SA: Time to reflect as ANC marks 96 years

Original Post Date: 2008-01-09 Time: 00:00:00  Posted By: Jan

[Well, all I can say is that the ANC is the worst thing that has happened to this country in the last century. Jan]

By Deon de Lange

The ANC is 96 years old. And while the party prepares to party this weekend, recently elected leader Jacob Zuma faces criminal charges of fraud, corruption, racketeering, money laundering and tax evasion – presenting the ANC with its biggest organisational crisis since it swept to power in 1994.

Zuma is scheduled to answer these charges in the Pietermaritzburg High Court on August 14 unless a “political solution” is imposed on the judiciary.

Whatever happens, these developments will see the ANC devoting its 97th year to the management of an entirely self-made crisis.

Since coming to power in 1994, the party has faced many challenges.

ANC election campaign literature and party spin doctoring has consistently and correctly identified poverty, joblessness, continued economic inequality, housing shortages, landlessness and HIV and Aids as some of the major “challenges” facing the country.

The ANC as a governing party has been broadly unified in its quest to address these problems – even when its members disagreed on the steps needed to effect meaningful change.

That was until delegates gathered in Polokwane in December to elect a new leadership collective.

Ominously reminiscent of some liberation struggles elsewhere on the continent, the post-apartheid ANC is showing signs of becoming yet another power cauldron where leaders and their followers turn on each other, diluting what was once a unified battle against poverty and underdevelopment, and instead engaging in a crude conflict of personalities.

Having played the man and not the ball at the conference in December, members of the ANC are set to spend the rest of the year noisily squabbling while the pleas of disaffected millions fall on ears that are otherwise engaged.

Questions can rightly be asked whether the ANC’s 96th year saw its character morph from an organisation that fought a morally just battle against the forces of injustice and inhumanity, to yet another political party fractured by the selfish interests of its leaders.

The ANC’s 96th year – 2007 – will be remembered as the year that both Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma put their own interests (and those of their narrow, self-defined constituencies) before the interests of the ANC and the country.

Risking the hyperbole her party is often accused of, DA leader Helen Zille on Monday issued a statement appealing to the ANC not to lead South Africa down the path of “cronyism, populism and ethnic mobilisation”.

She warned that the current political crisis in Kenya was a case in point of how quickly this could “destroy a country’s democratic prospects”.

Zille also appealed to the ANC to distance itself from those seeking to undermine the rule of law by questioning the courts’ ability to preside over a fair trial for Zuma – and called on the ANC to undertake to respect the outcome of the trial.

While the new ANC leadership continues with its first National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting on Tuesday, where a new 20-member National Working Committee (NWC) is to be decided, it would do well to take stock of recent events. It should perhaps consider carefully its history as the oldest political organisation on the continent.

It must decide which battles – those against the real enemies of its members, or those against perceived enemies within – will define the party’s struggle as it moves closer to an extraordinary milestone – 100 years – in 2012.