JAUNDICED EYE
This week, African National Congress veteran Mavuso Msimang confided that he was “disappointed” with the ruling party. Join the club, mate.
Actually, Msimang did join the club. Very briefly. That is, until he experienced the truth of former President Jacob Zuma’s oft-repeated warning to those contemplating leaving: “It’s cold outside the ANC.”
In December last year, Msimang, then the deputy president of the ANC Veterans’ League, wrote what Daily Maverick described as a “devastating resignation” from the organisation that had been his home for more than 60 years. It caused consternation in an ANC alert to the perils of losing such a high-profile member — Msimang was in the high command of MK, the ANC military wing, as well as a former CEO of SA National Parks and KwaZulu-Natal Tourism — to one of its rivals in an election year.
Msimang’s three-page letter was appropriately addressed to ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula, the man who epitomises the party’s opportunistic amorality. It traces every failure of ANC governance, from pit lavatories for school kids to 60% youth unemployment, back to “manifold malfeasances … corruption somewhere in the system”.
“For over a decade I have added my voice to the many others who have consistently decried and disapproved of corruption and its harmful by-products of nepotism and incompetence. The response of the leadership has, at best, been a shoulder shrug and a promise to do something about it. At worst, those who [raise their] voices endure slurs or are met with downright hostility,” Msimang wrote. “It is not easy to leave … But it is time to go.”
Defiant words but barely a week later, after a quick schooling from the ANC grandees in the error of his ways, Msimang was back warming his tootsies at the ANC fireside. He said he had been reassured by promises from the highest echelons of the party that those tainted by corruption would not be allowed to stand for election in May.
At the time, Veterans’ League President Snuki Zikalala proudly described to the media the “delicate” process it had taken to bring Msimang back into the fold. “We managed … to convince him that we are all committed to renewal and to ensure that those who are criminally charged are not in the list processes.”
This, of course, turned out to be untrue.
When the ANC released its electoral list last month, it was shot through with alleged state looters. While a few minnows were omitted, all the big names accused by the Zondo Commission of involvement remained, including Malusi Gigaba, David Mahlobo, Zizi Kodwa and Cedric Frolick. At least 26 people implicated by the Zondo Commission failed to present any defence before the ANC’s “integrity commission” but remain on the candidates’ list.
To this scroll of dishonour should be added Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande, in recent weeks deeply implicated in corruption and fraud at the National Student Financial Aid Scheme. And how about President Cyril Ramaphosa himself?
After all, a three-person commission of inquiry headed by a former Chief Justice said the president’s Phala Phala scandal that there was evidence of “serious violations” of the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act and the Constitution. They also suggested that Ramaphosa had lied to them.
Msimang’s meek about turn has left him somewhat embarrassed. Speaking to News24 on Tuesday at an ANC event to mark 30 years of democracy, he admits “absolutely” to being disappointed that the Zondo-identified looters will be back in Parliament after May 29, but still thinks that somehow the corruption problem will be solved. Otherwise, he says bemusedly, “it’s unthinkable that I would be campaigning for the ANC … [it’s like] we’re laughing at the people.”
To sneer at Msimang’s gullibility and failure of courage is to miss the point. Psychologically, one of the most difficult things for a person to do is to change their mind. Especially about a long-held ideological position that has been assiduously buttressed by like-minded friends and tempered in the white heat of battle with rival ideologies.
There are still honourable men and women in the ANC who have gone through similar cycles of disillusionment followed by estrangement from the party and then a reluctant reconciliation. However, such endless equivocation sustains the illusion that the ANC can be rehabilitated. Until they accept the futility of this cycle and finally turn their backs on the party en masse, there’s little hope of breaking the political logjam.
Unfortunately for South Africa, none of the opposition parties has, as yet, shown any sign that they can tap into this idealistic voting pool. Instead, the default position of many alienated ANC voters has been to call down a plague on all the political parties’ houses, to eschew opposition politics for the luxury of opining loftily from the sidelines.
Professor Raymond Suttner, a former ANC and SA Communist Party activist who spent a decade in apartheid prisons, before breaking ties with both organisations because of the Zuma era’s rampant looting, is one of these influential non-participators. In a recent series of columns on Polity, he notes as the futility of voting for an ANC that “may be in a terminal crisis” but also argues that there are good reasons to abandon electoral politics entirely.
Those who have remained in the ANC “despite the stealing” in the belief that it could be renewed from within have been conclusively proved wrong, writes Suttner. “That does not fill me with joy. Unfortunately, what has happened after the removal of Jacob Zuma has become as serious, if not more so, than the earlier looting.”
Life continues to be cheap, with “widespread lawlessness”, including in the police. The question of fraud is no longer of state capture initiated by Zuma’s nexus with the Gupta family but continues unabated in Eskom and Transnet, as well as other state-owned entities.
“In this situation of national crisis, which encompasses almost every area of our lives, understandably, many people have wanted to remove the ANC-led government,” writes Suttner. While he acknowledges the relatively superior performance of the Democratic Alliance-governed Western Cape and admires the “exemplary” actions of Chris Pappas, the mayor of uMngeni, the only DA-controlled municipality in KwaZulu-Natal, he says the opposition parties lack “significant empathy and compassion”.
“At the moment there is no political party that can be the bearer of a unifying, collective sense of hope, hope for a better future for all. The ANC and its allies have abandoned that, but most other parties, with relatively small followings, are attracted to individualistic notions of freedom and hope very much along the lines of free-market liberalism.”
What, then, is the solution to the national crisis of which he speaks? Suttner finds comfort in “glimmerings” of hope in the activities of “religious, caregiving and some professional organisations”, as well as social movements like Equal Education and some NGOs.
It’s a dreadfully unconvincing solution that he proffers. While community organisations and individuals assuaging social ills is both admirable and necessary, power —unless it is won through violence or a crisis precipitated by a total systemic collapse — comes from the electoral process.
But, again, scorn is not the solution. Those parties trying to flog themselves as alternatives to the ANC, of which the DA is significantly the biggest, have to find ways to attract the alienated idealists of Msimang’s and Suttner’s ilk. While this may prove to be more of a voting puddle than a pool, a switch of allegiance by this group has a symbolic importance far beyond their numbers.
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