Читать книгу Tafelberg Short: The ANC's Battle of Mangaung - Susan Booysen - Страница 4

Introduction – the ANC, the president and the conundrum[1]

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Five years in the life of the African National Congress (ANC) is a long time. Five years since the Zuma ANC’s victory of Polokwane, and the ANC is an organisation racked by factionalism, with question marks about leadership and ability to pull things together to get better government looming large. Mangaung will be no Polokwane. This time around, the conference battlefield is entered without the Polokwane hopes for a dramatic (even if traumatic) turn in leadership and organisational renewal.

The signals going into Mangaung are those of compromise, mostly driven by the need not to see a replay of Polokwane. There are likely leadership compromises, presidential candidacy give-and-takes, slates-for-peace, and negotiations to try and ensure that deployment will be secure. Proponents of a compromise argue that a repeat of the Polokwane scorched earth of fallout that reverberated into the state and delivery needs to be avoided.

Without such an intervention, the ANC will be on record for killing itself off. The great Mangaung challenge is for the ANC to find the road out of this morass.

In many ways the change for which Polokwane had hoped became the aim of the 2012 campaign to substitute Jacob Zuma for ‘Anything but Zuma’. The divisions sprung around an entrenched Zuma faction that had been rewarding individuals and structures for their loyalty. Ideological and policy debates were often the afterthoughts to processes for outmanoeuvring opponents. In the pressure cooker of first suppressed campaigning (‘the campaign opens in October’), and then little space to attend to track records, the incumbents suffered devastating criticism of the leadership, performance and wellness of the ANC. Such critique, however, hardly dented their campaigns – the contestants, foot soldiers and would-be delegates had their eyes firmly fixed on positioning for power, influence and access. Zuma’s campaign was judged to be dominant and the shots were called.

The campaign from October to November became one of a fight for ‘continuity’ and ‘give Zuma a second chance’ against a relatively strong, low-public-profile Kgalema Motlanthe campaign, which was linked to the so-called Forces of Change. Most indications were that the Motlanthe campaign was not set to achieve an outright win. It was mainly self-censored to avoid Polokwane-like party-wide damage. However, the Motlanthe campaign had to be seen to be strong enough to force a compromise position – originally mooted by the Zuma kitchen cabinet at a Pennington meeting in late September and subsequently diffused through the branches – of Zuma for ANC president and Motlanthe for South African president from Election 2014 onwards. Zuma would hence remain as ANC president until 2017 while Motlanthe would step in as number one on the ANC’s national proportional representation list and hence become its candidate for the national presidency.

The Motlanthe camp insisted that they would not compromise with the Zumaists. It was possible though that this was part of their strategy to appear strong and ensure a favourable bargaining position. It also remained to be seen up to what point a campaigning Motlanthe would retain the option to enter the Zuma-led slate.

Leading into this mooted compromise were a range of divided provinces, regions and branches. Some ANC structures escalated their calls for the removal of Zuma and his associates. But they were faced with an incumbent almost insurmountably entrenched courtesy of majority support in powerful provinces, anchored in the structures of Luthuli House and a pro-Zuma Mangaung delegate slant.

Amid the frenzy of Mangaung positioning a greater question was being settled: Is this the time that will seal an ANC future of post-liberation muddling through? Or could the ANC’s Mangaung 2012 leadership election be the time to restore the ANC as a virtuous symbol of post-liberation commitment to walk the road to the hitherto deferred dream with the people?

In many ANC branches there was intense talk of the need for the old liberation generation – no longer on pedestals, but rather seen as clinging to the robe of liberation glory – to make space for a new cohort that wants to see the ANC as a modern post-liberation and post-corruption organisation. This tendency was aligning itself to the Motlanthe campaign. It is likely, however, that this new cohort is not yet strong enough to see itself into ANC power.

The cut-throat Polokwane-linked competition between Zuma and Thabo Mbeki had let the ANC populist genie out of the bottle. Given the collateral and enduring damage, many – and including those in the potential new ANC cohort – thought it would be appropriate to try to bring a compromise and negotiated top-leadership deal to the Mangaung table.

