite or perish.
Where the ANC fails to see workers, where it prioritises those inside the hotel rather than the ordinary workers, it will not know what hit it when the local government elections are over
At least Supra Mahumapelo, the ANC strongman from the North West, took a few minutes to commiserate with the workers, noting he has no power to do anything about their situation. ANC Youth League leader also Collen Malatji expressed support.
For many leaders who drove past, empathetic leadership is a rumour to be shared with society in documents such as Umrabulo, but never something ANC workers are worthy of. That should make Mandela, Hani, Sisulu and Oliver Tambo turn in their graves.
As workers went back to do their work, satisfied there was no-one in the party’s higher echelons who could claim ignorance of their plight, they noted their intention was simply to be heard, more so after Mbalula created an impression at a media conference it was only he and a few other seniors who had not been paid.
As the ANC wrestled with the complexities of waning support, intensifying battles for leadership positions, stubborn patronage networks, leading in a geopolitical world where facts don’t matter, the ANC’s relationship with its own employees should have been on the agenda. After all, these are the people who will implement much of what the leaders agree on. These represent the people, ordinary workers, who made the ANC the behemoth it once was.
Where the ANC fails to see workers, where it prioritises those inside the hotel rather than the ordinary workers, it will not know what hit it when the local government elections are over.
When most of the electorate see themselves in those locked outside Birchwood Hotel, they wonder how the ANC could ever prioritise them when it is this heartless against its own employees.
TimesLIVE
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