Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - Turn on the radio or scroll down your phone, and the big headlines belong to the ANC’s 55th elective conference and the leadership contest that has returned the Cyril Ramaphosa slate to power.
But when this latest version of the political circus drops off the front pages, another story is set to take its place.
This one will hang around for most of the period leading to the 2024 national and provincial elections, specifying the terms of public office horse trading from the top in the Union Buildings down to the bottom at the municipal level, and possibly once more deciding Ramaphosa’s future as the country’s president.
Under South Africa’s political system, Ramaphosa will lead the ANC into the general elections in 2024.
Although we can predict that the party will lose its long-standing majority, he is still likely to remain president in any coalition government.
Watching the ANC continue to self-destruct after Ramaphosa’s take-over in 2017 has been akin to seeing your racist neighbour’s house flood with sewage. It is delightful schadenfreude, the pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune – until you realise that the stink is heading straight for you.
One positive thing about the leadership contest results is that the incoming leadership will get another chance to implement the unfulfilled conference resolutions catalogued in Ramaphosa’s political report.
There is hope that Ramaphosa will now become a resolute leader who is not in office to reward those who supported his return.
I would ask how much damage his distractors can do after they get out of that conference hall; unless he neutralises the wounded individuals soon, this group will see that less as a question and more as an active challenge. There is much to deduce from the scenes outside the meeting hall, where Ramaphosa’s opponents sang: “Out, Ramaphosa, out!”
Inside, when Ramaphosa took the stage, rival factions sang songs and his opponents refused to stop singing for several minutes, despite him asking them to quiet down.
Party leadership slates are a drug for ANC faction leaders. Once more, it has enhanced their performance against internal rivals, and has shown how much they like to indulge socially.
But dependency is a path to ruin. The introduction of leadership slates started a pattern of problematic use across party structures.
A principle position such as the step-aside policy to weed out corrupt politicians from the party’s ranks was potent until a dogmatic adherence to leadership slates neutralised it.
Ramaphosa thought he could handle it, but got hooked. He was hardly a high-functioning addict, but he could at least discern some political realities through the fog of intoxicating dogma.
It is a pity the Phala Phala farm saga cropped up because he could have been more of a protagonist in deciding who not to include in the slate that returned him to office for a second term.
Ramaphosa’s second term, as marked by the composition of the compromised new leadership, could signal the ANC’s descent into the chronic phase, where the craving for a hit overcomes all faculties of reason.
The president must still answer a string of questions about Phala Phala that have been posed by law enforcement agencies. His chairperson and Cabinet minister Gwede Mantashe is implicated in the state capture report, and must still face sanction.
His secretary-general and also a Cabinet minister, Fikile Mbalula, tops the list of those who have already blown their stash of credibility on a binge of unfulfilled conference resolutions and poor performance in their respective ministries. Then the debt collectors came – literally, in the form of soaring booing voices from the conference delegates, even as these individuals ascended the stage after being announced by the electoral commission.
The political and organisational reports reflected a disappointing performance under Ramaphosa’s first term in office.
Like junkies caught shoplifting to feed their habit, the authors of the political fiasco in the party and the ANC-led government have exposed how they go through the motions of contrition while trying to deflect blame for their failures.
Ramaphosa’s speech was similar to those he regularly uses to address the nation, reviewing the many challenges and few successes of his first term.
It sounded as if it was hastily rewritten to accommodate the events of a quashed impeachment process in Parliament. It was delivered way past the scheduled time with the fidgety distraction of a man waiting for his dealer.
He told delegates that South Africans “expect us to have the courage and honesty to recognise our failures and to correct them”, referring to “the triple challenge of poverty, unemployment and inequality”. But “green shoots are beginning to sprout”, he added. “I am convinced that better days are ahead.”
But how will the ANC get the money and political will to revive the stagnant sectors of the economy that promise to produce labour-intensive jobs?
His repeated promises to improve Eskom’s existing power plants’ performance and undertake critical maintenance do not plug the lost revenue gap created by all the frequent electricity supply disruptions.
Nor do they bring down the unemployment figures, which have risen in most municipalities because investors are not sold on the efficacy of the government’s snake-oil growth tonic.
ANC members with a clear-headed grasp of reality worry about the side effects of driving vulnerable people deeper into penury because of party incompetence.
They fret about the continuing rise in popularity of individuals whose known inefficiencies and corrupt practices cannot inspire confidence in the party.
These members are not just resigned to defeat at the next election, and deterioration of party membership, but see these as a necessary corrective.
Having failed to avert the party’s slide to the bottom of leadership slate addiction, the party needs the voters to scare it straight.
Resilient party members not beholden to slates can force this newly elected leadership to sober up one policy at a time, but the dominant faction will not renounce the creed that carried Ramaphosa to power in his second term.
For that, it would take an electoral intervention – and a long stint of detox in a coalition government.
The truth is, of course, that conference delegates supported the Ramaphosa slate not because they did not realise what he would do or still not do in the next five years in office, but because they did.
It suited them to get the person they trust to continue with the current state of affairs that is financially benefiting them by churning out state contracts for their own class and chums in the Union Buildings, and they cared nothing for the consequences of inaction in other significant areas meant to create a better life for all South Africans. They will continue that way until they are found out by voters in the next elections.
If recent polling is to be believed, “severe consequences” for the ANC may finally be on the way, specifically in the form of a ballot count at 3am in a cold school hall in the same way the counting of votes for this leadership continued in the conference until the early hours of the morning.
If the ANC does not change its habit of treating the people of South Africa as its access to personal wealth, we will soon be saying the continuing loss of electoral support could not happen to a more deserving group.
The question, though, is just how much more harm it can inflict on the country in the meantime. That is not a challenge – more an omen.
Nyembezi is a policy analyst and human rights activist
Cape Times
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.