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Elections. That’s the main reason behind the killing of politicians in South Africa today.
These elections are rigged at ANC conferences at all levels – from the branch to the region to the province and up to national conferences such as the Mangaung elective conference, which elected President Zuma in 2012 and the Nasrec elective conference that elected President Cyril Ramaphosa last December.
These national elective conferences choose the president of the ANC, but South Africa’s party-list electoral system since 1994 means that the ANC president has almost automatically then gone on to become president of the government of South Africa – whether this was Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma or Ramaphosa.
There is a serious problem here.
We can all see that the ANC has been converted into a cash cow. It is no longer an instrument to serve the people. From 1912 to 1990 the ANC was a servant of the people.
Despite all its problems, whether infighting between the nationalists and communists, or between ethnic or tribal groups, or conflict over democratic accountability, it never lost its prime focus: the ANC’s mission was to liberate the country from apartheid colonialism to a non-racial, non-sexist democracy based on the principles of the Freedom Charter.
In the trenches of South Africa and southern Africa, and as far north as Angola and Tanzania, ANC cadres were tempered, sacrificing blood and life for the motherland. In those decades being an ANC member was risky.
You could be shot by the South African police, you could be hunted by Special Branch and every hole could be ransacked by Askaris vying for your blood.
The ANC’s security had to be careful because the slightest mistake could lead to the death of members.
After 1994, however, the ANC was seen as a cash cow.
Fly-by-night members joined the vehicle for access to riches to government and state resources. The way to access these resources was correctly identified as winning elections.
All wannabe politicians learnt to perfect the skills of vote-rigging to make sure they won elections, even when the voters no longer trusted or wanted them.
The current ANC internal electoral laws – which are based on branch delegates – have offered crooks an opportunity on a silver plate to win elections by bribing the delegates at branches.
The bribing takes place in various formats. For example there is gate-keeping, a process whereby the branch general meetings elect delegates are called in secrecy so their rivals only discover the following day that delegates to the regional, provincial, or national conference were elected yesterday in a meeting they were not invited to and were not aware of.
There is also a process of paying for bulk membership, for instance at construction sites where businessmen will pay large sums of money for people to become ANC members.
These people have no clue about ANC policies, with their sole task being to vote for specific slates at a conference that will secure these businessmen jobs and the promise of future tenders.
When these methods of rigging fail to win elections at a conferences, assassinations of rival candidates becomes an option, such as in KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and North West.
With our compromised police, many of these killings have gone ahead without the perpetrators being arrested.
In any case where the criminals are arrested, their dockets are mysteriously lost at police stations and they end up not being prosecuted.
So the killings emanate from dissatisfaction with conference election results and the subsequent loss of opportunity for self-enrichment, which goes with losing elections.
When you know the elections were rigged, you can never be satisfied with the outcome.
This is why those who lost elections have ended up organising assassination squads to kill their rivals, especially in KwaZulu-Natal where assassins – locally called izinkabi – are hired to kill rival candidates.
Meetings by security cluster ministers are addressing the effects of the problems, not the cause. The cause of the killings comes from the rigging of elections at conferences. The killings of ANC members by other ANC members will continue until ANC internal electoral laws are changed.
We need to introduce the “one ANC member one vote” and get rid of the branch delegates format, in which 2% of ANC members elect leaders for 98% of ANC members.
The tenderpreneurs and other business crooks bribe the 2% of ANC members who are delegates to vote for a particular slate with promises of a councillor’s job, or being appointed a minister or being promised a tender for particular projects.
Those who have lost elections and opportunities resort to killing their rivals.
To solve any problem, you need to establish the cause. Without knowing the cause of the problem, you can only move in circles without a breakthrough solution.
Changing the current ANC electoral laws will go a long way to stop the killings for jobs.
• Omry Makgoale is a rank and file member of ANC. These are his personal views.
