One of the most gruesome events in recent years cast a long shadow over the ANC’s policy conference, which started at Nasrec on Friday. Hours before, eight young women were raped and robbed by a group of men in Krugersdorp. The details were still unclear, yet the incident featured early in proceedings, in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s opening speech.
Not much later, the police arrested dozens of foreign nationals. While some were in possession of documents allowing them to be in SA legally, most weren’t. But it wasn’t immediately clear how — or if — they were linked to the crime. That didn’t stop the ruling party from using the horrific incident to defend a populist proposal to clamp down on immigration.
It seemed an eminently cynical, if predictable, response. The ANC is tying itself in knots as it seeks to arrest its electoral decline, veering between hand-wringing and downright populism in the proposals emerging from its policy conference over the weekend.
To crack down on immigration, it suggested scrapping some visa categories, including spousal and study visas, and withdrawing the country from the 1951 UN convention, the 1967 protocol on refugees and the 1969 Organisation of African Unity refugee convention. (The plan is to accede again with reservations and exceptions, as a number of other countries have done.)
It also floated the idea that communities should help SA’s overstretched police sniff out undocumented foreign nationals.
It’s an unapologetically populist tactic to shore up its waning voter numbers. As home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi said last week, tighter immigration regulation is “the international trend. Governments have been overthrown on this issue. We have to act.”
But it runs counter to the values of some delegates, who tell the FM they don’t recognise their own party in this proposal. And in any event, the ANC didn’t lose support because other parties were tough on immigration, one delegate adds. The party fell below 50% of the national vote for the first time in last year’s local government election because it failed to deliver services and policing.
Beyond the populism, the line on immigration would also seem to be at odds with the party’s international relations discussion document, which criticises the politicisation of immigration “by political formations seeking to grow their power in the run-up to the 2024 [general] elections”. Xenophobia that arises from such actions poses “a serious risk to internal stability and our Africa policy, which is [at] risk of being perceived as anti-African”, it adds.
While the document speaks of “managing the movement of people”, especially economic migrants, it doesn’t suggest restricting it.
By all accounts, discussions in the international relations committee reflected this policy document. Yet the Krugersdorp horror meant ANC international relations subcommittee head Lindiwe Zulu is talking tough.
Asked about the apparent disconnect between the domestic and international positions, she tells the FM that while the ANC believes in working towards “a unification of the African continent”, the party has to be “conscious of other issues that are related to security and crime”.
We are not isolating it and saying they are the only men who rape, but the fact is that that is the situation
— Lindiwe Zulu
The “people who were caught” for the crimes in Krugersdorp are a case in point, she says. “We are not isolating it and saying they are the only men who rape, but the fact is that that is the situation.”
This isn’t SA being xenophobic, she hastens to add. “But we are concerned about this kind of thing.”
It’s not only rape, Zulu says. “You have this thing here where there are no-go areas. You go to Hillbrow, Berea, you have no-go areas. That is not acceptable in any kind of community,” she says, adding that communities need to “take responsibility” for their areas.
While Zulu may see no contradiction between the ANC’s domestic and international policy proposals, others are more critical.
Philani Mthembu, executive director of the Institute for Global Dialogue, for example, believes the policy conference showed that the ANC needs to discuss its immigration proposals more thoroughly.
“The ANC wants to show it’s tough on undocumented migration, but I think it’s still an open question in terms of the language that is used, and the approach that is used,” he tells the FM. “I don’t think the ANC has yet found a coherent manner in which it engages the issue. This is certainly going to be one of the hot topics up for discussion in the run-up to [the party’s elective conference in] December, and in the run-up to [the general election in] 2024.”
International relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor, at least, is trying to find middle ground amid her party’s apparently contradictory ideas. She tells the FM that in developing any new immigration policy, the government should understand its commitment to the Bill of Rights and the constitution, as well as to the universal declaration of human rights.
At the same time, she agrees that some exclusions to the UN convention on refugees might be necessary. The government should have had some reservations when it acceded to the convention after taking power, she explains. “It was in the 1990s, a new government, and SA hadn’t really been an open country as we are now,” she says.
While she points out that the cabinet hasn’t agreed to any such policies yet, she does sound a note of caution. “It’s a very serious proposal with many implications, and we must watch that what is essentially an administrative and human capacity problem is not converted into something that is so weighty it causes us problems in the international law.”
The immigration clampdown wasn’t the only populist idea floated by the ANC over the weekend. Another was the chemical castration of rapists; there was also renewed talk of expropriation of land without compensation and of nationalisation of the Reserve Bank (see page 28 for more).
We must watch that what is essentially an administrative and human capacity problem is not converted into something that is so weighty it causes us problems in the international law
— Naledi Pandor
Underpinning it all was a pervasive sense of fear — and paranoia — around the 2024 poll.
Take water & sanitation deputy minister (and former state security minister) David Mahlobo, who, as ANC head of peace and stability, said: “There are people who are ideologically opposed to the ANC for the past 28 years and they want to use our own mistakes around the issues of governance and failure of delivery to say: ‘Take the ANC out of power.’”
Newly elected KwaZulu-Natal secretary Bheki Mtolo, in turn, blamed the party’s funding squeeze on “the old guard that [was] defeated in 1994”, and spies who had infiltrated the party.
Ramaphosa, at least, was more introspective. In his opening address he told delegates the ANC today “is at its weakest and most vulnerable since the advent of democracy” — something he attributed, in part, to internal divisions “driven by competition for positions, the contestations of structures, and the pursuit of access to public resources”.
If the party is to revive its electoral fortunes, it needs to “earn [its] role as leader of society”, he said.
For that, the ANC should turn its focus to governance, rather than appeasing the populists.
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