The ANC Gauteng conference last week elected Panyaza Lesufi as its provincial chairperson. Despite his weaknesses, he has some commendable attributes: his achievements, experience, and the way he led education in the province.
For what it’s worth, the ANC seems to have made a good choice.
But he’s coming in at a time when the ANC holds the majority in the Gauteng legislature by only a single seat. At the municipal level, all metros in the province are governed by coalitions.
When the ANC was at its strongest, it didn’t see the need to elect its best possible leadership, one that enjoyed overwhelming public confidence, and that would have accelerated its hegemony. Instead, it undermined the public and took its vote as automatic, regardless of the type of candidates it put forward.
It gave highly compromised leaders such as Jacob Zuma two terms at the helm despite clear evidence that his leadership was bleeding the ANC to death. At the last moment, when it faced its toughest election in 2019, it pulled a better candidate out of the ANC hat, but it was too late. The ANC had 57% of the vote at the time, then two years later it fell to below 50% in the 2021 local government elections.
Panyaza Lesufi is also coming in under similar circumstances in the most contested area in the country – Gauteng. In two years' time, he has to carry this limping giant to the most difficult and possibly its most existential election ever.
The weakening of the ANC as an institution though is not a recent phenomenon. The party has been in constant decline in the past 10 years – a problem that’s largely of its own doing.
Despite its post-1994 transformation of the public sector, and the inroads its policies have made in slightly changing the face of economic prosperity for pockets of women and black people, the overall feeling of the Gauteng electorate is that these changes are moving too slowly. They do not have the required footprint necessary to have a significant effect on the lives of workers and the poor majority.
In addition, the ANC’s service delivery deficits, and its election of poor leadership enveloped in allegations of unlawful behaviour, have accelerated its decline. In essence, it has not lived up to the expectations and hopes of ordinary people.
The ANC itself admits all these problems in its documents and reports.
Adding to this crisis is the "consequence management systems" that the ANC has put into place for wrongdoing: they have all proven to be weak and ineffective. As a result, the biggest problems facing the organisation have been institutionalised, not eliminated.
The 2017 national conference of the ANC crafted a "step-aside" resolution because of its expectation that its institutional inventory would allow corrupt leaders to be nominated and elected. The 2012 conference came up with the integrity commission for the same reason.
This is despite the fact that it already has regulations in place that guide the type of membership it should have, the kind of leadership it should elect, and those that it should avoid.
The "Through the Eye of the Needle" document stipulates how its branches should nominate and elect the most capable and relevant leadership to best serve society – yet it continues to ignore it. It also fails to screen for bad apples to prevent further reputational crisis.
The consequences of all these institutional challenges have delivered a weakened and compromised ANC that now heavily relies on its remaining individual leadership attributes to stay relevant.
Suddenly, the call for the election of young people, women, and those from business and academic backgrounds, who are trained in ANC structures, is gaining ground – at a time when power is so close to possibly being lost.
Maybe, just maybe, the ANC has to be in this position for it to take its renewal seriously. But the best available leadership being sourced now may be coming in too late.
• Mzileni is a research associate in the faculty of humanities at Nelson Mandela University.
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