The ANC goes into yet another national executive committee meeting at the end of this week. As usual political observers will hold their breath waiting for news of what transpires in the meeting of the 108 or so top leaders in the party. The key question, as has been the case with every one of these meetings since January 2018, is whether Ramaphosa has enough power in the NEC to implement his urgently needed reform agenda.
The scrutiny of the ANC NEC and other ANC structures is not misplaced. Power in SA lies with control of the ANC. Useful as the state capture inquiry has been, a stark and bitter truth has been exposed by it. That truth is that none of the corruption that has taken place in our republic would have taken place if the ANC had not been captured first. That means that one cannot talk about state capture without talking about ANC capture. One cannot reform the state, at least for now, without reforming the ANC or kicking it out of power.
Power in the ANC translates into power over the state and its almost limitless resources. If one fantasises about wealth in SA today, as the Gupta family very obviously did, then one has to aim to capture the ANC. With the takeover of the party, the wealth of SA’s taxpayers is yours to do with as you please.
Is the ANC a better party with more members? No. Has quality of leadership and membership improved? Decidedly not.
Back in the 2000s some ANC leaders realised that the ability of the ANC and the country’s fabulous laws to hold us all accountable were useless, if leaders who did not treasure them rose to power within the party. Thabo Mbeki, at the time president of the party, bemoaned the quality of ANC members and said they did not have enough political education to lead the country or even their own party.
“The reality is that we have not attended to this matter with the seriousness and consistency it demands,” he said. “As a result of this failure, we must expect that we will have members who, among other things, will have very little familiarity with the history and traditions of the ANC, its policies, its value system and its organisational practices.”
Power was draining away from Mbeki in the mid-2000s. He was not being listened to. Despite being a man who values quality, the secretary-general of the ANC at the time, Kgalema Motlanthe, was more fascinated by quantity than by the quality Mbeki was talking about.
“Over the last five years we have increased our membership significantly. From 416,000 members in 2002, the membership of the ANC has increased to more than 620,000,” Motlanthe reported to the ANC conference in 2007. “The membership of the ANC is larger than it has ever been. Could it be that the decision of our 1942 national conference, to expand the membership of the movement to one million members, is within reach?”
Under Gwede Mantashe, Motlanthe’s successor in the secretary-general position, the party doubled its membership to over 1.2 million. By December 2020 it had reached 1.4 million members.
Is the ANC a better party with more members? No. Has quality of leadership and membership improved? Decidedly not.
The biggest danger, however, is how the ANC as a party seems to think it has to micromanage its deployees in government. Nowadays, every single decision that government has to make has to be rubber-stamped by the likes of ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule. Why? It is the same Thabo Mbeki who recognised the danger in the ANC’s mass recruitment in 2007, who again identified the ANC’s weakness in meddling in government matters at every turn. In 2016 he wrote about how, during his tenure in the presidency, his administration “was very careful to avoid conflating the ruling party and the state”.
Further to that, he wrote, “the ANC did not and could not have the capacity that the state has to generate and consider the kind of enormous details which government had to deal with, as it translated broad policies into specific programmes relating to more than 30 government departments. Fully understanding this, the ANC headquarters and the NEC, for instance, never intervened in government work, pretending that they could have the same capacity with regard to matters of detail as would the ministers and deputy ministers and the national cabinet.”
The point Mbeki was making is this: the party gives its deployees a framework within which they must operate. These deployees must then go off and implement them without being micromanaged by the party on a daily basis.
The problem with SA today is that we think we have a government. We don’t. We have Ace Magashule, Jessie Duarte, Carl Niehaus and Kebby Maphatsoe yapping at every decision government makes. If there is to be any reform by Ramaphosa, it has to be about the relationship between his party and the state. The ANC is holding him and his team hostage.
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