Publications
Partners
The ANC’s disastrous performance in the local elections was a long time coming, writes Mavuso Msimang
By any objective assessment, the performance of the ANC in the local government elections was a disaster, but a predictable one.
This has been a long time coming. Securing the majority of municipalities was but cold comfort for the party.
Nelson Mandela Bay has historically been an ANC fortress and it was always a nursery for its hard-core activists, among them top-drawer Umkhonto weSizwe cadres who provided both quality and quantity when the call to arms came.
The tradition was not dissimilar in Gauteng, which was for the best part of the 20th century the fountainhead of resistance against white rule and the succession of iniquitous apartheid administrations.
Gauteng gave birth to the ANC Youth League of Anton Lembede, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and others. And the 1952 Defiance Campaign, led by Nelson Mandela, mobilised across race lines in the streets of Johannesburg.
It was held under the auspices of the ANC, the SA Indian Congress and the Coloured People’s Congress, whose organisational affiliations were necessitated by apartheid’s racist allocation of residential areas.
About 20 000 women famously marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria on August 9 1956 to protest against the government’s plan to extend to the womenfolk the obligation to always carry on their person the detestable dompas, a document intended to restrict the movement of Africans to fulfil the regime’s labour supply requirements.
Everton in Vereeniging was the scene of a historic protest led by Robert Sobukwe, then president of the Pan Africanist Congress, as a call was made to burn the dompas in another heroic challenge to the authorities.
Who does not know about the gallant 1976 Soweto uprising, which shook the apartheid regime to its very foundations?
The ANC’s performance in the metros during the elections severely dented its proud legacy of a tight compact with the people. What went wrong?
In his perceptive wisdom, Tambo once observed that no one was capable of destroying the ANC but the ANC itself, so deep were its roots in communities.
The ANC’s predicament is entirely self-inflicted. For a start, for inexplicable reasons, the ANC has not seen fit to modernise its archaic system of electing its leaders.
Since 1994, this has permitted a disproportionate number of unsuitable individuals to enter executive echelons positions.
National executive committee (NEC) members are elected at conferences held every five years by representatives of ANC branches across the country.
It is a truism that many of these branches have been heavily infiltrated by self-seekers who see ANC membership as a ticket to quick wealth.
The delegates who go to elect NEC members at conferences do not know a significant number of the people they are empowered to elect.
They thus become easy but willing prey to mercenary vote touts, who compile slates with names of people they would like to see elected to the NEC.
They then lobby delegates hard to vote for these characters, an exercise often laced with offers of bribes. Merit counts for little in list compilations, whose primary purpose is to inundate the NEC with individuals who swear fealty to the leader.
It must needs be stated, though, that despite the prevalence of the repugnant slate practice, the NEC boasts some individuals of unquestionable integrity.
One imagines their voices being drowned out like a fart in the thunderous roar that must defends the leader.
The dismal ANC performance in these elections has to be laid squarely at the door of the national leadership. It approves, or in a significant manner influences, member appointments to strategic positions in the local, provincial and national spheres of governance.
Its deployment committee is also responsible for appointments to senior government positions and to boards of state-owned companies such as SAA, Denel, PetroSA and Eskom.
Without exculpating the local and provincial leadership from its own sins, ultimately the buck stops with Luthuli House. Such is its stranglehold, for instance, that it insisted on President Jacob Zuma being the face of the ANC in these elections. We are all witness of that catastrophe.
Yes, the electorate was angry because of poor service delivery, a local issue. It was also angered by rampant nepotism, corruption and incompetence. To add insult to injury, the ill-gotten wealth is often flaunted with mindless insensitivity by local government officials.
What mostly offended the public at large were similar practices at a national level. And here the loot is large. It is mostly based on the abuse of the government tender system, which has, overnight, produced filthy multimillionaires.
New to big money, these reprehensible souls flaunt their wealth, so much so that apprehending them would be a walk in the park, if only the will to do so existed.
The public is consequently dismissive of platitudinous assertions from leaders that they are committed to fighting corruption.
What the everyday person cannot understand is why the ANC thinks it’s alright that its leader is an individual with a string of scandals behind him; who is reluctant to go to court to clear his name; who counts among his friends shady businesspeople; and who was indicted for breaking his oath of high office.
But also a person who is the subject of humiliating caricatures and is the butt of cruel jokes, and a person who has made decisions that have cost the national economy greatly.
People don’t understand why the ANC leadership does not use legitimate power to end this enduring crisis of misrule, not least to spare their comrade continuing agony.
Many people are beginning to believe that there is honour among thieves, given what the president of the ANC Women’s League blurting out about skeletons that lie peacefully in NEC members’ cupboards should not be disturbed.
Is it perhaps the case that self-interest supersedes obligations to the organisation and the populace?
What is certain is that unless the ANC courageously tackles the elephant in the room, we can continue to sing our dirge to the glorious movement.
TALK TO US
Do you think the current ANC leadership should step down?
