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For the ANC to recover and survive, it needs to empower its members – or at least a majority of them – to raise their consciousness, their energy and their engagement to rescue both the ANC and South Africa.
You can elect good leaders by default, in the same way that you can elect bad leaders by default.
The key is to establish a political culture and regulatory systems that are able to minimise the chances of mafia-type crooks acquiring office through manipulation of the electoral laws within political parties such as in the ANC, DA and EFF.
Flawed party electoral laws end up negatively affecting the running of the political parties and negatively running down South African society, the economy and the government.
This is the failed heritage from the Zuma/Gupta presidency which the ANC and the country are still locked into.
So far so good, President Cyril Ramaphosa is doing relatively well under the circumstances, but this is by default.
It was by the narrowest of margins that he was elected ANC president last December, but held handcuffed by Zuma’s bodyguards elected into the top positions around him.
How is he to break out of this straitjacket?
There are no guarantees he will finish two terms under the dynamic of current ANC party slates, with the slates tearing each other apart.
If he is replaced tomorrow, the country will slide back into the doldrums.
The North West is still without a premier.
With the Gupta-inspired slate and Ramaphosa slate still at loggerheads, they cannot agree on a compromise candidate.
The North West provincial executive committee, which remains loyal to the former premier Supra Mahumapelo, does not want to entertain any change to their fortunes.
Then you have the recently held Free State provincial elective conference, which is being challenged. Unhappy Free State ANC members are preparing to institute a legal case against the newly-elected provincial executive committee (PEC) members, while former premier Ace Magashule – further elevated to ANC secretary-general at the Nasrec conference last December – has arranged that his confidantes are deployed to the new PEC to ensure uninterrupted looting by the corrupt elite and to cover his back after leaving the province for Luthuli House.
But it is in Zuma’s home base of KwaZulu-Natal where the threat to Ramaphosa’s presidency is now explosive.
Preparations are in full swing in the province for its ANC provincial elective conference.
Some regions have requested postponement but the Zuma slate – led by Sihle Zikalala – is impatient to hold this conference, in order to reinstate its own ill-fated authority in the province.
Meanwhile political killings continue unabated with few or no successful arrests, and in the case of successful arrests there are no successful prosecutions. The blood-drenched tide is loosed.
Zuma’s regime of control and corruption lives on.
As the old Mbokodo chief made sure from the first day he was installed as president, his Zuma/Gupta deployees are still in charge of the investigative police divisions and the prosecutions authorities.
This is why they bungled the recent Estina Farm case in Free State, despite glaring evidence in the public eye.
When the police are deployed to scuttle the cases rather than to prepare successful prosecutions, this is what happens.
We cannot be surprised when all or most of the former Gupta deployees get discharged for lack of evidence as per law.
With such Zuma-era investigations departments and washed-down prosecution departments, they have Get Out Of Jail Free Cards.
So the ascendancy of President Ramaphosa is not in itself a general panacea for ANC or SA problems. We need safe election methods in SA and in the ANC to get a reprieve.
Placing all the eggs of South Africa in the basket of President Ramaphosa is not enough.
The best President Ramaphosa can do is to be the best catalyst.
Ramaphosa needs to mobilise his supporters across the whole of South Africa in the spirit of the United Democratic Front and the Mass Democratic Movement, and to show the same spirit of leadership as when he organised the National Union of Mineworkers.
We need more than he is doing to secure the future of ANC and South Africa.
Where is the Ramaphosa we once knew and followed?
• Omry Makgoale is a rank and file member of the ANC. These are his personal views
