Creating a sustainable Luthuli House will not be easy, but to succeed, treasurer-general Paul Mashatile will have to go further than simply ensuring the ANC’s financial security — he will have to modernise the behemoth and finally transform it from a liberation movement into a modern political organisation. In recent weeks, the Sunday Times has revealed the extent of the financial morass the party finds itself in, from its hefty tax fine to a failure to pay pension and provident fund contributions and a bloated workforce populated by ghost employees. The ANC, by all accounts, appears to have been run pretty much like the state — in a chaotic, unprofessional and unsustainable way.
This is unsurprising, given former treasurer-general Zweli Mkhize’s financial report to the party’s 2017 Nasrec conference, which showed back then that the ANC was already technically insolvent. When Mashatile took over from Mkhize, he found the party in debt of R215m, with a deficit of R47m in that financial year. That report also showed that the ANC was in debt, despite a record-breaking five years in which it collected about R2.6bn, mainly from private donations, with fundraising amounting to R1.69bn.
Now the retrenchment of up to half of the staff on its books is on the cards, as well as a long process to make the organisation financially sustainable in the face of new legislation which has rattled donors, a gloomy economic outlook constraining potential funding and the loss of electoral support implying a reduced allocation from the Electoral Commission of SA and fewer public representatives to extract levies from. It’s an all-round grim situation for the party known for birthday bashes complete with packed stadiums, hundreds of bused-in cadres, champagne, cake and bikers. The rally as we know it seems a thing of the past in the short to medium term, not least because of the pandemic. With an election looming, the ANC is in a precarious situation. While much of this can be attributed to the fact that the party’s day-to-day affairs are run by the secretary-general, an elected politician often with little experience of running a large, complex organisation and often deferring to an office manager, there is a historical element to the mess. Insiders say the ANC’s headcount problem is "typical revolutionary politics" — where comrades are hired simply because they cannot do anything else — combined with its history in exile. During exile, the ANC was the only source of income for many cadres. Back then, party leaders would mobilise resources from donors across the world to fund its members in camps and offices in various countries.
In fact, it is understood that there is an ongoing process to trace properties owned by the ANC in various countries including Tanzania and the UK. While the party resolved at its Mangaung conference that "progressive modern management should be introduced in the running of the ANC", the situation simply continued to deteriorate, culminating in this week’s protest action by its employees.
But the crisis may yet present an opportunity for the party to transform itself, particularly if Mashatile follows through with his public utterances that there will be "no holy cows" as the ANC seeks to trim its staff numbers and streamline its operations.
However, he is likely to face resistance as he seeks to ensure that the party is no longer an employment agency for comrades. There are some on its payroll who have not been in the office in years, and others who don’t perform any particular function. What is worse is that the situation at Luthuli House is mirrored at provincial and regional level.
Fixing the situation at Luthuli House then is key to getting the party functioning optimally, which, in truth, it has never really done.
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