The ANC has again mastered the art of talking left and walking right.
When the outcomes of the December 2007 Polokwane conference resulted in the removal of former president Thabo Mbeki, the ANC returned five years later at its 2012 conference to admit that it made a bad judgment. It resolved that its conferences would not affect governance. It would try to ensure that there was stability in government.
It said its leaders would complete their terms of office and would only be removed for poor performance or misconduct. It reassured the public that there would be a visible distance between the party and the state.
This sweet talk never happened.
Between 2007 and 2018, we saw every ANC conference deciding who leads government and who controls state budgets and tenders – not SA citizens. Regional conferences decided who became mayor. Provincial conferences decided who became premier and MEC. The national conferences decided who became president and minister.
Jacob Zuma won Polokwane in 2007 and became president in 2009. Cyril Ramaphosa won Nasrec in 2017 and became president in 2018. At provincial and regional level, it’s the same pattern and it’s messier at that level. The end product of the shifting of chairs has been a decline of the ANC at the polls. The economy and quality of service delivery have been consistently disappointing since.
As a result, voters began to realise the game is no longer about them. It’s about leaders rearranging the queue for themselves to accumulate power and state resources. Voters punished the ANC at the polls and they still do.
For the ANC, factionalism became an entrenched commodity in the party, which is used to predetermined conference outcomes to appoint government officials who will plunder taxpayers’ hard-earned resources.
In all these examples over the past 15 years, the ANC hasn't changed for the better. It repeats the same mistakes. It still treats the party and the government as the same thing. What happens in the party must also happen in the government. The will of the people is secondary.
It is based on these reasons that citizens and civil society have mobilised all the way up to the Constitutional Court to ask for all elections to be contested by individuals as well. They feel parties take away their power to decide what must happen in their country.
Citizens feel powerless and stripped of their right to choose a government when 500 delegates in a conference have more power than them to decide who becomes mayor, premier and president.
ANC members themselves don’t like this arrangement either. They have been pushing the ANC to consider a different method of electing leaders where each of its 1m members will get to vote in a secret ballot in their ward instead of a few conference delegates.
These developments show that a large body of our citizenship is unhappy with how the party and the state have been converted into a single entity that disempowers all of us from running our own country.
Clearly, the ANC has failed to separate itself from government. As a result, the party comes before the country. Delegates and leaders go out of their way to manipulate and fight till the end in ANC conferences because they know that’s their best route to become government officials and control state resources.
Nobody cares about people and the quality of services they should receive.
The KwaZulu-Natal government is the latest victim of this scenario. It is not the floods or Covid-19 or the July 2021 unrest that decided the changes in the provincial cabinet. It was the ANC KZN conference won by Siboniso Duma that resulted in these changes – rewarding him with the post of economic development MEC.
The December conference will also decide the changes in national government on our behalf.
The ANC has distanced itself from the people and their constitutional democracy, and the people therefore must not miss the opportunity in 2024 to remind the ANC who is actually in power when a country is a democracy.
• Dr Mzileni is a research associate in the faculty of humanities at Nelson Mandela University
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