Still we rise
When degenerative organizations like the African National Congress (ANC) regard you as "the main threat", and call battles against you a "swimming against a strong stream", you know you must doing something right. Which is why we take the reports in the Mail & Guardian that the "ANC has identified the Congress of the People (Cope) as "the main threat" as a compliment, albeit an unintentional one. In fact, we would be concerned if they were to compliment us intentionally. If your friends say a lot about you, so do your enemies.
This revealed order by Gwede Mantashe - ‘to introduce programmes that will "undermine" Cope support ...' - will work to Cope's advantage by delousing the fleas, especially those from the ANC. The chaff will be separated from the wheat. Cope has for sometime now, even before the fall of the head of election strategy, Mlungisi Hlongwane, been trying to get rid of the enemy within.
We chose against conducting witch hunts in favour of suffering the enemy within - until it ran out of steam. When the ANC embarked on its ‘Operation Come Back Home' [whose object is to attract our members, especially the leadership, with lucrative jobs and business opportunities] Cope looked vulnerable until it realised the ANC was actually doing the organisation a favour, without realising it.
For an organisation that is genuinely committed to ethical principles, operating with fewer quality members is preferable to carrying worthless quantities of rubbish for the sake of inflating numbers.
When you have something going, as the saying goes, everything your opponents do works to your advantage. The Christians among us will be aware of St Paul's saying that everything works for the greater good of the good. What this strategy of the ANC spells out clearly is that their organisation does not only lack imagination but have actually ran out of ideas- if all it can come up with to counteract the Cope wave is by shadowing its moves. We take it as a sincerest form of flattery, but the worrying factor, as seen during their election campaign, is that when this strategy fails they resort to violence.
It is not by accident that ANC MKVA was suddenly resuscitated towards the last elections. And it was not just a matter of few opportunistic individuals taking the opportunity to reboot their significance within their organisation. The move was organised and well orchestrated.
The ANC is showing all symptoms of a declining Liberation Movement: lack of progressive ideas, intolerance to real alternative views, use of history as a weapon for political power, growing centralisation of power towards unchecked party/leader autocracy, and resorting to violence when all else fails. There are disturbing signs also that it is aware of its demise and has chosen to rely on manipulation and abuse of State power as the last straw to desperately clutch on to.
What the ANC still fails to understand is that the Cope wave is strong because it is rooted in the present day needs of the people, as determined by their social progressive spirit. The ANC has failed to keep up with the progressive spirit of the people, which can be seen in its obsession with empty rhetoric, nostalgia for yesterday politics, and the wishy-washy wish lists and empty rhetoric it calls its manifesto. The ludicrous cut and paste thinking of the ANC is a sign of the slouching mediocrity it operates by, as can be clearly seen in the State of the Nation Address. It's pathetic. It'd be laughable were it not so tragic. What mediocrity relies on is indecisiveness (look at the cabinet), compromise (because you have no principles), lack of vision, and obsession with the past. Need we say more?
The most worrying factor for Cope is not the ANC tactics of regression, but the people of goodwill in South Africa who choose to keep quiet because of misdirected intentions of aiming to be patriotic. It makes them accept mediocrity through flawed reasoning. If you keep quiet even though you see the country is going to the dogs then you are complicit. This is how Martin Luther. Jr, put it. "Though we be present in the battle, if we are not present where the battle is hottest, we are traitors to the cause."
We become traitors to the cause by saying we just want to live our private lives when the signs are clear that soon there won't be much platform to live those lives at the best possible way. As Yeats saw long ago, the best are lacking in conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. If things continue in this path, things will soon fall apart; we've a clear example beyond the Limpopo.
As for a total onslaught against Cope during the 2011, well, that just another point among the long wish list. Just as you cannot create 500 000 jobs over 6 months in a recession economy, unless you don't know the difference between a job opportunity and what you call ‘decent jobs'. Decent jobs are not temporal, and they involve proper health insurance, and so forth.
For those who seem to still miss the point, let us reiterate; the Congress of the People was born out of revolutionary will of the people who wanted to defend their Constitution, correct the deviations from the spirit of Freedom Charter, restore ethics in politics, morality and consolidate participatory democracy.
We were then concerned about the lack integrity on our leaders, the political deviation to an undue introduction of rowdy politics of partisanship and personality cults within the Liberation Movement. We are still concerned: in fact things have only changed for the worse when the ANC changed pilots, adding impotent imagination, dubious morals and corruptible characters to habits and patterns of regression.
The ANC chose to co-opt the real concerns of the people into an electioneering strategy, speciously promising to put corrective measures, only to go back to old habits the moment they were off the woods, like cadre deployment to the civil service after the elections. What is becoming glaringly obvious is that, though the ANC preaches things like democracy, constitutional based open society, it does not embody their spirit, in fact sometimes it betrays it.
The wind of a new agenda for change and hope for all is sweeping throughout our land. There's nothing either the ANC, the SACP, COSATU, or rest of the bunch who remain cordoned off from the 21st century by sophisticated ignorance and obsolete ideologies, can do anything about it. No one can stop an idea whose time has come, especially not those who boast only outdated social structure and perverted intellectual heritage. Cope is the only alternative to the failing vision of the ANC, and one by one everyone is going to wake to this realisation.
Cope stands on the cutting edge of change for the better, almost by luck for that matter, because the spirit of change is fostered by the needs of the people, and not by politicians. Cope is there because of the opportune moment it was founded on, and will itself be relevant only if it embodies people's aspirations, ready to fulfil the promises of liberation of our people.
Cope is the only party that brings new solutions to our present needs. It's other advantage is that it has genes of a liberation movement in its blood, and the overwhelming support of emerging South Africa's progressive generation. This enables Cope to move in harmony of tradition and progressive thought, forging new ways to realise the hopes of the people.
Studying the voting patterns of the last elections a clear picture emerges of Cope being the only party that really crosses racial, ethnic and cultural boundaries. All the people of goodwill are slowly realising that Cope is the only way forward for us under the progressive umbrella that is South Africa's constitution.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni is editor of http://copetown.org/ and COPE's head of research in the Western Cape legislature.
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