JUSTICE MALALA: Rudderless ANC heading for the rocks

Two events last week illustrate that the ANC will go down in flames on November 4.

In the run-up to the May 1 holiday weekend, a fast-growing and noisy anti-immigrant grouping known as “March and March” staged a protest march to the Gauteng provincial legislature over alleged crimes involving undocumented foreigners. The group chanted “Abahambe!” (the anti-immigrant slogan coined by sports minister Gayton McKenzie, meaning “They must go!”) and menaced shopkeepers to shut down businesses in the city centre while wielding “traditional weapons” like those carried by the IFP in its violent 1990s marches.

Participants also included the Operation Dudula group (notorious for kicking sick “foreigners” out of clinics), ActionSA, the IFP and Jacob Zuma’s MK Party.

Over the next four days, impromptu marches were held in Durban, KuGompo (formerly East London), and elsewhere in the country. Images of people being beaten with fists, knobkieries and sjamboks proliferate on social media.

Throughout the marches and violence last week there was a huge vacuum of leadership. The ANC, which styles itself as “the leader of society”, was absent as a player, a commentator, or even an active observer of these events. There was a huge hole at the heart of an urgent and developing crisis in South Africa, and the ANC’s leaders, members, or even its perspective, were silent and AWOL.

It was Julius Malema, the leader of the EFF, who gave a fiery speech in which he declared that he did not stand for the violent acts of these groupings.

“Pushing out of school an African child that looks like you, I will never do that. You can take your votes. Let me die with my conscience very clear,” he said.

President Cyril Ramaphosa made a half-hearted plea for peace during his Freedom Day speech. Other than that, little or nothing from the “leader of society”.

The ANC’s absence on even proffering ideas and solutions on illegal immigration mimics its absence on numerous other fronts. The leader of its women’s league, Sisisi Tolashe, is mired in corruption scandals yet Ramaphosa does nothing. Even ANC members are shaking their heads in shame after Tolashe allegedly commandeered half of her government-paid domestic worker’s salary for her daughter and gave cars donated to the women’s league to her children ... the scandals keep piling up.

There is a big empty hole where the ANC should be. The organisation has walked away from the hard work of being society’s intellectual and practical leader. Where this vacuum of leadership has opened, others will move in and profit on November 4.

The second event that predicts the ANC’s defeat in November is the continued exchange of threats and private insults between the ANC and the SACP, now a relative nonentity in South African politics. After years of toying with the idea, the SACP has decided to contest the local government elections independently.

The SACP’s contribution to the ANC’s electoral successes since 1994 is debatable. It has never been a “mass party”, instead choosing to make up the intellectual and ideological base of the ANC at all levels. It saw itself as the ANC’s brain. In November 2017, it contested the Metsimaholo municipality by-elections and won three seats in the 42-seat council. In the period since it started seriously contesting the ANC last year, it has failed to get more than 5% in the seven wards it has contested. The party’s one dubious “success” was garnering 12% in a ward in the Eastern Cape two months ago.

So, no electoral threat there, you may think. But the SACP’s departure will hurt the ANC because it is yet another example of the fact that it is possible to leave the ANC’s sinking ship. In the period between 1994 and 2009, people like Zuma could confidently tell those contemplating leaving the Hulk Hogan that was the ANC that “it’s cold outside” the party.

Yet COPE, the EFF, MK and now the SACP have shown it can be done. That is a huge vulnerability for the ANC. The floodgates are being forced open. At some point, it will not be a trickle of members leaving. It will be a flood.

That flood of departures, for the ANC, begins on November 4. It will usher in an unprecedented period of messy, sometimes unscrupulous, coalitions in straitened municipalities across the nation.