Tafelberg Short: The ANC's Battle of Mangaung. Susan Booysen

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      The ANC’s Battle of Mangaung

      Susan Booysen

      Tafelberg

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

      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.