A young man who has allocated to himself the right to demand from me explanations of phenomena, socio-political phenomena, demanded from me an opinion on the above-mentioned topic. What can I say? This young man, Freddie Tshikala, has this firm belief that I have the answers he needs to understand what puzzles him in the socio-political milieu in this country. If I say to him I do not know, he will want to know from me who does? I therefore have to respond, under duress, as they say in the legal fraternity.
Freddie wants to know whether the politics of ethnicity, tribalism, exists in the ANC. He specifically wants to know why COPE keeps saying that their political stronghold is the Eastern Cape. In Freddie's mind, a political party worth its name should have a national stronghold, not a regional/provincial one. Freddie goes further; he quotes what I said in my book, Umkhonto WeSizwe: Fighting For A Divided People. In that book I mentioned that there was a Camp Commander, Archie Sibeko (alias Zola Zembe) who saw nothing wrong with announcing publicly, in an ANC military camp, that he wanted to meet people from the Eastern Cape, only.
Freddie goes further. He reminds me that I wrote about a ‘comrade' who told us that ‘sizoniphatha apha size siyoniphatha ekhaya' when he was asked why every MK military Camp was run by people from the Eastern Cape. This is the problem you create for yourself when you tell young men like Freddie ‘izindaba zabantu abadala'. When they notice something in the political life of the nation that seems to testify that ethnicity exists in the African National Congress, they will come back to you for an explanation, especially if you yourself have told them that such a thing exists. I therefore have to go into this painful subject that most of us in the ANC would like to pretend does not exist.
The people who left the ANC after Thabo Mbeki was ousted at Polokwane as the president of the ANC, and subsequently as president of the country, claimed that they were unhappy with the way Thabo had been removed from leadership. They said that he should have been allowed to finish his term as President of South Africa. They did not explain how they found this NEC decision, unanimous, repugnant to them. They were just unhappy that he was removed before he had finished his term. First, was it his right to stay on until he finished term, or was his incumbency of the presidency dependent on the organization that had deployed him to the presidency in the first place?
Thabo, at a certain time, forgot who put him in the presidency. He began to think that the position he held was his right, and that nobody could remove him. The people who were loyal to him forgot the source of his power and began to think, like him, that he held that position in his own right as Thabo Mbeki. That is where the problem lay. So, when he was removed, people felt bold to say that the ANC should not have removed him. The person, Thabo Mbeki, in the minds of his sycophants, held the position of president in his own right.
A grave political error
During his presidency, nearly 99% of the people who held political positions, from the local, provincial and national level were his personal appointees. Ace Magashule in the Free State was thrice voted by the ANC there as the preferred candidate for the position of premier, and three times Mbeki overlooked him for persons who had little local support. In KwaZulu-Natal, Zweli Mkhize was brushed aside in favour of Sbu Ndebele, the only guy in KZN who declared publicly that Mbeki should be allowed to have his third term. People in the ANC had learned that the way up the political ladder, and proximity to wealth, lay in becoming an ‘imbongi', Thabo Mbeki's praise singer.
Look at his cabinet, the NEC and the NWC. Who did these people represent? Why did they not question and criticize the decisions that the president made? Mervyn Gumede in his book, ‘Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC' on page 297,second paragraph, enlightens us regarding the type of Ministers Thabo had in his Cabinet. He says:
‘Cabinet ministers almost never challenge Mbeki, lest they lose their privileged positions. Asked for her opinion on a specific matter during a cabinet meeting, Sigcau once responded: ‘You decide,Thabo, you can count on my support on any issue.' By all accounts, this attitude has become the norm rather than the exception.' On the same page we are told why the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, Blade Nzimande, quit parliament in 1999 because parliamentarians also had been cowed into submission. His crime? ‘...he had taken Mbeki and the ANC's policies to task'(page 297).
It has become fashionable these days to place all the sins of the ANC between the time Thabo took over as President of South Africa to September 2008 at his door. It seems the man did all the damage by himself. He had accomplices, people who were appointed by him, not on the basis of their ability or skill, but because they had sworn unwavering and blind support to him, not the ANC. That is why to-day, the ANC is facing a huge challenge of having failed to deliver. Then, Polokwane happened.
For the first time since the ANC went underground in 1960, the people of South Africa took back the ANC from a clique to themselves. There had been, until Polokwane, a ‘tradition' in the ANC of appointing a leader by a consensus of a mysterious group of people who decided who should head the ANC. Mbeki is a product of this tradition. This tradition produced in Mbeki a leader who did not owe his position to the grassroots, the branches. Any wonder then that this pipe-smoking fellow should have ignored the grassroots, believing himself to be ‘divinely ordained to leadership?'
When we predicted this in the 1967s, that when we returned home, the PEOPLE would snatch back to themselves the organization that belongs to them, we were told that we were dreamers. An MK cadre told us: ‘Sizoniphatha apha, size siyoniphatha ekhaya'. And for a while, until December 2007, this was manifestly true. The people who ran the ANC in exile came back and ran the ANC until Polokwane, where all hell broke loose in the ANC. I have written this in my book, Umkhonto WeSizwe:Fighting For a Divided People, and Freddie Tshikala wants to know why COPE keeps saying that their stronghold is the Eastern Cape, and not the whole country.
