THAMSANQA D. MALINGA | SA's interests to be cast aside as ANC enters its silly season

Well, once again SA the silly season is upon us and it’s not the annual “festive season” characterised by the spending spree and countless family festivities as we take a break from the year-long toiling. This silly season is the one that come once every five years when the ANC holds its elective conferences that culminate with a national conference where new leadership is elected.

This is the period where about 4,000 members of the party come together and decide for the rest of us 50-million South Africans on who the next president of the Republic will be.

During this silly season of the ANC, I can tell you with certainty that service delivery will not be top of the list of the current deployees of this movement that is also governing the country, the majority of provinces and municipalities. What tops the agenda is about making it to the whichever list is put up. We have seen it with regional conferences as well as the provincial conferences that have recently taken place.

With the nomination process open for branches of the ANC, reasoning and patriotism will fly out and South Africans stand to find themselves in limbo and our country will be on autopilot – if not already on a nosedive with its engines switched off a la Eskom.

It is said that history has no blank pages, so let us for a moment digress and dig into historical data. With every year where we have the ANC conference, we have seen political battles play out and resources, largely state machinery, used in the tussle for this or that position.

Towards the watershed Polokwane conference, the former National Intelligence Agency (now State Security Agency) together with the now defunct Scorpions and Special Investigative Unit were the weapons of choice. It is during that conference when ANC members – some of them deployed public servants, shouted, “it’s our turn to eat,” and others declared unashamedly that  “I did not join the Struggle to be poor.”

Polokwane gave us one Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma. His ascension to the ANC top post and de facto the country’s number one citizen, was preceded by an act that was seen as a constitutional coup d'etat with the recall of former president Thabo Mbeki before the end of his term.

Zuma’s reign has its own record of malfeasance and the neglect of the Republic at the expense of benefiting his supporters and cronies as a means of reward for his elevation in  Polokwane.

Then came Nasrec in 2017 where Zuma in campaign for his cronies departed with a salvo of declaring that free education to all will be provided. He used state machinery to ingratiate himself and try to leave some form of “legacy” apart from the mess he was accused of creating.

His presidential term was characterised by state capture. Zuma too was recalled before seeing out his second and final term of office.

We are now headed to the 55th conference of the ANC and the same old tricks are applied with the abuse of state resources. If it’s not Arthur Fraser with his case against the incumbent president Cyril Ramaphosa by using “stolen” intelligence information (of which this is not the first time he’s done it), then it is the seemingly timed Eskom load-shedding. If not that, then it will be something else.

But it's high time SA, not the ANC, mattered most. The party has been so arrogant to a point of declaring that it will rule until Jesus comes back. Its leaders, public service deployees as well as electorate have constantly proven that the ANC matters more than the wellbeing of South Africa.

We saw that with the unremitting defence of Zuma. Now it is the delay into the investigation of the Phala Phala Farmgate.

The ANC branch members who will be “nominating” party members to stand in the conference, together with those who will endorse such nominations with a vote, do not have SA’s interest at heart.

We know that should Ramaphosa lose the ANC top post, we are likely to have episode three of the constitutional coup by January 2023. By no means am I saying the incumbent must be retained, neither I am saying the opposite. What South Africans must know is that in the next two to three months there will be no government, and the service delivery you get will be a form of campaign for Nasrec 2022.

Whatever the outcome of the ANC processes leading up to its conference, together with the results of that event, South Africans must know that it is time to stand and declare that the interests of this country and its citizens are far more important than those of the ANC and take the responsibility in 2024 to make sure that indeed SA comes first.

This country is ours and not an ANC (Pty) Ltd. The Republic of South Africa comes first, the ANC can go bust - if it must.

• Malinga is a director at Mkabayi Management Consultants, a political commentator and author