Former President Jacob G Zuma’s thoughts on the state of the organisation ahead of the upcoming 55th National Conference
6 November 2022
The month of December 2022 is yet another critical milestone for the country and the ANC as the 55th national conference of the organisation will take place. As the conference surges closer, several matters are still up for discussion with regards to the type of ANC that must emerge and the issues that require urgent attention to ensure the revival of our beloved movement.
With regards to the administrative aspects and preparations, we find ourselves in the same position that we were in, during the 54th national conference in 2017. This is an unfortunate situation.
In 2017, the secretary general’s office was still trying to conclude the audit processes and was still dealing with inquiries on the eve of conference. It was the first time that we were not able to finish our conference preparations on time.
This time round, the sitting of branch general meetings, regions and sub-regions has been fraught with technical problems which caused delays. The weaknesses at the SGO as well as the failure to pay staff salaries by the treasurer general’s office have clearly had a negative impact on the organisation.
Besides the administrative hiccups, we must come to terms with the fact that the ANC has changed into something else that we do not know. Therefore, the upcoming conference should assist us to effect drastic changes that can correct the shortcomings that are posing a serious threat to the people’s organisation.
There is a lot that happened at the last conference that needs to be corrected if we are to revive the ANC and return it to its original mission.
The organisation’s mandate remains to fully liberate the people of this country especially the poor and the working class from poverty, landlessness and continued economic exclusion. Leadership is a critical factor for any conference. Resolutions and decisions that are adopted need strong and decisive leadership that will ensure effective implementation.
We should therefore be very concerned about the leadership that will emerge from the conference, and how that leadership is chosen. Something has changed with regards to the leadership contestations of the leadership positions. One of the glaring features of the 2017 conference was the number of comrades who wanted to be president of the ANC.
We had seven of them for the first time in the history of the ANC. This was an indication that something had seriously gone wrong within our movement. I am not sure if we have managed to address that new and unusual character of the ANC.
It may be useful to explain what had happened to our organisation, to have so many members of the National Executive Committee (NEC) deciding to contest for only one position, that of the president? Two of the candidates had been nominated within the framework of the ANC. These were Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa. Then, an additional five candidates emerged from almost nowhere but they were contesting the position of president.
There is a strong belief that the enemies of our organisation have decided to interfere with the strength of the ANC by causing divisions. We have not yet sat down to discuss this new and unusual tendency in the ANC.
Looking at what happened in NASREC, it is clear that this number of presidential candidates was increased by our enemies in order to reduce the number of votes of the preferred candidate.
The ultimate goal is to undermine the ANC at the polls and continuously reduce its majority to force coalitions. An ANC that does not have an outright majority cannot continue its mission of delivering a better life for the poor, the African majority.
It is really of great concern that the ANC seems to be run by invisible people who are not necessarily members. These people take these decisions and use members to implement them. They are running the ANC from wherever they are and this must stop. We are currently witnessing a repeat of NASREC 2017. There are comrades who started almost two years ago to offer themselves as presidential candidates and the majority of these comrades emanate from the NEC.
Where does this new tendency come from? We have not examined the origins of this tendency. We have also witnessed comrades nominating themselves lately, instead of waiting for the process of our organisation which historically has been the case.
This unusual behaviour is certainly not an innocent move. It is a move that has been created by those whose mission is to deal with the ANC, to make people lose confidence in the organisation, and to reduce its popularity and support. My worry is that we do not seem to have been looking into these issues as an organisation.
There are many other things that we have not followed up on as an organisation, for an example the resolutions and decisions that were adopted at the last conference. If anything, there have been different views about our resolutions, particularly at the leadership level and we ended up unable to implement them. It also seems that the matter did not arise in the recent policy conference with a view to find out why we have not implemented the resolutions and some decisions. There is doubt whether there will be an explanation in the reports to be delivered to the 55th national conference as to why our resolutions and decisions were not implemented.
We have also witnessed foreign tendencies in the manner in which the leadership contest was conducted and that has also not been discussed. That is a major issue for the ANC and its survival and strength and needs to be prioritised for discussion. At NASREC in 2017, it was for the first time that we had huge sums of money being used to buy delegates to vote in a particular way.
There were clear allegations made that Cyril Ramaphosa who was contesting the presidency used a lot of money to buy his position as President of the ANC. When this allegation was made, the figure was put at around a billion rand. In the Zondo Commission, Cyril Ramaphosa openly admitted that he did use money to buy the position but said it was not over 1 billion rand, but was just over 300 million rand.
Again, as the ANC we have not scrutinised this serious issue and the reality that we have a president who was not elected properly through the democratic process, but had used money to buy people to support him or vote for him, therefore having abused our democratic process. Fortunately, this information is on record. Have we corrected such manipulative occurrences that happened in the last conference, as we go into another conference now? Are we heading for a repeat of that un-ANC behaviour or are we saying things have changed?
