Seven seconds is a long time in politics. The length of time it takes the EFF to flip-flop. Or the Patriotic Alliance to turn on a coalition partner; Helen Zille to tweet; the Guptas to appoint a cabinet minister; Jacob Zuma to launch a legal challenge; David Des van Rooyen to test the finance minister’s chair (or, almost).
It also, apparently, marks the line between adulation and humiliation.
The latest unseemly political spat pits the ANC Women’s League against the party’s KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) structure. If the video clip is anything to go by, it is farce personified: an umqhele-wearing Eben Etzebeth is flanked by KZN premier Nomusa Dube-Ncube and ANC provincial chair Siboniso Duma during the Springboks’ eThekwini victory tour. A disembodied voice announces that Dube-Ncube will now raise the Webb Ellis trophy with Etzebeth, but Duma sneaks in like a Faf in slippers and gets his hand on the cup handle first. As Etzebeth raises the trophy, Dube-Ncube tries valiantly to keep a hand on it but is forced, in defeat, to feign a wave as Duma and Etzebeth lift it beyond her reach.
Line-outs have nothing on this.
Enter Women’s League deputy secretary-general Dina Pule, fresh off the bench after her Christian Louboutin-induced exile. The whole affair, she said, was “blatant sexism” by Duma — another instance in which he “undermined the authority and leadership of the premier”.
While Dube-Ncube seemed to be quite sanguine about the whole affair, the provincial ANC went on the attack, with ANC KZN secretary Bheki Mtolo telling eNCA that the Women’s League is determined to “undermine” the ANC in the province, “destabilising structures”. All three had initially touched the trophy, he said, but the party had agreed Dube-Ncube was on the short side when it came to lifting it. Still, she did touch it — “for nearly seven seconds”.
Well, that ought to mollify the well-heeled Pule.
The descent into dissonance
In any event, as fast as you can say “holiday in Dubai”, the spat captured the wandering attention of ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, who opined to the media that it runs counter to a national executive committee (NEC) resolution that “public spats must stop” — it “gives an impression that the ANC is disorganised”. There’s a shocker.
He even wheeled out a new term: communication dissonance — the “inability, or unwillingness, to stay on message”; “the public ventilation of internal organisational or governmental disagreements”. Or that’s what Mbalula is said to have written in a six-page internal letter, reported by News24.
The real communicative dissonance is the distance between what the ANC says, and what the ANC does
It’s rich coming from a man who just a month back said of Thabo Mbeki: “You see, when someone ages, he becomes like a child and says what he wants, don’t fight with him.” This after the party stalwart and former president dared to criticise the ANC. And four months ago, he said of public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan: “Comrade Pravin, move faster or otherwise we will move you.” (In a yogic feat of spin that fooled no-one, the ANC later claimed Mbalula’s statement was a call to fast-track rail improvements, not a threat to remove Gordhan. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing.)
But enough of Mbalula’s hypocrisy. In the spirit of “democratic” centralism, Mbalula reportedly writes in his missive, ANC members are “encouraged” to express dissent within party structures. Talk out of turn, however, and face a lashing by the NEC.
Mao called; he wants his suit back.
Quite how the KZN maul has played out is largely inconsequential. If anything, it is a welcome reprieve from the daily grind of poverty, unemployment, crime and collapse. More interesting is what it says about the party itself. It points, at least in part, to a riven movement, with ongoing fissures around centres of power. After all, factionalism in the ANC didn’t begin with Zuma, radical economic transformation poster child Ace Magashule and periodically orphaned Carl Niehaus. And it certainly didn’t end there.
More importantly, though, by defying the NEC diktat with their petty sniping, the Women’s League and KZN provincial leadership have made crisp the ANC’s inability to bring its own organisational structures to heel — to keep tabs on its own internal affairs. Hence Mbalula’s need to wield a big stick.
It is, one assumes, an issue of concern for the secretary-general, given his remarks at Thursday’s Southern Africa Europe CEO Dialogue. Speaking with his usual bluster, he conceded that if the ANC were to lose the election, the party “will only be out of power because of itself”. More specifically, it would be the result of its failure to both “energise its support base” and fix how it “organises itself internally”.
The first is axiomatic. The second, well, organises may be pushing it. After all, the party can’t even organise an elective conference on time and without chaos ensuing. Consider, for example, that the high court declared the Ekurhuleni conference unlawful; the results of the KZN Women’s League conference were nullified; and 2023 was the first time in eight years that the Western Cape and Youth League actually held elective conferences.
Mbalula is right to be concerned. But he’s wrong to expend so much time on intraparty pettiness. The real communicative dissonance is the distance between what the ANC says, and what the ANC does. As South Africa knows all too well, that’s way longer than seven seconds.
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