When struggle veteran Mavuso Msimang announced his resignation from the ANC last week, the party didn’t just lose a valued senior member. It lost a part of its soul.
Msimang has been a steadfast soldier and a key moral cog of the organisation through a horrific exile period, the armed struggle, liberation from apartheid, government, the Zuma years, and finally the hope and disappointments of the Cyril Ramaphosa administration. Msimang’s moral clarity and persistent voice of reason has been at the heart and centre of the party, as he said, for over sixty years. Through his utterances and writings, Msimang is one of very few in this nation who has ably represented what many of us would refer to as the core values not just of the ANC, but of the struggle to defeat apartheid and build a united, nonracial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa.
Many in the ANC will choose to dismiss his departure as the contretemps of a disillusioned member. That would be a mistake. Msimang’s departure is far bigger. It is a dimming of the light that the ANC used to be in the hearts of many ordinary South Africans through the past 60 years of struggle, triumph and governance. It is the end of an era.
Even if they stay in the party, many of Msimang’s colleagues in the ANC Veterans League (where he was deputy president) fully share his views and his profound disappointment with the organisation that he has given his life to. In his resignation letter Msimang said “it’s time to go”, and many of his comrades know he is right. Their only problem, the one thing that keeps them in the ANC tent, is that they don’t know how to live without the ANC in their lives. It is a dilemma that many ordinary South Africans, the two-thirds majority that voted ANC in 2004, faces. It may seem easy for many, but walking away remains a complex, difficult act in a country scarred by apartheid.
The reason is simple but has huge implications: Ramaphosa and his cohort of leaders have failed to deliver on their promises of renewal and rejuvenation of the party and the country.
Why didn’t Mavuso leave in the 2010s after the execrable Jacob Zuma’s rise? Why didn’t he join up with Mbhazima Shilowa and Mosiuoa Lekota at that time and be one of the key builders of a new alternative movement to the ANC that was being birthed under Zuma? I think, like many other ANC stalwarts and ordinary members, he thought that the party could be saved. In the 10 years that Zuma dominated and destroyed the party — in full view of its members and in many instances with their disgraceful support — Msimang was one of few voices that spoke against the ethical and moral bankruptcy, the idleness and sloth, that had come to grip the party. The narrow defeat of Zuma at the ANC’s 2017 conference at Nasrec was in no small measure thanks to Msimang and his public stance against the Zuma administration’s corruption and betrayal of the ANC’s vision and promises of change.
That Msimang has chosen to leave now, just six months before a pivotal election, which many pollsters project the ANC will lose, is an indictment on President Cyril Ramaphosa, Paul Mashatile, Gwede Mantashe, Fikile Mbalula, and the rest of the ANC leadership. Msimang’s move should force all of us who love SA to reflect deeply about why he has chosen this moment to announce his decision.
The reason is simple but has huge implications: Ramaphosa and his cohort of leaders have failed to deliver on their promises of renewal and rejuvenation of the party and the country. It is a sentiment that has become prevalent among ANC veterans, even those who were so scared of Zuma in the 2010s, they kept their mouths shut as he destroyed their party and their country.
Recently, former president Thabo Mbeki told a memorial service of the late ANC leader Aziz Pahad: “The fact of the matter is that we did not do that, we did not renew the ANC following that conference resolution of 2017 ... That resolution has been repeated by the conference of 2022, to renew the ANC. We are now in October, that was 10 months ago that the resolution was renewed.”
So disillusioned are ANC veterans such as Mbeki, that in May the former president told Eyewitness News he couldn’t see himself campaigning for his party.
What we are seeing here is a small and significant referendum on Ramaphosa’s “renewal” of his party. The likes of Msimang and Mbeki are just not buying his slowly-slowly, tentative, accommodationist, renewal story any more. They expected action in his first five years as ANC president, and they didn’t get it. They expected action after December last year, when Ramaphosa won resoundingly and was gifted with a national executive committee that is at least 66% supportive of him. He has done nothing with that power except increase the size of his cabinet.
The renewal of the ANC is failing. Nothing says this more starkly than the departure of an ANC insider and a key moral voice such as Msimang. Which raises the question: so where to for South Africa?
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