Zuma's speech marks ascendancy of militant hardliners
President Zuma's speech on the occasion of the ANC's 99th anniversary reflects an organisation so deeply divided, that its leaders can only enforce "discipline" through outdated Marxist-Leninist ideology - "democratic centralism", a Soviet-style "vanguard" party, cadre deployment, and increased party control over people's lives.
This is the disturbingly anti-democratic thread that runs through President Zuma's speech from start to finish, and should ring loud alarm bells for all South Africans. It reflects the ascendancy of militant hardliners in the ANC.
Quoting Moses Mabhida, a former leader of the South African Communist Party, President Zuma described the ANC as "the Parliament of all the people of the country", thereby underscoring his previous statements that the ANC is more important than the constitution. In doing so, he denigrated the constitutional checks and balances that a multi-party system and independent institutions provide to limit power abuse by the governing party.
President Zuma's repeated commitment to outdated and repressive Marxist ideology will also undermine his stated aim of "job creation through meaningful economic transformation". The policy programme he espoused today has led only to economic decline and mass impoverishment wherever it has been implemented.
The President is under the illusion that South Africa has a uniformly functional state apparatus, capable of leading economic development and "transformation". The truth is that the administration - across all three spheres of government where the ANC governs - has been profoundly weakened by cadre deployment. And yet President Zuma today recommitted the ANC to cadre deployment in the media, in tertiary institutions and in "key strategic positions in the state as well as the private sector". He went further, saying that "we place a high premium on the involvement of our cadres in all centres of power"!