ATTACKING THE AUTHOR AND NOT THE ARGUMENT

The ruling party used last Friday's edition of ANC Today to respond to two recent articles by Helen Zille and, in turn, to launch a scathing attack on the DA leader.

The first article it refers to was a statement made by Zille on 4 February titled "Mbeki can salvage his legacy by repudiating the National Democratic Revolution". It was made just prior to the President's State of the Nation Address and, in it, she set out what she believed President Mbeki should say in his upcoming speech. The second is an edition of SA Today, published on 15 February and titled "A Public Challenge to Jacob Zuma: Pledge your allegiance to the Constitution". In it, Zille challenged ANC President Jacob Zuma to commit to the South African Constitution as South Africa's primary set of laws and ideals. (Zuma has, on several occasions, said the ANC is more important than the Constitution).

Quite clearly those two articles hit a chord within the ruling party; for the ANC's dogmatic response - one driven more by emotion than rational consideration - is both mendacious and, in parts, illogical. It does not directly address or respond to what Helen Zille said, setting up straw men and relying on misdirection instead. It is riddled with prejudice and, I believe, deserving of a response.

It is a fair amount of work to disprove a logical fallacy, and a full and comprehensive breakdown of all the errors in this particular piece would run to some length. So, let me rather address what I consider to be some of the more significant mistakes.

The anonymous response titled "Our revolution shall not be halted" opens with a series of paragraphs which define the scope of the attack and, at the same time, the outer limits of its merit.

Zille's original statement, on Mbeki's State of the Nation Address, elaborated on this central point: "...the President must concede that there is nothing democratic about the ANC's core doctrine, the so-called ‘national democratic revolution' (NDR) which commits the party to controlling all levers of power.... Unless he takes his last chance to reverse it, his legacy will be defined by the way in which he helped the party to extend its tentacles into virtually every institution of state, in order to serve the ends of his shrinking ruling clique."

As evidence of the NDR's destructive consequences, the DA leader provided six examples: the ANC's proposed media tribunal, its attack on Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, the interference with the NPA, the Speaker's appointment as ANC Chairperson and head of the ANC committee dealing with party strategy in Parliament, the ANC's refusal to re-investigate the arms deal and the current electricity crisis.

Significantly, the statement is dispassionate and, while the argument is forceful, it plays the ball, not the man.

In contrast, the ANC's response does exactly the opposite - attacking Zille's motives and speaking around the facts. Among other things, it describes her as part of "an amalgam of those who have exercised power and enjoyed privilege in one form or another - political, economic, social, military - based on the exclusion, exploitation and oppression of the vast majority". Indeed, much the first third of the ANC's response is dedicated to an assault on her character.

This is called an ad hominem attack, which Wikipedia describes as "replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief of the person making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim."

It is also a favourite tactic of the ANC's.

It is quite easy to disprove the attack on Zille's character - she has a long record of fighting for human rights, democracy and justice - the point is, were you to do so, you would lose sight of the original argument you put forward, the merits of which exist independently of the character of the author. Put another way, by attacking the author instead of the argument, the ANC is attempting to misdirect debate and avoid the hard questions; in this case, the six pieces of evidence Zille put forward.

Yet even on this front - when the ANC eventually does get closer to addressing the facts - it still cannot break away from its reliance on misdirection. For example, it states: "the 2007 Strategy & Tactics of the ANC: Building a National Democratic Society describes the main content of the national democratic revolution as, ‘the liberation of Africans in particular and Blacks in general from political and socio-economic bondage. It means uplifting the quality of life of all South Africans, especially the poor, the majority of whom are African and female. At the same time it has the effect of liberating the white community from the false ideology of racial superiority and the insecurity attached to oppressing others.'"

The response quotes several other sections from the Strategy and Tactics document, ostensibly to demonstrate that the ideals which underlie the ANC's policy and practice are democratic and commendable.

The problem is that this is, for all intents and purposes, selective reasoning. It is one thing to quote the ideals behind the NDR, quite another to do so at the expense of the mechanics - which are often undemocratic and even unconstitutional. In other words, one can have a discussion about the end but Zille's argument concerned the means. After all, the NDR is a mechanism to achieve a certain outcome, not the outcome itself.

(This is not to suggest that the ANC's final vision for South Africa is beyond question either. Certainly its commitment to equality and its rather particular understanding of democracy are open to debate. But that is the subject for a different discussion.)

Take cadre deployment for example. Formally adopted by the ruling party at its 50th National Conference in Mafikeng, in 1997 - the same conference at which Mbeki was first elected ANC President - it has become one of the cornerstones around which the NDR has been structured. (Click here to read the 1997 ANC resolution which sets it all out.) Yet it is also profoundly undemocratic and, essentially, circumvents the Constitution.