The people who deserted the ANC after Polokwane told the country that they had done so because they were unhappy with the removal of Thabo Mbeki from the Presidency of the ANC and the country. They were not all from the Eastern Cape; they came from every province in South Africa. The common denominator among them was that they were people who had benefited personally from Thabo Mbeki's patronage. With the removal of Thabo from leadership, they foresaw a decline and demise of their personal positions and fortunes. Their clarion call was that they had left the ANC because they foresaw a perilous threat from the ANC to the ‘rule of law', ‘democracy', the ‘judiciary' and the ‘constitution'. They told the world that the ANC had deviated from the Freedom Charter. If these claims were true, COPE could have built a very revolutionary, powerful and enduring organization. COPE will fail. Why do I say so?
The arch-organizer for COPE was Mluleki George. Mluleki George believes that because Mbeki is a Xhosa-speaking South African, he can then mobilize the whole of the Eastern Cape, amaXhosa, to support COPE. Even the news media began to believe this and declared that the Eastern Cape was a COPE stronghold. Recently, even the Reverend Mvume Dandala has reiterated that the Eastern Cape is a COPE stronghold. What sits at the core of this claim? It is the belief that because Mbeki is a Xhosa, then the amaXhosa will rise en masse in support of COPE. Do the COPE leaders realize what they are saying about themselves as an organization? I do not think they do.
What they are saying is that they are an ethnic-based organization. A similar phenomenon was when Gatsha Buthelezi launched the IFP as a Zulu organization, without realizing that by so doing, he had imposed upon his organization a character that was essentially tribal. Later, he tried to develop IFP into a national organization, but the message had gone out to the nation that ‘Inkatha into yamaZulu', and could thus never become a national organization. That is what COPE is doing, unwittingly, to itself. They are saying COPE is a Xhosa organization.
If Zuma enjoyed support only in KZN, one would quite correctly conclude that Zuma is a leader of the Zulus. Why then does Zuma go to the Eastern Cape and fill two large stadiums? Are there Zulus in the Eastern Cape? Why do the Xhosas in the Eastern Cape support Zuma in such overwhelming numbers? It is because the Xhosas have heeded the call of 1912, when the ANC Founding Fathers told us: ‘Zulu,Mosotho, Mxhosa hlanganani.' ANC people are no longer mobilizable along ethnic lines. Yet, people who call themselves leaders of COPE believe they can set the clock back to pre-1912 political thinking. If then the people are ahead of the so-called leaders in their political consciousness, what right do these people have to claim they can lead this nation? The nation has moved on from ethnic loyalties, yet the purported leaders are stuck in pre-1912 thinking! Viva Eastern Cape Viva!
When Zuma was expelled from his Deputy Presidency, some Zulu friends of mine said that Msholozi was a victim of what has come to be known as ‘the Xhosa-Nostra'. They even went as far as saying Zuma should leave the ANC and form his own party and they would support him. My question to them was why is Zuma supported by Zwelinzima Vavi, Fikile Mbalula, Gwede Mantashe and numerous other Xhosa-speaking comrades if the power-struggle in the ANC was a Xhosa-Zulu thing? Why does Zuma have overwhelming support among the BaSotho in the Free State and Lekota does not have? The Shangaans, the Vendas, the Swazis in Mpumalanga, the Batswana in North-West, and the Xhosas in the Eastern Cape, W.Cape (aboSkwatsha) support Zuma? Yini lena? The answer is simple.
ANC people have moved away from ethnic politics to national politics. COPE wants to take us back to ethnic politics, tribalism. That is why I say they have failed, and this will be demonstrated on the 22nd of April this year. When the followers achieve a higher level of political development than the people who claim they are their leaders, we have a situation where the less desires to give direction to the greater, a mathematical anomaly, in that that the greater cannot come from the less. AmaXhosa have demonstrated to COPE leaders like Mluleki George and Reverend Mvume Dandala that they do not attach their loyalties to ethnic leaders; they support a national democratic movement.
Freddie finds it strange that ANC leaders in 1912 had a more advanced socio-political vision than leaders who lead the ANC in the 2000s. The politics of ethnicity is a thing of the past in the ANC. People who still try to peddle it among us are just pissing against the wind, because the people will oppose them, Freddie. I am a Zulu but I will never be seduced by the IFP. We have moved on; we have become national political animals.
I have written this article to calm the fears of a young man, Freddie Tshikala, a Venda young man, and those of my other comrades who are perturbed by political people who keep saying the Eastern Cape is their stronghold without any political legs to stand on. I have also written this article to salute all my comrades in the Eastern Cape and the other provinces who have refused to be seduced by ethnic power-mongers who seek to take us back politically, to the era of tribalism. Viva ANC Viva. Come April 22 we shall bury the corpse of COPE ethnicity in the grave of discarded ethnic chauvinism.
Thula Bopela is a Head: Security Management at Parliament. He writes in his personal capacity.
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