By Professor Sethulego Matebesi
The recent visit of former president Thabo Mbeki to the ANC in Free State has led to more questions than answers. Most revealing in that respect is that the issues of concern have been raised publicly by members of the ANC.
To better understand the displeasure of some members of the ANC about Mbeki’s visit to Free State, it is crucial to understand the origin – admittedly, this is only part of it – of the current internal strife of the ANC.
It is a sad and well-known fact that Jacob Zuma’s defeat of Thabo Mbeki’s bid to serve a third term as the president of the ANC at the party’s 52nd national conference in Polokwane in December 2007 tore the party apart. This state of affairs within the ANC provoked several scholarly studies, with some viewing Zuma’s ascendancy to power as an expression of democracy. In contrast, others saw it as a danger to constitutionalism.
Since then, intra-party power struggles of the ANC have become so complicated that they threaten the consolidation of democracy. As a result, there have been several approaches to engage and promote an agenda towards re-engineering the party in the same vein. The latest such approach is the renewal process of the party.
Contestation over the choice of champions – subtle and disguised factionalism.
Fostering trust and confidence among rank-and-file members by an organisation with a large national footprint like the ANC is not an easy feat. The recent visit of Mbeki to the Free State brought to the fore many obscure yet profound obstacles for the renewal process.
The first is the historical context of the public spats and audio leaks. Drawing a parallel between the ANC before and after 1994, there is a sense that intra-party cleavages existed. However, robust internal debates were embraced. In short, the centre was holding.
Over the past two decades - as in the case of Bolivia, Brazil and France - we have seen several popular and revered ANC leaders being investigated, prosecuted and even jailed. These judicial proceedings have been perceived as political prosecutions.
Be that as it may, one direct and more general implication of such a situation is that the leaders facing charges and their supporters will have different views of how the ANC should be managed. Indeed, the degree of goal incompatibilities significantly affected the resolutions reached, if any. Inevitably, the hostile intentions from the different factions inhibit or promote agreements and certain types of resolutions as long as it supports a particular narrative.
The second obstacle has been the failure of the ANC to deal with ill-discipline within its ranks. There are multiple explanations for the cavities of discipline in the organisation.
For starters, it is surprising that the ANC – more than a century after its birth – took a decision at its 2017 Nasrec policy conference that those charged with corruption must voluntarily step aside, and those alleged reported and accused of corruption face the integrity committee.
Interestingly, four years later, this conference resolution led to the suspension of some ANC leaders, including the secretary-general of the ANC, Ace Magashule, on May 5, 2021. The suspension of Magashule has been highly divisive for the party, more so since many see him as an ideal person to take over from President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Another formidable obstacle is the question of the most relevant cadre to champion the renewal process, as the process requires warring factions to be ready and willing to make peace.
The Free State ANC may have demonstrated a bold stroke in fostering unity and trust. Needless to say, this unmistakable gesture of benign intent by the Free State interim provincial committee has been met with suspicion by some who called it a subtle and disguised form of factionalism.
In this regard, questions were raised about why the former president of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, and other veterans are not used to advance the renewal project. As a result, unity remains elusive for the party.
Political gatekeeping and the overhaul or audit of membership
During his briefing of the ANC in the Free State, Mbeki called for the membership of all card-carrying participants of the celebration to be audited. Meanwhile, ANC Free State provincial committee convener Mxolisi Dukwana called for the complete overhaul of the party’s membership.
I reckon these are sound suggestions amid the crisis on internal strife. However, I leave it to the readers to decide whether the issue of gatekeeping will not rear its head and derail this process. I have the impression that, after many years of attempting to deal with the challenge of factionalism, the actual difficulty for the ANC lies in recognising the nature of the problem, not in finding neutral members who can champion its purported renewal process.
* Matebesi is associate professor and head of the Department of Sociology at the University of the Free State.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL and Independent Media.