The 2024 elections are a dark, ominous cloud hanging over the ANC.
The party’s desperation as it searches its intellectual vacuum for solutions was clear at its policy conference — it debated whether to use chemical castration on rapists and whether to declare youth unemployment a national crisis.
Then what? The ANC’s economic transformation head, Mmamoloko Kubayi, could not say. The details, she said bizarrely, will be left to the government.
The debate — or nondebate — on the step aside resolution was a clear signal that the renewal agenda continues to face hurdles. Many in the ANC see no reason to act against those who are arrested for crimes such as corruption, fraud, money-laundering and, in the case of Mpumalanga treasurer Mandla Msibi, double murder. That this was even up for debate shows that the ANC still has a long way to go before coming close to any semblance of “renewal” — large sections of the party still believe it can remain in power without cleaning up its act.
This is just not the case.
The ANC is in deep trouble electorally, more so than its ordinary members know and most of its leaders care to admit.
But at a meeting in the Northern Cape last week the party’s head of elections, Fikile Mbalula, was candid. He told members that if it were not for President Cyril Ramaphosa’s face on the party’s election campaign in 2021, it could have lost Mangaung municipality — one of the last remaining metros under ANC control.
“If Ramaphosa, we didn’t deploy him there, Mangaung would be gone, comrades,” he said.
Mbalula said that when former president Jacob Zuma was still in office, the “face” of the party had been its biggest weakness in campaigning.
“In the past the face was the problem, we had to explain the face before he got to the meeting and that was a problem. The face was eating from the campaign instead of adding value to the campaign,” he said.
We were facing political obliteration comrades, there would be nothing if I did not unleash that Ramaphosa
— Fikile Mbalula
Referring to the local government elections in 2021, he said: “We were facing political obliteration comrades, there would be nothing if I did not unleash that Ramaphosa, there would be nothing, fokol.”
His audience, rank and file ANC members, was shocked. While the party leadership seems to get it, it hasn’t filtered down.
Former president Kgalema Motlanthe, speaking to the FM on the sidelines of the policy conference, says organisational renewal has to be “preceded by acceptance first and foremost of the mistakes so that you address … the nub of the problem”.
And the nub of the problem, he says, is in the very structures that make up the ANC. “The way the branch structures were conceptualised, it was soon after the unbanning and the question is, are those really functioning optimally to provide ordinary members of the ANC the opportunity to participate in the political life of the ANC?”
Other party insiders agree the revamp has to start at grassroots level. They believe careful, calculated consideration must also be given at the elective conference in December to the naming of a new secretary-general — the person effectively in charge of the day-to-day running of the organisation and of its branches.
With Ace Magashule suspended, treasurer-general Paul Mashatile has been acting in his place. At the policy conference over the weekend, three names cropped up in discussions over who should take the post: Mbalula, outgoing Gauteng premier David Makhura or former party secretary in KwaZulu-Natal Mdumiseni Ntuli.
According to insiders in the CR22 campaign, Makhura is seen as “too academic”. What is needed, they say, is a “street fighter” like Mbalula — someone who would “get in the mud with the pigs”. There are also attempts to strengthen the office of the secretary-general with an additional deputy.
Over the years the ANC has repeatedly failed to rectify its organisational flaws, and it might now be running out of time to do so.
Motlanthe has previously told the BBC that the ANC appears to be deaf to the message that it is “veering off the rails” and needs to rebuild. “Perhaps the best way to remove those earplugs is if it loses elections.”
They say they have heard the message
— Kgalema Motlanthe
Asked at the policy conference if he thinks the party has woken up yet to the danger, Motlanthe is enigmatic: “They say they have heard the message.”
His lukewarm response is not surprising, given the way the party’s KZN and Limpopo chapters sought to scrap the step aside rule.
The elective conference at the end of the year will be a watershed moment for the ANC, particularly if it continues to run the government as it runs itself — without urgency, imagination or professionalism.
It will be its last chance at renewal — because if it loses power in 2024, it will no longer matter what course the party takes. Even if it retains power nationally, the ANC is on track to see Gauteng and KZN join the Western Cape as provinces run by the opposition.
Come 2024, Ramaphosa’s face will most certainly not be enough to stem the tide.
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