EDITORIAL | The ANC is led, the ANC is dead: Zuma meeting says it all

When the ANC officially returned to SA after almost three decades in exile, it had a catchy slogan: “The ANC Leads, the ANC Lives.”

It was as much a declaration of intent as it was a statement of reality. At the time, no meaningful discussion about the future of SA could happen without Nelson Mandela’s party. Although the Nats were still legally the governing party FW de Klerk knew he had little room to manoeuvre without first consulting the then liberation movement.

And the ANC didn’t shirk the responsibility to lead a deeply divided society towards a common future. Who can forget the inspired role played by Mandela in quelling racial tensions after the assassination of popular ANC military man and SACP general secretary Chris Hani?

Were it not for his live television address, where he called for calm on both sides of the political divide and urged South Africans to focus on the bigger picture of working towards a new and nonracial South Africa, Freedom Day could have been derailed by many more months of bloodletting.

That was the ANC that the majority of South Africans were to later entrust with governing the country. Even those who didn’t vote for the party in 1994 and in subsequent elections came to accept its authority to govern and believed it to be best placed to lead the country out of apartheid and into a brighter future.

That was then.

In recent years there have been many instances where we have had reason to wonder: what happened to that ANC of the 1990s?

In the end, they left the meeting having achieved nothing other than a lame assurance that Zuma will continue to consult with his lawyers about the case.

The party’s mishandling of former president Jacob Zuma’s refusal to appear before the Zondo commission even after being instructed to do so by the courts is but the latest incident causing us to ask the question.

If what happened at the meeting between the party’s senior officials and Zuma on Monday does not demonstrate that the ruling party lacks the courage, capacity and the appetite to lead, perhaps nothing will.

President Cyril Ramaphosa and five other ANC national officials went into the meeting with Zuma armed with a clear mandate from their own party’s national executive committee: All members should cooperate with the Zondo commission when they are required to do so, and no one is above the country’s constitution and its laws.

It was then expected of them that they would use the opportunity of the meeting to tell the former president to abide by the court ruling and explain to him the possible consequences of his defiance for him as an individual, the country and the party he once led.

Instead, if we are to go with the word of party secretary-general Ace Magashule, the president and his entourage turned the meeting into a listening session – where Zuma apparently made a long presentation about his “persecution” by authorities over the past two decades.

In the end, they left the meeting having achieved nothing other than a lame assurance that Zuma will continue to consult with his lawyers about the case.

While it is true that they cannot force him to appear before deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo if he does not want to, the least the ANC officials could have done was to register their displeasure at the manner in which he had behaved with regard to this issue.

They chose to kick the can down the road, hoping the matter would somehow resolve itself. That is not how a party that leads behaves. Failure to take courageous decisions and standing by them even if they rub powerful individuals the wrong way is a sign of weak leadership.