By Paul Hoffman
There are presumably more law-abiding citizens in the ANC than corrupt or soft-on-corruption individuals. The silent majority will have to assert itself if the ANC is to renew. The alternative is to perish.
Those with long memories will recall then President PW Botha admonishing the members of the white chamber of the tricameral parliament back in the 1980s to “adapt or die”.
The National Party, which he led before suffering a stroke and being replaced by FW de Klerk in 1989, is long dead. This fact is at least in part because of its tardiness and indeed failure to adapt adequately and timeously. Perhaps there is a lesson for the ANC in this history of a formerly dominant party in SA politics.
The exhortation back in the 80s had an echo of sorts during the ANC January 8th celebrations of 2025 when its leadership called upon the ANC to “renew or perish” at its 113th anniversary celebrations in Cape Town.
Talk of renewal among the ANC leadership has been around since at least 2000. The talk has continued, but renewal has not yet become an action item. Talk (at least in public) of perishing, on the other hand, is new. The shock of only attracting 16% of the votes of the eligible voters, a large proportion of whom did not turn up at the polling stations last year, no doubt jolted the leadership into facing the prospect of the party perishing if renewal is not acted on and soon. While the 16% vote did secure 40% of the seats in the National Assembly, there is no guarantee that the voters who stayed away in 2024 will do the same again in future elections to be held at local level next year, and at the national and provincial levels in 2029, assuming the so-called GNU lasts that long.
That there is a need to renew is unquestionable. Jakkie Cilliers takes a professional interest in the future of Africa. His diagnosis in his latest ISS African Futures blog is instructive:
“Weak governance and poorly implemented policies hinder Africa’s ability to address its challenges effectively. Corruption and inefficient institutions further erode public trust and limit the impact of development initiatives, reflected in the findings from Afrobarometer, among others. Without determined action to unlock more rapid economic growth, the continent risks entrenching existing disparities and missing opportunities for transformative change.”
Weak governance in SA is evident from electricity outages, interruptions in water supply, failure to maintain infrastructure, unspent budget allocations and cadre deployment, including unsuitable appointments of staff in the public administration and SOEs.
The reports of various commissions of inquiry such as the Zondo, Mpati and Nugent commissions reveal rampant grand corruption and ample evidence of the capture of the state by those hellbent on repurposing it to their own selfish, greedy and unlawful ends.
Apart from the obvious impact of corruption on the weakness of governance in SA, the underlying revolutionary intent that informs the activities of those in ANC-led governance structures (whether in politics or administration) is also to blame for the dire straits that now drive the ANC to consider the need to avoid the prospect of perishing.
National Democratic Revolution
It is the tenets of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) that inform the activities of the deployed cadres of the ANC and its allies in the SACP and Cosatu. This revolution has been pursued without progressing by the ANC when it was the dominant political party in SA for all of 30 years. How it expects to succeed with the aims of the revolution when it is no longer dominant is hard to divine.
Basically, the NDR’s plan is to secure hegemonic control of all levers of power in society in order to create the communist nirvana that it envisages.
That plan is seriously at odds with the tenets of the Constitution, our supreme law. Notions of the rule of law and the separation of powers do not mesh well with the NDR. Checks and balances on the exercise of power do not sit well with the desire for hegemony.
A great deal of constitutional litigation is lost by the state because of the clashes in values between that which the NDR aims to achieve and that which the Constitution requires. Laws and conduct that are inconsistent with the Constitution are invalid and can, on application, be struck down as invalid by the courts. The unpopularity of the judiciary in some quarters is accounted for by the setbacks NDR’s aims suffer when they are litigated in our impartial and independent courts.
Whether the ANC is ready to consider abandoning the NDR at this stage, as a means of avoiding its demise, remains to be seen. The late Professor Kader Asmal, on whose kitchen table in Dublin an early draft of the Bill of Rights (now Chapter Two of the Constitution) was prepared, did exhort the ANC to abandon the NDR, but his plea went unheeded in 2010 and earlier.
The proposed National Dialogue might be a good occasion for discussion on whether the NDR and our constitutional order are compatible. The GNU is based on the rule of law and adherence to constitutional principles. The ANC’s invitation to form the GNU was initially seen as a move away from the NDR as it was not included or even mentioned in the invitation to form the GNU. As it happened, the GNU was formed by parties other than the ANC which do not embrace NDR values and was rejected by those parties whose policies, at least in part, align with the NDR, namely the new MK Party and the EFF.
However, having set up the GNU, the ANC now insists that this step was no more than a tactical move on its part as part of the NDR! Whether the other members of the GNU would have been willing to join it as loyal cadres of the NDR is open to considerable doubt.
Bait and switch
It seems that the political parties which joined the GNU have been subjected to what the Americans call “bait and switch” tactics on the part of the ANC: the invitation it extended talks only of the rule of law and fealty to the Constitution.
The reality, as recently revealed, is the pursuit of more NDR-based strategy and tactics, at least by the ANC, as part of the GNU. Exploiting political opponents to retain the presidency and speaker positions is unlikely to build the trust needed to succeed in politics.
The non-ANC members of the GNU have not sworn allegiance to the NDR nor were they asked to when they were invited to join the GNU. On the contrary, they swore allegiance to the Constitution.
The notion that the ANC governs by sleight of hand, praising the Constitution it championed on the one hand but pursuing the NDR on the other, is not new. FW de Klerk complained that the now-extinct Nats did not sign up for the NDR.
It is a big ask to expect the ANC to abandon the NDR. The SACP and Cosatu, whether or not their alliance with the ANC survives the renewal of the ANC, are even more unlikely to abandon the NDR. Grizzled veterans of ANC politics regard the NDR as an article of faith and would view its abandonment as apostasy.
Many in the ANC would rather it perish than that they favour abandoning the NDR. There are, however, cooler heads in the ANC who are prepared to move with the times, adapt to the exigencies presented by the electorate and modernise in order to secure political survival.
The other main plank in the renewal of the ANC is for it to shed its image of being either corrupt or soft on those in its ranks (and among its friends) who have stooped to corrupt activities.
Renewal and corruption are incompatible. The talk of ethics and integrity training for ANC members is all well and good. However, until the ANC gets behind the necessary reforms of the criminal justice system to render it constitutionally compliant and able to deal with corruption in the manner envisaged in binding terms by the Constitutional Court in the Glenister litigation, the prospects of successful renewal are dim.
There are presumably more law-abiding citizens in the ANC than corrupt or soft-on-corruption individuals. The silent majority will have to assert itself if the ANC is to renew. The alternative is to perish.
It seems 2025 is the year in which the ANC will have to actually make the choice between its renewal or its demise. The manner in which it votes on the Bills introduced in Parliament to render anti-corruption work constitutionally compliant will indicate the direction in which the ANC is headed. DM
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