The Fall of the ANC: What Next?

by Prince Mashele and Mzukisi Qobo (Picador Africa)

Nkandla: The Great Unravelling

by Phillip de Wet (Mail&Guardian)

AT a recent election rally, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe called on supporters to defend Jacob Zuma at all costs because he is a symbol of the party and an attack on the president was an attack on the ANC as a whole. "You see," Mantashe was quoted as saying, "when they attack your president, they are not attacking you personally. You are the symbol of the ANC. If you want to kill a snake you crush its head before the rest of the body dies."

It was an unfortunate choice of words, and opposition politicians have run with the metaphor; as the DA's Helen Zille, for example, put it, "If Mr Mantashe is correct, then President Jacob Zuma is the head of a snake, and we know that one must strike at the head of a snake with a weapon. In a democracy your vote is your weapon - not violence."

Prince Mashele and Mzukisi Qobo, authors of the robust and provocative The Fall of the ANC: What Next?, may also have been amused by Mantashe's words. It is, however, their view that it is the ruling party, and not the president, that is in dire need of protection - not from its foes, but its own leadership. This is a snake, in other words, that has perhaps fatally poisoned itself.

"It is as good as dead," they write in their introduction. "Like parts of the skin that have become deadened and are lacking vitality, the ANC is denuded of ideological content, of a clear set of ideas where to take the country into the future, and of a credible leadership that is fit for such a purpose."

In later chapters the ANC appears to slip in and out of actual death and there are times when The Fall. . . reads like a script from the Grand Guignol, full of the imagery of the charnel house, with vampires and zombies to boot. The SA Communist Party, for instance, is "a coterie of careerists riding on the back of the ANC's access to state power. It is a parasite sucking the blood of the ANC carcass. Indeed, the ANC's poisoned blood is sure to kill the parasite, too."

Elsewhere, it's almost the stuff of the Monty Python parrot sketch: "[The alliance with the SACP and Cosatu] is squirming on its deathbed, gasping for air in what are arguably its last moments. The head - the ANC - is serious trouble. It really is a shadow of its former self. The rest lies buried in a glorified history, incapable of rescuing the battered image of the party today. If [former ANC president Oliver] Tambo was still alive, he would, as an educated man, know that it is impossible for the head of a living organism to die without the limbs dying. As the limbs of the ANC, Cosatu and the SACP will blow up the minute the head finally drops. What a sad ending."

Not yet. But if the ruling party is in terminal decline then, according to Mashele and Qobo, the rot set in long before the Zuma era. It is one of the book's central themes that the ANC was, from the outset, simply not up to running the country. Before its unbanning in February 1990, an event that took them wholly by surprise, the party had not developed a detailed plan of how it would govern South Africa. "For a liberation movement that had been engaged in the struggle since 1912, a period of 80 years, it is rather striking that it did not develop such a plan well before the ‘Ready to Govern' campaigning in 1992."

Mashele and Qobo suggest that the "real possibility" of liberation only occurred to the ANC in 1988, when for the first time in its history, it drew up its own guidelines for a democratic future in a document that acknowledged the Freedom Charter as "the first systemic statement in the history of our country of the political and constitutional vision of a free, democratic and non-racial South Africa."

"What this means," according to the authors, "is that before 1955 [when the Charter was drawn up by the SA Congress Alliance], the ANC had not systematically conceptualised and practically envisioned a free, democratic and non-racial South Africa." The party had hitherto only operated on the basis of "a gut feeling of freedom" without the "coherence" of a detailed plan.

Once it had adopted the Charter, it then failed to convert it into any sort of practical post-liberation programme to run the country. "There was ample time to do this," Mashele and Qobo write. "The party was more preoccupied with mythmaking, however, toying with the impossible task of taking over the country through the barrel of a gun. Even when it had operated underground for more than 20 years, the ANC still did not imagine itself as a government-in-waiting. There is no documentary evidence to demonstrate they did."

The party, of course, continues with its mythmaking. But against a background of the Nkandla scandal, the widespread corruption, nepotism, tender fraud, rampant maladministration in the provinces, incompetence and general decline in political leadership, the banging on about past glories is fast losing its lustre, and disillusionment with the ANC grows apace.

Which brings us to the "What next?" of the book's title. Here the authors are not as confident or as incisive as they are in dealing with the history of the ANC's slow collapse into dysfunction. This caution is understandable, I suppose, in the forecasting business. But they do present two possible future scenarios.

One is profoundly pessimistic: like Zimbabwe, ours will be a failed society on all levels, with increasing unemployment and rampant corruption across the public sector, and a ruling party elite that is likely to transform it into "a mafia organisation, controlled by cliques, factions, gangs and tribal entrepreneurs." Depressingly, the authors argue, "current trends point in this direction. The scenario will be possible if the political environment continues to be dominated by the ANC, with no prospects of political change."

The bad news about the alternative is that, while a turnaround is possible, it's going to take a long time - two decades at least - and that it won't happen without a massive improvement in our public education system, one in which learners can advance with some ease to a higher education system geared for a modern economy. (Tellingly, Mashele and Qobo regard the present Higher Education Minister as somewhat lacking in the grey matter department. "The current secretary-general of the party, Blade Nzimande, is probably intellectually the weakest in the history of the SACP.")

The authors argue that 20 years is more than enough time to overhaul the education system, and that a failure to do so would mean squandering the future of generations of South Africans. In fact, they add, this is exactly where the ANC has been unforgivably remiss; "it has failed to produce a critical mass of highly skilled South Africans to propel an economic revolution. Even during the boom years, between 2000 and 2007, the country failed to take advantage of favourable global conditions, due to acute skills shortages."

Importantly, the authors believe an "educated" citizenry would be politically flexible and be "good for the general health of democracy. Politicians would be kept on their toes, always mindful of the potential consequences of complacency . . . The blackmail of liberation heroism would not be enough to sustain the allegiance of an informed electorate." Such an electorate, the authors claim, would have little time for many of the other parties contesting the 2014 elections, including the DA, AgangSA, Congress of the People and the Economic Freedom Fighters.

We shall know in due course to what extent Nkandlagate has affected the ANC's standing at the polls. In this regard, I was intrigued by Phillip de Wet's Nkandla: The Great Unravelling, a digital-only publication from the Mail&Guardian that purports not only to present an overview of developments at the president's rural home in KwaZulu-Natal as they unfolded over the past four years, but also "to capture the essence of Nkandla".

De Wet certainly has succeeded in turning out a readable and engaging tract that pulls together all the related threads and key events of the scandal. It's not a long read - Amazon.com lists it as 85 pages long, but it feels shorter  - and there's nothing new in it. But it is a punchy read, even if the story is by no means over. Nkandla: The Great Unravelling ends with Public Protector Thuli Madonsela's Secure in Comfort report. How long, I wonder, before Nkandla: The Great Reckoning is with us?

This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.

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