JAUNDICED EYE

The African National Congress is big on anniversaries. 

It celebrates its birthday every year with much pomp and circumstance and the tipsy clinking of champagne glasses. The parties held in stadiums around the country — there are simultaneous provincial versions of the national gathering — always include a massive and truly ugly cake, garishly iced in ANC colours, which is ceremoniously eviscerated before the dutifully assembled media by the president and his cronies collectively wielding a large carving knife.

Aside from the fact that black, green and yellow are not the most appetising colours with which to daub a gigantic piece of confectionery, it’s a somewhat strange custom. A big song and dance about simply surviving another year. But then again, when a government has pitifully few tangible political achievements to celebrate, what else is there to toast but the marking off another year on the calendar?

In a similar vein, the ANC on Monday celebrated the first 100 days of the Government of National Union (GNU), which saw it enter into a de facto coalition with its previously despised enemies, the Democratic Alliance. eNCA’s television footage of the occasion, which if you are a masochist with time on your hands can be viewed on their website and on YouTube, showed a gathering that was far different from the ANC’s usual birthday bashes. 

Held outside Luthuli House rather than in a stadium, it was more funereal than celebratory. The obligatory, exuberant call-and-response of “Amandla!” and “Awethu!” that punctuates any ANC gathering was muted and perfunctory. The assembled ANC flesh might have been willing but the spirit was decidedly weak, despite the valiant cheerleading attempts of Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula.

The off-key tone was set from the outset when one could see the lips of Cyril Ramaphosa and Mbalula moving out of synch not only with one another but with the rest of the crowd singing the national anthem. A fitting symbol perhaps of the discordance that the multiparty GNU has caused in the ANC’s much-depleted post-electoral parliamentary ranks.

The SA Communist Party, which views itself as the intellectual engine room of the ANC’s Tripartite Alliance while Cosatu is supposed to provide the worker muscle, refused to attend the makietie. Its stance is that the GNU is a sell-out by the ANC of the alliance’s Holy Grail, the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), and that there was nothing about this “rightwing GNU coalition arrangement” to be happy about. 

Cosatu, too, didn’t attend. It said that none of its office-bearers were available because they received the invitation “too late”.

It seems that not everyone in the SACP got the memo. A number of SACP members who are also ANC office-bearers — including Deputy President Paul Mashatile and ANC Treasurer-General Maropene Ramokgopa — attended the R3-million function.

Belatedly, Mbalula tried his level best to walk back from being the “celebration” that the ANC had initially announced it to be. (And which the officiating chaplain described, in opening the proceedings, as a celebratory giving of thanks for a GNU that barely three months ago had seemed to be “a mission impossible, a journey doomed to failure”.)

“We are not celebrating,” Mbalula explained unconvincingly. “We are reflecting.” Ramaphosa gamely picked up the baton from Mbalula in his own address. This was most definitely not a celebration, the president said. Perish the thought. It was an occasion for the ANC to reflect on its poor electoral performance and shifting realities that had culminated in the formation of the GNU. 

“Today, on this day of reflection … we affirm that the ANC will continue to lead the fundamental transformation of our country and society. Whether [the GNU partners] like it or not, it will happen.

“Today, as we thank our people, we also want to assure that the ANC remains committed to ensuring that our manifesto, as adopted by the national executive committee and various structures, will be implemented.” 

Again, it seems that not everyone got the memo. Supporters of Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi, who has challenged the GNU national agreement by refusing to cooperate with the DA at a provincial level, displayed anti-GNU, pro-Lesufi placards in a silent protest during the singing of the national anthem.

Mbalula, introducing the speakers, threatened the Lesufi-backing anti-GNU protestors with disciplinary action. “I saw some of you trying to ruin this event … Don’t come and try to start mischief here because you will be met with a disciplinary.” 

Lesufi, who had half-heartedly gestured to the protestors to lower their placards, must have had a hearty snigger to himself at this empty threat. Just a week ago, he had forced Mbalula into a grovelling climbdown when the secretary-general had tried to “discipline” him for making anti-GNU public statements. 

However, Lesufi, now openly the central figure around which anti-GNU forces within the ANC are gathering, knows the brinkmanship game and when to push and when to pause. He gently chided his supporters when it was his turn to address the gathering. Without a trace of irony — and simultaneously contradicting both his president and secretary-general about the nature of the event — he said, “As we celebrate this milestone we must be wary of those doing wrong things. Comrade SG was right that it must not be in our name that we undermine the leadership of this movement.” 

Undermine the leadership? Me, Lesufi? Never!

An unnamed “Luthuli House insider” is quoted by News24 as describing the event, which ended with music and dancing, as a “waste of money” and a failure. “They expected 10,000 people. There were less than that. There were buses that were paid but did not come.” 

Truth is, the shindig was neither celebratory as advertised nor reflective as redefined. A period of 100 days is so short in government as to be only of cursory significance as a milestone. Unless, of course, one expects that there may not be that many more days ahead to mark.

To put Monday’s event into context, this is a party that was bloodied in a general election where it lost almost a third of its vote. It’s about 18 months from the municipal elections in which it in the past has performed worse than in the national contest.

The ANC has seen its Struggle credentials nonchalantly usurped by the uMkhonto weSizwe party. It now has the humiliation of seeing its divinely ordained vocation to lead South Africa on the path to the NDR — “Like it or not,” as Ramaphosa used to taunt the opposition — subjected to daily modifications by the DA it previously ridiculed and insulted as un-South African.

This is a party riven by intra-party and intra-alliance factions, rivalries and disputes. It’s about two years away from the leadership election which will decide who is to be Ramaphosa’s successor as ANC president. Depending on who that is, Ramaphosa will quite possibly be dumped as head of state and not see out his five-year term. 

So Monday was really the ANC equivalent of an old-fashioned revivalist meeting, complete with a brace of pastors entreating God to bless and protect the GNU.  It was an attempt to lift flagging ANC spirits and to conjure some enthusiasm for a GNU that the public and corporate spheres love, but the majority of the ANC appears, at best, to be lukewarm about. 

As Ramaphosa tangentially challenged his detractors within the Tripartite Alliance: “Those who say we should not be working together with others [in the GNU] need to come forward with alternatives. Alternatives that they believe can work. Thus far we have not heard of any better alternatives.”

Ramaphosa has hardly put a foot askew in the first 100 days of his tightrope walk to save the ANC from its own worst instincts — to ditch the GNU, lurch left to embrace the EFF and MKP, and wreck any prospects that there might be of reversing South Africa’s decline. But his nerve-wracking journey has just begun.

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The eNCA coverage can be accessed here: https://www.enca.com/top-stories/watch-anc-celebrates-100-days-gnu