The rest of South Africa – the broader base of ANC supporters, South African voters and more – sat largely on the sidelines. They watched with incredulity the prohibition-on-campaigning phase, followed by pre-emptive ‘victory is ours’ strikes from the Zuma camp as official campaigning opened, and then mooted deals. This was the (s)election process that was about to deliver the next two presidents of the ANC and South Africa, for at least the next decade.

For many, the late-2012 question is whether the unfolding changes could constitute the beginning of action to stop the decline of an ANC that has been trading on its liberation movement dividend, and which since about 2004 has been shedding influence, esteem and power more than regenerating its own power. This is a process that I argue in detail in The ANC and the regeneration of political power (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 2011).

The ANC has recorded electoral decline during Zuma’s leadership, although this has been veiled by the movement’s belated rise in KwaZulu-Natal. The ANC never realised its dream to conquer the Western Cape province electorally (only briefly through its usurpation of the New National Party at the time of floor-crossing). It was sheltered, for the time being, in citizens’ predominant choice not to express their discontent with the ANC through votes. ANC supporters and members chose inventively, for example, to combine voting for the ANC with community protests and intense criticism of their ANC in the periods between elections, or to abstain rather than switch to an opposition party. The electoral dividends, however, were no longer being regenerated at replacement level. One of the greatest threats the ANC faced was a leadership that fiddled and cadres that fought factional battles while the base was burning … not fatally, and not falling apart yet, but raising questions about long-term organisational viability.

This book takes stock of the forces playing out in the continuously changing ANC at the point of the important ‘Mangaung moment’. The analysis recognises the contradictions of the ANC-people relationship. Despite contradictions and questions, South Africans largely continue to believe that the ANC is advancing and protecting their rights. The ANC that this book assesses, at the intersection of ‘Centenary’ and ‘Mangaung’, has displayed uncanny abilities to continuously reinvent itself. It staggers and encounters crises, yet then re-emerges as a changed but leading organisation. The Mangaung question is whether the Mangaung moment will bring a weakened ANC, or whether there could spring a renewed party or movement, determined to deliver better and cleaner: one that could be set to take South Africa into a durable longer-term future.

The ANC circa 2012, despite internal wars, was generally standing strong (Chapter 2). From the bottom-up perspective, enough had changed for a sufficiently large number of South Africans to enable the continuation of the ANC’s status as the most trusted political party, most likely to act in the bulk of the people’s interest. The likely longer-term organisational trap for the ANC, however, was that under Zuma’s leadership from 2007-12 the ANC had by all indications started trading on its reservoir of goodwill.[2]

In the run-up to the ANC’s national elective conference in Mangaung it is essential to unpack the ‘no-campaigning campaigns’ that were converting into seemingly massive advantages for the Zuma side (Chapter 3). They plunged the ANC into a whirlpool reminiscent of the Polokwane putsch of 2007 (Chapter 4). It was simultaneously a set of different organisational challenges and insistence on change (or tolerance for non-change) that unfolded. Core role players had learnt the Polokwane lessons (Chapter 5), which included organisational splits and fallout suffered in government. In working to prevent a repeat of the Polokwane thrill, however, they unleashed new sets of pressures. On one level the strains appeared set to enforce organisational stability. On another, the politics in the pressure cooker were changing the ANC as irreversibly as Polokwane’s open contest had done.

The 2012 Zuma campaign stood in the light of the chief incumbent at first pitching himself against the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) and especially its expelled former president Julius Malema. This endured at least until other opposition to Zuma consolidated from October onwards. The ANCYL’s blurred lines of political challenge and political and public finance ethics became entangled in the future ANC-South African president’s election (Chapter 5). The ANC’s mid-year 2012 policy conference in Midrand and the eventual September 2012 confirmation of the resolutions indicated the nature of the ANC at the time of Mangaung (Chapter 6). When the ANC ran out of options to guarantee a better life for more in the foreseeable future, its governing-party plans for additional and more concrete delivery and transformation shifted further into the future, and particularly became lodged in the real or make-believe public statements that a second-term Zuma would bring the realisation of the promises of the first term. The ‘Lula moment’ was the vessel to carry the factional belief that Zuma was the ‘good president’ who was just too busy during the first term to make good on his Polokwane promises.