Cadre deployment is designed to allow the ANC to deploy its members and those loyal to the party to key institutions of state. This, in turn, makes those institutions loyal and accountable, first and foremost, to the ruling party. In this way the Constitution is reduced to nothing more than a series of suggestions or, to use Jacob Zuma's own words, it is there merely "to regulate matters". Real and ultimate power lies in the hands of the ANC NEC.

Cadre deployment has had a profound and destructive effect on a number of state institutions. As a consequence, a large number are now defined by contradiction: The Public Protector's office no longer enjoys public confidence; the Speaker of Parliament is also the ANC's chief political strategist in Parliament and Valli Moosa sits both on the board of Eskom and the ANC's fundraising committee. Until recently, even at provincial level, the problem was acute - a spokesperson for the ANC premier in KwaZulu-Natal, for example, simultaneously served on the SABC board.

Cadre deployment is undemocratic and deeply problematic. Yet, instead of offering a considered defence, the ANC's response again attacked the author rather than the argument:

"Those who oppose such conscious action and advocate a laissez-faire ‘equal opportunity society' approach must tell us which institutions in our society, which centres of power, must remain untransformed. Who must remain excluded? From what must they remain excluded? To whose advantage must they remain excluded?"

The implication being, if you oppose the ANC's political programme of transformation (a euphemism for the NDR), you are opposed to the establishment of a ‘true' democracy and an equal and just society. That the program of transformation or the NDR itself might be flawed simply isn't an option the ANC is ever willing to consider.

At no point in its response does the ANC attempt to address the fundamentally undemocratic nature of cadre deployment or how it has impacted on the nature of the South African state, its detrimental impact on public accountability or even on service delivery.

And so it goes.

One might be hard pressed to argue convincingly that affirmative action and BEE are central parts of the NDR in the same way that cadre deployment is but these programmes are often used together by the ANC, the one reinforcing the other. Certainly their effect can be the same on an institution as both reward criteria other than merit: political affiliation on the one hand and race on the other. But separately, especially when badly misused, each can be equally destructive on its own.

By way of illustration, consider Politicsweb's analysis of how many of Eskom's problems can be directly attributed to its unthinking pursuit of BEE and affirmative action policies, ahead of the country's best interests.

At one point the article describes how, in June 2002, former Eskom CEO Thulani Gcabashe approved a corporate directive on procurement from black suppliers: "This established a ‘Hierarchy of Procurement' which had to be followed in ‘sourcing products and services.' Although existing agreements were to be respected, for any further purchases drawn from outside the company Eskom was required to go first to ‘Black Women-owned Suppliers,' then ‘Small Black Suppliers,' then ‘Large Black Suppliers,' then ‘Black Empowering Suppliers.' Only once these options had been exhausted could ‘other' South African suppliers be considered."

The result was that Eskom's coal stock pile was effectively reduced from 61 days in 2000 to just 18 days in 2007.

Again though, these and other similar hard facts are deliberately overlooked by the ANC in its response. For why argue the facts when you can argue about such imaginary threats as motive, race and political intent?

The same pattern is evident when it comes to Jacob Zuma's comments on the Constitution. Zuma's position is unequivocal. He has, on at least two occasions - one in 1996 and one in 2006 - stated that he believes the ANC is more important than the Constitution.

But the ANC's response doesn't address his comments, either to defend or reject them. Instead, it argues that the ANC has a long history of defending the Constitution and upholding its values. And, again, while that may or may not be true (it is certainly debateable) it really isn't the point - what does Jacob Zuma have to say about the matter? Why did he say those things? Does he stand by them? Should he become South Africa's president, what then?

Implicit in almost all the ANC's writings is an assumption that transformation - or the NDR - is non-negotiable; that it is a programme of action above and beyond critique; indeed, that it is the very definition of democracy in action. It simply refuses to address or interrogate the possibility that it might be flawed. In turn, anyone who challenges it is painted as divisive, racist or in some way intent on destroying South Africa's new democracy.

But consider this: the DA doesn't have an NDR. It doesn't have a revolution that defines its political programme. It doesn't believe in cadre deployment. It has a different definition of affirmative action. Certainly, above all else, it is committed to the Constitution, its values and ideals. How does the ANC reconcile that with its own approach?

It can't. To do so would be to admit that the NDR is fallible and that it is perfectly possibly to pursue the end-goal of a better and more democratic South Africa through different means.

Unable and unwilling to argue the facts, it turns instead to the character of its opponents. The ANC's response tells you as much about its track record as it does about its ideology, for if its track record is so dismal that it is forced to rely entirely on character assassination (it doesn't address one of the six pieces of evidence Zille put forward), it is essentially an admission of defeat and, for all intents and purposes, it has very little left to offer the country.