One day historians will pore over ANC and state documents to understand why President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ambitious New Dawn programme failed.
Over and above the greed and the corruption that holds the party in its grip, the historians might want to reflect on the role of paranoia — and conspiracies — in the party. Paranoia defines everything that the ANC does. In this party, everything and everyone is plotting against the party — including its own leaders. Within the ANC, more than anywhere else in society, Nelson Mandela is accused of being a spy for the apartheid regime not just by the party’s lunatic fringe but by many in its mainstream. In the ANC you often hear that Thabo Mbeki was a spy of Western powers. And today, Ramaphosa is depicted as a spy of the mythical white monopoly capital and who-knows-who-else?
The ANC is a prisoner of the past. Everything it does is about the past: its policies, its leaders, its discourse. Everything it touches is destroyed or hampered by conspiracies and suspicions from its past. It is impossible to chart a path into the future in the ANC. Everything is stillborn in the muddy paranoia of history.
The party elected Ramaphosa as its president in 2017 — and what is discourse in the party? Instead of weighing up and implementing his reform agenda, the past four years have been mired in excavating his past. He has been accused of being an apartheid spy (with no evidence), yet the same people who allege this elected him chief negotiator during the democracy talks and secretary-general of the party in the 1990s. What’s wrong with these people?
They are prisoners of their past, incapable of raising their eyes to the horizon and charting a way forward. Honestly, if the ANC was to start a company, it would be called Conspiracies-R-Us.
So, no-one should not be surprised by the endless stream of conspiracies that emanate from the party today. Mudslinging and the manufacture of lies is just how the party operates.
Paranoia, lies, smear campaigns and conspiracies are what has driven the ANC since its exile days ... In the ANC in the 1980s, one merely had to whisper that someone was an apartheid spy, and they would be destroyed.
Take Kgalema Motlanthe, one of the most measured leaders of the party. The man has been fooled by his own comrades’ conspiracy theories and been a victim of their smear campaigns at the same time. Back in 2005, when Motlanthe was secretary-general of the ANC, a bunch of emails purporting to reveal a political conspiracy against Jacob Zuma landed in the party’s hands. Motlanthe believed the emails were authentic and that there was indeed a plot to besmirch Zuma. The people named as authors of these emails (amazing that people planned a takedown of Zuma by email, or that anyone would believe such a far-fetched conspiracy) vehemently denied the charges, but Motlanthe believed them.
The emails were proven to be fake. The whole thing was a hoax. Yet, inside the ANC, it is still believed. There are still people in the party’s national executive committee who swear by the bogus intelligence report despite the inspector-general of intelligence showing that the whole thing was fiction.
Just two years after the hoax email saga, intelligence operatives tried to smear Motlanthe himself when a woman was sent to gullible journalists with a story that Motlanthe had impregnated her. After a big, fake scandal the woman confessed there was no pregnancy and no liaison with Motlanthe. Who set her up? Believe me, it is people in the ANC itself.
Paranoia, lies, smear campaigns and conspiracies are what has driven the ANC since its exile days. In the 1980s innocent members of the party were detained, tortured, and executed for allegedly working for the apartheid regime — even when they were merely speaking up about terrible conditions in the ANC’s camps or corruption among its leaders. In the ANC in the 1980s, one merely had to whisper that someone was an apartheid spy and they would be destroyed.
That history of the party has carried over into its time in government. At the beginning of its time in power in 1994 it made some effort to be serious about the act of government, but by the mid-2000s the ANC had reverted to its conspiratorial and smearing roots.
The rhetoric was all about “reactionary international forces” arrayed against SA. It was about all the internal machinations with spies. Mbeki saw conspiracies everywhere, while Zuma saw plots against him by everyone. Not once in all this time have we ever been shown a shred of evidence of all these conspiracies against SA.
How can such an organisation run SA? How can a paranoid organisation such as this have a vision and a plan for a country in desperate need of urgent care as SA does?
When the history is written, South Africans will have to take responsibility for the fact that a paranoid, conspiracy-fuelled, incompetent bunch like this was repeatedly returned to power despite its repeated failings. We need to open our eyes, people.
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