The ANC Leadership Must Not Fail Us: A Polemic!

In the article entitled: ANC: A pyramid scheme in the brink of collapse? which was published here on 14 December 2015, I stated thus:

‘I am a member of the ANC and have been since 1989 when I was barely 11 years old. Painfully, it is the first time in all these years that I am overcome by a great feeling of doubt about the ANC. The doubt is borne of my anxiety whether I am still and truly a member of an organization, the ANC, or just part of a compendium of loose, self-interested groupings at the helm of which is the weighty personality cult of President Jacob Zuma. This to me is a profound doubt which I believe many who care about the attainment of the ANC’s historical mission are silently or vocally feeling’.

I made this observation honestly to communicate my sense of uneasiness about the state of the ANC today. My feeling was (is) that the ANC, as a coherent and functional organization, seems to have somewhat lost its voice along with its power to hold especially president Zuma to account. In this regard the ANC leadership seems to behave like obedient disciples of the Jacob Zuma cult who must praise and defend everything done or said by his holiness, president Jacob Zuma.

In this connection we ordinary members of the ANC – just like the Jehova’s witnesses – have to go door to door explaining the seemingly ‘biblical scripture’ about how wonderful and holy is pastor Jacob Zuma. It is as if we have been fed the (un)holy opium that makes us cease to think critically and independently, seemingly emulating those congregants who allowed themselves to be fed snakes and grass by some devilish so-called pastors.

Under these circumstances, one observes that ordinary members of the ANC feel no sense of security that when things go awry, the leadership of our organization will act in defense of our common heritage, the African National Congress! This view is particularly buttressed by the common observation that there seems to be a process underway to subjugate the leadership of the ANC under the unsavory business interests as exemplified by the Guptas.

In this regard, the latest revelations that the Gupta Family Business Empire has been offering cabinet posts to various leaders of the ANC apparently in exchange for business deals seem to back this observation. We wish to state it categorically that the delegation by President Jacob Zuma of his constitutional powers to the Gupta Family is nothing short of selling our sovereignty and thus our right as a nation to self-determination. In fact, this conduct by president Zuma amounts to political high treason of the highest order!

Accordingly, there is a general feeling that the ANC leadership has been shielding president Zuma beyond necessity for far too long now. In this moment of madness defense of the indefensible, the ANC leadership has sacrificed too many a comrade just to protect one individual. This has become symptomatic of a leadership that is blindly obsessed with a leading figure than the welfare of the country, the ANC and its entire membership. This has made the ANC leadership virtually complicit to the cardinal political sin of selling the soul of the ANC and the country to the Guptas and other business interests.

In their quest to defend president Zuma - like someone delirious from taking opium- our leadership has been dragging the ANC and the country towards a cliff with no care who says what. The political counsel from the veterans of our movement like Ben Turok, Kgalema Motlanthe and others, has been treated with such disdain by the current ANC leaders that you would swear these veterans were counter revolutionaries hell-bent on destroying the ANC. This was done all in defense of his holiness, president Zuma.

As a result of these machinations by our leadership, the ANC is fast losing credibility and moral standing in society. For any political organisation to lose these two important political ingredients, however popular it might be, means that its political power precariously hangs in the balance.

In this connection, the political hegemony of the ANC rests on the masses of our people recognizing it as a true representative of their interests. Where there seems to be a feeling that the ANC represents the Guptas instead of these masses, the ANC hegemony will start to whither to a point where it evaporates altogether.

It is therefore a seriously disconcerting development that as a result of poor leadership, we are now faced with a possibility of the ANC losing power consequent to the impending loss of our hegemony. The scary part of this unfolding drama is that if this happens, it is not guaranteed that some in the ANC will relinquish power without a bloody political violence or possible rigging of the elections in certain instances. As we all should be aware, the trappings of power can be so comfortable that relinquishing them can be a difficult thing to do and therefore a matter of life and death. We are already seeing the signs of this nightmare in some provinces.

In conclusion, it is an incontrovertible fact that some, if many, decisions made by the ANC leadership in defense of president Zuma have not countenanced the expectation of our people that the ANC represents their interests. Instead we have seen decisions that have arrogantly poised the ANC as inimical to the over-arching strategic goals we committed to under our constitution.

The ANC leadership seems to have arrogated to itself the status of being a politico-business cabal organized around President Zuma, the chief master of political patronage. If the claim that over 80% of our NEC members have business interests is true, then this assertion is not far-fetched.

We therefore wish to appeal to the ANC leadership to dispel these observations by acting in line with the historic mission and vision of the ANC. We appeal to the leadership to make decisions that will not only secure the continued existence of the ANC, but to ensure that the future of this great nation is fully secured.

No amount of politically convoluted statements will satisfy the people of South Africa anymore. All the people need is decisive action against those that act with impunity as they destroy the only place we can call home: South Africa.  This decisive action should - of necessity and for the ANC to show that it still exists as a functional and coherent political organization – includes the removal of president Zuma as President of the country and ANC.

If the ANC fails to do this, then they would have confirmed the adage that ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’. Which simply means in this context that if the ANC no longer exists, then there will be no serious consequences for president Zuma for selling our country to the highest bidder.

Mzukisi Makatse is an ordinary member of the ANC writing in his personal capacity.