We seem to be dealing with an ANC that has changed, but these changes did not emanate from discussions and resolutions in our conferences, as should be the case. As we approach the upcoming conference, there has again been very obvious usage of money. A number of comrades who have raised the matter, after experiencing the usage of money, which has shocked many, do not seem to be having a platform within their movement to raise these matters and correct them.
The organisation, its policies and politics have been consumed by a patronage network which is characterised by corrupt hands exchanging money. These corrupt hands are making comrades buy votes for positions instead of being elected fairly and correctly. This leads to leaders being elected for the wrong reasons. They are therefore at the core of corrupting the ANC. Comrades who are saying we need to rescue the ANC are not able to advance their plans and thinking about how this must be done. There is in fact no discussion about that at all.
It is also truly of concern that there have been serious allegations touching upon the leadership and we have not heard any discussion about within the movement, whether from the branches or leadership, to deal with some of the things that people have been complaining about. These include, among others things some alleged illegal activities that have taken place.
We have also not even asked what has made the ANC to decline in the manner that it has declined, more than any other time in its history. The outcome of the last ANC conference caused the ANC to lose support in the last national general elections and we dropped from 62% to 57%. There were even more severe losses in the local government elections in November 2021, which saw the ANC dip below 50% for the first time ever, winning only 46% of the vote, and losing control of the key metropolitan municipalities.
I am not aware of any serious debate that has taken place about what went wrong and what needs to be fixed so that the ANC can regain the support and respect that it has lost since NASREC. We should in fact also be worried that the ANC no longer prioritises political discussions and engagements.
In many of the recent conferences we have had, whether from branches, sub regions, regions or provinces, there has been a serious absence of political discussions about where the ANC is going, the policies and resolutions. What seemed to dominate the conferences has been quarrels about credentials until the time to vote for new leaders without providing enough time for political discussions to take the ANC forward in implementing its radical policies. Less attention has been given to critical issues.
As I said recently, we seem to be turning the ANC into an article of commerce. This cannot be acceptable. We need to have a clear plan about how we are going to revive the ANC into an organisation that can be supported and respected by the majority of our country. It is not going to help us to go to conference to get positions in the main, rather than to put the ANC in a better position for the people of this country.
Besides serious political engagement, we should also be discussing administration issues such as the membership system and the serious funding problems that the organisation is facing. Many comrades who are members of the ANC are found to be absent in the electronic membership system that we are currently using. That issue has not been addressed.
Delegates to the conference cannot fail to discuss and resolve this matter. It is the faulty membership system which has made comrades say openly in the recent past years, that conferences have been stolen. This has not happened before as there was a genuine membership system which could not be manipulated.
Today even if you are a member of the ANC, you can be declared a non-member. What do we have in place to correct this? We also need to rescue the ANC from relying on donations. This organisation with such a glorious history, should be financially sustainable. There are solutions to these issues but we do not seem ready to discuss these matters. The ANC is also going to conference limping as many structures have been disbanded since NASREC. This is again a new worrying phenomenon in the ANC.
This seems like a deliberate tactic to weaken the organisation through enabling the leadership to appoint their own people who do not derive strength and power from the membership. The task teams leading many structures are accountable to the leadership that appointed them instead of the membership that was elected by them. We have also had conferences that did not proceed correctly, but nothing was done about it. For example, the so-called “festival of chairs” conference in the Eastern Cape.
The leadership established a Commission of Inquiry called the ‘Sbu Ndebele Commission’. That commission produced a report which made it clear that the conference held in the Eastern Cape, was not an ANC conference and that a proper conference need to be convened.
The outcome of that conference should have been nullified. But our leadership allowed an illegal Provincial Executive Committee (PEC) was allowed to serve a full term of office and even participated at the NASREC conference even though it was illegitimate. In Mpumalanga bogus branches and delegates were found to have participated in regional and provincial conferences held in 2015. Therefore, there were two provinces that participated in NASREC illegally which went on to elect the current president and other leaders.
We trust that the national conference will also look at other decisions that have been taken which do not make sense. This includes the removal of NEC members from the National Disciplinary Committee and replacing them with non-NEC members. Other positions taken have been detrimental to the organisation but were left unchallenged, such as the ANC president calling the ANC the ‘accused number one’ corrupt organisation in the country. How could he possibly make such a statement and expect the ANC to win the local government elections?
In actual fact, he was de-campaigning the ANC. We also need to guard against other emerging tendencies where membership of the ANC must now be determined by age. In the history of the ANC, we have had the ANC Youth League which was the preparatory school for young members of the ANC. Those leaders never demanded to take over leadership on the basis of age.
They emerged from within the ranks of the movement and were ready for leadership. This shows how we have politically deteriorated when people demand leadership positions based on age only, without outlining what they are bringing to the organisation that would solve the challenges facing the ANC and the country.
Whether we like it or not, the time has come to correct the way our organisation is being run and for us to elect the kind of leadership that will help us achieve our objectives of liberating our people through our tried and tested policies of the ANC.
The real ANC must be revived and must come back to the people, its rightful owners. That should be the mission of the 55th national conference.
Issued by Vukile Mathabela, Office of Former President Jacob Zuma, 7 November 2022
