The ANC will stand, but this dreadful book will not!

The Fall of the ANC: What Next? by Prince Mashele and Muzuki Qobo is an appalling bad book. It is not a bad book because it criticizes the ANC or its leaders. It is bad because it is sloppy, badly written, hardly referenced and takes liberties with facts and history that border on the criminal (see here).

While it sets out to make a contribution to matters of profound significance-the state of the national liberation movement, the national democratic revolution and the post-apartheid era of development and under-development-this political diatribe ends up being nothing more than a closet promo for the manifesto for a political party, Agang. Even this it does badly. Where does one start then, with a review of such a book? (As I penned this, the manifesto became redundant as Mampele joined the DA!)

Any critique should strive for generosity. So let it not be said that this book has no value. It certainly serves as an exemplar of what we do not need being passed off as serious political analysis. It also lists some of the key challenges we face as a nation, both in the state and in the ANC; corruption, political arrogance, factionalism and the tendency to allow our home grown notion of exceptionalism to occlude our reality. But unfortunately that's where its virtues begin and end.

The book is written in a style that seems to range between turgid prose and dramatic hyperbole and to contradict itself on almost every page, sometimes even within a single sentence.

It makes gross, unsubstantiated generalisations and flits between facile critique and fantastical projection in a manner that suggests some kind of mental deficiency or drug induced hallucination of the authors.

For example, it claims that the ANC had ‘never thought about governance' before 1990 and therefor was not ready to ascend to power in 1994.

At the same time, it points out that the ANC had adopted the Freedom Charter in 1995, Ready to Govern in 1988 and the RDP in 1994 and while these documents laid out a basis for the ANC to govern, they were just plain wrong. Well that may be their opinion, but it hardly stands up as a well researched and rigorously tested hypothesis. The counter for this claim is put forward by the very authors. Its almost as if they were having a drunken, loud argument, rather than writing political opinion.

When they are not quoting liberal philosophers; Popper, Kierkegaard or cold war anti-socialist propagandists such as Stephen Ellis, the authors tend to get lost in their own emotional dissonance with the ANC. Many of the things that they feel and believe may well be true, but unfortunately simply venting them does nothing to prove these arguments. They talk of the ANC being effective at duping the masses, at being rotten in exile and therefor rotten at home, of being an organisation manipulated by communists and so on. But none of this is ever substantiated by a single fact. It's just how Mashele and Qobo feel about the ANC.

A consistent thread of argument, if one can describe a such a stream of arbitrary and meaningless consciousness as having the properties of agency to qualify it as such, is the critique of Marxism and its alleged influence on the ANC. On the one hand the authors argue that the SACP has had a disproportionate influence on the ANC, making it a puppet organisation of a puppet organisation, the SACP being a puppet of the former Soviet Union (a bit like the Russian Babushka doll?) and that this has rendered the ideas and policies of the ANC archaic. This applies not only to the ANC before 1994 but afterwards as well, they claim. Yet at no point do the authors offer even a shred of evidence to back up such a claim. It is simply accepted and presumably we must as well, that the SACP controlled the ANC and misdirected it. In the very next breath, they claim the relationship between the two organisations was always ‘uneasy'. Well?

While the authors are eager to accuse the ANC, led by the SACP and its ‘Marxism' as being ‘historicist', the entire thesis of their publication can be summed up as being little more that a historicist critique of the ANC. Like all liberation movements, they argue, it is inevitable that the ANC will ‘fall' because of corruption, factionalism, tribalism, and other ‘isms', they claim. Like all developing countries, except China, it seems they argue, the ANC must accept a long walk to development. They claim this while completely ignoring the effects of the global economic crisis, the reality of ideological and other struggles within our society, not to mention globally and while they start out with a canned Marxist history of South Africa under colonialism, slavery, war and capitalism, they seem to completely disregard the impact this history has had on our current reality.

Corruption is a case in point. For while the authors correctly identify corruption as a key threat to our democracy and to development, they offer no real explanation of its origins, it's resilience in our society or how to deal with it. They hint that the ANC in exile was ‘rotten', of course with no evidence for this claim, and in passing they refer to the looting of the state by the de Klerk government, but that's where it begins and ends. Cadres, it seems, corrupt themselves with no assistance from the former regime, private companies, venal entrepreneurs or anybody else.

The same with BEE. In the authors eyes, all black business people have made their wealth by ‘adding no value' and by being in proximity to the ANC. How this can be true of the likes of Cyril Ramaphosa, who left all positions in parliament and government, or Patrice Motsepe, who seems to have never run a marginal mine and turned it to profitability, is simply not even considered.

It is not that a critique of BEE is not necessary, but to argue that this policy amounts to the transfer of wealth to an idle elite, spits in the face of every Black hawker, events manager, caterer, taxi-driver, salon owner, etc. that ever got up to trade in business for a day. The also do not explain why all the ‘productive' White capitalists are doing business with Black ‘parasites'. Which capitalist would do such deals if they made them no money?

At the end of this vague, unsubstantiated, facile critique of South African politics, the authors finally propose their answer to our post-colonial, post-apartheid crisis. It is breathtaking in its simplicity.

1. All citizens must take ownership of the freedom they have fought for or been bequeathed and vote the ANC out of power if it.

2. The ANC or another political party, a wild guess is that it is Agang, must radically transform the education system in our country so that 20 years from now we will begin to see the fruits of this policy in the form of citizens who can read and write, walk and chew bubble gum at the same time and vote for a party of their choice.

Well, it never occurred to any of us, not least those in government, that it was all so simple.

The problem with this critique is that it attempts to pass for serious political comment. Our reality is a complex one. We do face a crisis of a state and institutions that seem incapable of dealing with social problems and conditions, be it crime, violence, corruption, education or creating jobs. We do face a crisis of thinking and programmatic intervention by the ‘left', where we seem to constantly repeat the slogans of a bygone era of socialist revolution no matter how little these impact on the concrete, lived reality of ordinary people.

We do have a crisis of legitimacy with leaders who have lost contact or empathy with the masses.

But to think that by hatching up a pre-election book that summarises the political comments of its authors, which they are perfectly entitled to and presenting this as a serious analysis of where our country is-which they are not entitled to fob off on us-and where it is going to is no more than an attempt to characterise intellectual flatulence as being a symphony.

Dr. Phillip Dexter

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