Policy-replacement actions circa 2012 were ambiguous. Nationalisation of mines and other strategic operations or redistribution of land was twisted to become rhetorically promising, yet substantively in retention of much of the black economic empowerment (BEE) status quo. Nationalisation of the mines – in addition to the more conventional meanings – could very well entail that empowerment-operations-gone-wrong in the minerals industry had to be rescued, or that the state should own 51 percent, which would then be farmed out for management by an expanded class of patriotic capital.

The sub-theme of the second transition versus the second phase of the transition went beyond the 2012 policy conference to epitomise the mid-year phase in the Battle of Mangaung (Chapter 7). The policy conference’s ‘second transition’ first promised turnarounds to the national democratic society in the 30- to 50-year term. Later, the compromise ‘second phase of the transition’ posed 20 years as the realistic date. The final announcement of the resolutions was silent on the ‘delivery date’. The fact that this debate hinged on whether transformation was to be carried out in a ‘transition’ or a ‘phase’ in a transition illustrated the farce that the discourse of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) and its stages had become.[3]

The concluding Chapter 8 deals with the ANC’s Mangaung moment linking into the Centenary celebrations. Can the flickering Centenary flame rekindle the ANC that most South Africans do not believe has spluttered to its last, even if much is in the balance? Did the celebration of the lives of the organisation’s preceding presidents show up the shortcomings of recent incumbents more graphically than intended – to a point that it etched out the need for a profound change in ANC direction? The ANC’s centenary year nurtured memories of struggle and inserted the past into the present. South Africa was reminded that the struggle was not finished. The lingering question, perhaps being taken up by a generation of emerging leaders (will they show themselves at Mangaung?), was how to revert to delivering on struggle goals rather than massaging the whims of comrades in party and government that are driven by private privilege rather than public good.

The year 2012 was seminal for the ANC, for many more reasons than just being the Centenary filled with celebrations. It witnessed the ANC trying to take out insurance against shortfalls on expectations. The Zuma grouping encouraged nationalist mobilisation – both broadly to let the ANC’s centenary remind South Africans of the unjust racial past and how it continuously impacts government, and more reactively against acts of cultural insensitivity like artist Brett Murray’s depiction of the president in his painting The Spear. Things came to a much more serious point when Marikana’s labour revolts turned into a massacre by the South African police. This was paired with international rating agencies Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s downgrading South Africa’s credit rating – to some extent inappropriately, given the immediately pending Medium-term Budget Policy Statement that would put many of the uncertainties to bed – and the Economist singing the woes of Cry, the Beloved Country in a cover story. Well before, and foreshadowing, Marikana, community protests became more frequent and more violent. Unemployment remained just about intact (and in 2012 was shown to have grown) and growth prospects for the economy were adjusted downwards. All this was while the ship of state ploughed forth with well-fed commanders on board. Nkandlagate ahoy! The developments etched out the deficiencies of the post-liberation project and revealed the thin balance between life as we have known it from 1994-2012, and a future that was not anchored in belief in the ANC and its alliance partners.

1. The writing of The ANC’s Battle of Mangaung was finalised on 11 November 2012.

2. See Susan Booysen, 2011,The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power, Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press; Susan Booysen, 2012, ‘Regeneration of ANC political power, from the 1994 electoral victory to the 2012 centenary’, in Noor Nieftagodien, Arianna Lissoni & John Soske (Eds), One Hundred Years of the ANC, Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press.

3. David Moore, 2012, ‘Two perspectives on the national democratic revolution in Zimbabwe: Thabo Mbeki and Wilfred Mhanda’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 30, 4, pp. 119-138.

Tafelberg Short: The ANC's Battle of Mangaung

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