Sunday Independent.png
ANC must adapt to new realities
Jeremy Cronin, Sunday Independent, Johannesburg, 1 June 2014
In April 1995, around the date of our first post-apartheid anniversary,
Thabo Mbeki, then deputy president of both the country and the ANC, gave The
Star an exclusive interview. I suspect most South Africans have long since
forgotten what was, in fact, an intriguing exchange.
In the course of the interview, Mbeki was asked how long he thought the ANC,
SACP and Cosatu alliance would endure.
Mbeki didn't respond directly. Instead he went off on an interesting, if
unmandated, tangent. He said the ANC itself was a broad church composed of
liberals, nationalists and social democrats previously drawn together in a
common struggle against apartheid.
As South Africa's democracy "normalised" (I think that's the word he used),
the ANC itself would break up into its respective components. Pressed on a
time frame for such a break-up, Mbeki suggested five years or so.
Mbeki's 1995 interview came to mind when reading last Sunday's piece by
Mcebisi Ndletyana ("ANC stagnant in changing times").
Ndletyana argues the 2014 election outcome should not be a cause for ANC
complacency. He points to flashing electoral warning lights in three major
metros (Nelson Mandela, Tshwane and Joburg). I agree, completely. But what's
to be done?
Ndletyana doesn't offer much directly, beyond a platitudinous appeal for
"leaders to lead!"
But lead whom, and to where?
On what programmatic and organisational basis?
On these matters Ndletyana is silent, or rather indirect. His entry point
(in fact some two-thirds of his intervention) consists of admiring
references to Tony Blair's autobiography, A Journey. This is what brought
Mbeki's 1995 interview to mind.
It's no secret Mbeki admired Blair's "modernisation" of Britain's Labour
Party, and that he sought to emulate Blair's "third way" politics.
It was a politics best described as neoliberalism lite. Ndletyana summarises
well the context in which Blair single-mindedly, from the early 1980s,
sought to convert Labour into New Labour, a more centrist party, to win back
middle-ground voters.
Labour had last won office in 1974. The Blair initiative loosened the
party's ties to the trade unions, ravaged by years of Thatcherism, while
seeking to connect with the middle strata and please the financiers in
London.
The emphasis shifted from social solidarity to top-down technocratic
delivery to citizens-turned-consumers.
Two-thirds through his article, Ndletyana finally arrives in South Africa:
"The ANC of 2014 is no different to the 1980s Labour Party." Really? The
Labour Party had lost four successive general elections.
The ANC has just won its fifth election with an overwhelming, if marginally
reduced, majority.
The ANC's challenges stem not from the prolonged loss of office but from the
very opposite - from incumbency.
As South Africans we've now completed two decades of constitutional
democracy. It's something to celebrate.
But the social terrain on which we've been endeavouring to consolidate this
democratic achievement has not been, let's say, Sweden 1960 or the UK of the
80s. With persisting crisis levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality,
getting on to an ANC election list is often the one chance of escaping a
lifetime of grinding township poverty.
Giddy individual lifestyle change is possible. Conversely, a loss by your
faction can suddenly plunge you back into poverty. It's a high-stakes game
which quickly contaminates democratic politics.
What's to be done? The long-term solution is to radically address our social
crises. Curbing the perks of political office and, above all, being very
tough on corruption are also essential. But there are related organisational
issues.
The ANC still seeks to be - correctly, in my view - a movement, rather than
a narrow electoral, parliamentary party. In this respect the ANC is, at
least by aspiration, organisationally different from Blair's New Labour or
Zille's DA.
The ANC has a mass membership. It seeks to lead a wider alliance. Luthuli
House, rather than a parliamentary caucus or cabinet, is seen as the
strategic policy centre.
This movement character links to the Freedom Charter clause on "The People
Shall Govern".
That clause envisages a South Africa in which all have the right to vote,
but (often forgotten) it also calls for "democratic organs of
self-government".
The 1955 Charter understood democracy to be more than parliamentary
democracy. Although today the ANC has a movement form, does the active
reality live up to this self-characterisation?
Who remembers when last the ANC led a national campaign that wasn't an
election campaign?
Popular mobilisation (apart from elections) has come to be seen as
inherently oppositional to the incumbent administration, not as absolutely
essential to reinforce government's popular mandate in the face of powerful
interests opposed to transformation.
In the 50s the ANC built itself into a campaigning mass movement on the
basis of local organisation. Branch leadership was drawn from organic
community leaders - the local reverend, the football coach or someone like
Dora Tamana, organising creches and co-ops.
In today's villages and townships, community activists still exist.
Most, I suspect, are ANC supporters. But many are alienated from active
branch participation, displaced by the politics of politicians - the
competitive world of slates, lists and tenders.
The ANC's decision to delineate branches according to ward demarcations has
compounded the problem. In rural areas, wards typically span several
villages.
The ANC branch no longer connects with the sense of community. In large
urban townships, potential membership of a ward-based branch can run to
thousands.
Branch meetings are either mass rallies in which rank-and-file become voting
fodder, or (more typically) there's factional gate-keeping on access to
membership.
Perhaps branch demarcation could be scaled down to the voting district
level?
Without organisational change, worthy "Know Your Neighbourhood" campaigns
will continue to be largely electoral in intention - which households will
vote for us? - and not about identifying households in distress, for
instance, needing assistance.
Yes, as Ndletyana implies, the ANC must adapt to changing social realities,
including the important emergence of new middle strata. But these are not,
in their majority, white suburban nuclear families.
They're more typically a Third World middle strata - highly indebted,
supporting extended families, precariously floating above the sea of mass
poverty. We must organise and mobilise these strata - not so much as
individual entrepreneurs, but as collective protagonists, many with
professional skills, in solidarity with the great majority of waged and
unwaged poor. Their own futures depend upon it.
* Cronin is deputy minister of public works and deputy secretary general of
the SACP.
From:
http://www.iol.co.za/sundayindependent/anc-must-adapt-to-new-realities-1.169
6861#.U4rlL_mSyzA
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