Over the past few months, a consensus appears to have cohered in the local English-language press that the policy of “cadre deployment” is largely to blame for the corruption and dysfunction of the ANC in government, most perceptibly at municipal level. Recent headlines on BusinessLive, for instance, include “How the ANC’s ‘cadre deployment’ ruined SA”, “Why cadre deployment must die”.
These all had a particular resonance for me as I had born witness to the birth of this monster some two decades before.
In the election campaign ahead of 2nd June 1999 elections the Democratic Party of Tony Leon had, as part of its Fight Back campaign, flighted a radio advertisement claiming that “Joel Netshitenzhe, top ANC official, now says ANC plans include total control over Army, police, bureaucracy, intelligence services, judiciary, parastatals, reserve bank.”
This was a reference to a quote contained in a Tripartite Alliance discussion document published in the ANC journal Umrabulo in October 1998. This had stated that "Transformation of the state entails, first and foremost, extending the power of the NLM over all levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on."
This document was, according to numerous undisputed press reports, co-written by Netshitenzhe, then a member of the ANC National Working Committee and head, since January 1998, of the Government Communications and Information Service.
Nonetheless the ANC went to court in the last weeks of the campaign to interdict the further airing of the advertisement. This was defamatory of Netshitenzhe, ANC Legal-Coordinator Valli Moosa said in an affidavit, as he was prohibited by public service regulations from making public statements on behalf of any political party. The content was moreover “illegitimate, false and unfair”.
I was working as a parliamentary researcher for the Democratic Party at the time and was required to author the answering affidavit and do the research to prove, among other things, that the ANC did indeed have a policy of capturing the levers of state power.
It was possible to do this by simply ignoring the public obfuscation that surrounded much of what the ANC did and focusing instead on the evolution of this plan through the ANC’s own policy and strategy documents, many of them written by Netshitenzhe himself.
The ANC had effectively cleared the path for this policy between 1996 and 1997 by stripping the Public Service Commission of its powers over the career incidents of public servants, abolition of the ‘merit-system’ in appointments and promotion, and by packaging off tens of thousands of highly skilled and experienced state employees.
The draft Strategy and Tactics and other discussion documents released by the ANC in mid-1997, ahead of the party’s national conference in Mafikeng at the end of the year, had then proposed and motivated for the adoption of "a cadre policy ensuring that the ANC plays a leading role in all centres of power."
The conference had duly adopted such a policy in December. This required the ANC to formulate a “deployment strategy” and establish “deployment committees” at all levels – national, provincial and regional – which would, in turn, deploy comrades “to areas of work on behalf of the movement, including the public service, parastatals, structures of the movement and the private sector.”
Through 1998 the ANC government had appointed leading party members to head up numerous state institutions, including ones whose independence were guaranteed by the constitution. It had also sought to break the back of one critical state watchdog body after another – from the Medicines Control Council, to the Judicial Services Commission to the prosecution services. This was a process that ran parallel to the adoption of the infamously corrupt Arms Deal, as well as the ANC’s secret involvement in the development of Virodene as a putative cure for HIV/AIDS.
In late November 1998 the ANC National Working Committee established both a national deployment committee headed by then deputy ANC president Jacob Zuma as well as its strategy for cadre deployment. This document, which was only published later the following the year, called for greater ANC political control over the civil service and the strengthening of ANC leadership over all parastatals and statutory bodies, as well as “in all other sectors of social activity” such as in the economy, education, sports and the media. The primary task of cadres was to advance “transformation” in their institutions.
Unfortunately, after the election was over, the Democratic Party missed a crucial court deadline, due to its attorney having come down with a severe case of some or other tropical illness, and in October 1999 the Johannesburg High Court granted the order requested by the ANC against the radio advertisement, without the case being heard.
I had circulated by email the timeline I had drawn up while researching the matter to various people, including some journalists, and the Mail & Guardian recognised its significance and published it across two pages on 5th November 1999 under the headline ‘ANC cadres are taking over the civil service’. The following year, in March 2000, the Democratic Party published a critique of cadre deployment – further building on this research – called “All Power to the Party: The ANC’s programme to eliminate the distinction between party and state and extend its hegemony over civil society ”. The document stated that the ANC’s cadre deployment policy had created a dual authority with “ostensible authority” lying in the Constitution and Parliament and “real authority” in the party:
- ANC Members of Parliament under the “supervision and direction” of the NWC are unable to execute their constitutional obligations to hold the executive to account.
- ANC MPs are not answerable and accountable to the voters who elected them, but to the party leadership which appointed them and controls their careers.
- Within the civil service the formal hierarchical lines of accountability are bypassed, with ANC cadres informed by and answerable to party structures parallel to those of the state.
- The constitutional obligation on ANC members in independent statutory bodies to perform their duties without “fear or favour” subject only to the Constitution and the law is overridden by the “maximum political discipline” demanded by the party leadership.
This was objectively an important story. At the DP we were documenting, and trying to push back against, what is widely acknowledged today to have been a disastrous policy. Who knows, but had the local and international press, and civil society more broadly, helped put enough pressure on the ANC it may even have been possible to strangle it at birth.
This did not happen. I vividly remember however the sullen hostility of many journalists and commentators in the English-language press to our warnings. The report could not be attacked on the merits, as we were citing chapter and verse of the ANC’s own policy and strategy documents, so the approach appeared to be to mischaracterise, ignore or downplay it. Most memorably, Business Day did all three by refusing to publish a news report on the release of the report and then denouncing it as “McCarthyist” in an editorial the following week.
Between 2000 and 2001 “cadre deployment” was progressively extended to municipal level. In March 2000 there was already a noticeable trend of ANC politicians moving from work as city councillors into far more lucrative positions in municipal administration. They were almost always appointed over the highly qualified and experienced candidates still available for appointment at that time.
The DP again warned that this was degenerating into a massive jobs-for-pals programme. “Not only are such appointments corrupt”, a 28th March 2000 statement issued by the party commented, “they also undermine the capacity of local government to deliver.” Yet again, such warnings went unheeded. After the local government elections on 5th December 2000 ANC structures systematically deployed party cadres to serve as municipal managers in the new municipalities the ANC now controlled across the country.
At the time the ANC enjoyed huge political and moral legitimacy, and it was regarded as embodying the will of the black African majority. It was thus seen by particularly left-wing commentators as perfectly “democratic” for the ANC to deploy cadres to all centres of power in state and society for the purpose, it was believed, of overcoming minority resistance, and advancing the interests of “the people”. It was common too to defend cadre deployment as just a form of accelerated Affirmative Action.
Such illusions about the benign nature of the ruling party and the virtuous character of its cadres have obviously been steadily stripped away over two decades of ANC misrule.
Looking back, the paradox of cadre deployment is that while this was a policy intended to enable the ANC to “wield” the levers of power, nothing did more to sabotage its ability to govern the country effectively.
James Myburgh is editor of Politicsweb.co.za. He worked as a parliamentary researcher for the Democratic Party (now the Democratic Alliance) between 1997 and 2001.
This article first appeared in Afrikaans in Rapport newspaper.
