The ANC is not collapsing!

It would be naive and dishonest to accept the argument by Sentletse Diakanyo that the ANC has collapsed such that we should “welcome a new beginning”. Despite the pomp and demagogy that surrounds his thinking, his paper is premised on two main hugely empty arguments: (1) the ANC took a “fatal” decision by “firing” Thabo Mbeki; and (2) sealed its collapse when it took a “reactionary” decision to suspend Mosiuoa Lekota and Mluleki George.

With both these arguments, I beg to differ. Is this allowed on Thought Leader? I wonder, but I hope it is.

First and foremost, Sentletse’s argument is theoretically weak and factually misguided. (I use these terms guardedly in a well-meaning manner, for they may be misconstrued as labelling tactics or intellectual “purges”.)

Sentletse’s argument is factually misguided in two main areas. Firstly, the suggestion that there have been “great purges” is entirely untrue. When the ANC suspends its members pending disciplinary hearings, it has not purged them because it has not sat to assess their (mis)conduct, so nothing has been done to these people yet. We can’t then predict and call these “purges”. The non-election of ANC members in provincial congresses post-Polokwane is a matter of ANC members choosing leaders and not purging people.

Secondly, the argument that the ANC leadership must go ahead and “draft the epitaph of the ANC” is based on the thinking that the ANC will die when Lekota and his ilk leave. This thinking has not been substantiated by anything else hinting that the ANC shall only require a coffin and a sermon after the departure of the dancing Lekota and the ever-optimistic Mluleki George. This is only substantiated by nothing but the ink used to type that paper by its author.

I suspect that Sentletse has allowed his own wishes to take the place of reality and pose on its behalf. Elevating one’s wishes to objective reality can be nothing but the biggest error that a person can commit, for it leads to adventurous and failed missions that are a product of personal sentiment rather than reality checks.

Of course, I agree with Sentletse that the ANC cannot live forever, nor should we expect it to do so. Engels put it much clearer when he said “the only thing stable is instability itself”. However, it can be confidently stated that at present and in the near future, the ANC has not — certainly not yet — fallen. To read a “huge” collapse out of the Lekota split is a bit far-fetched.

Stepping back, if we are to use historical fact, the ANC was harder hit by the split of the PAC than it had ever been in its history. This was a split based on policy positions rather than one based on individual hatred and co-option of the Freedom Charter. The PAC was even more popular than the ANC for almost a decade after its inception, but that was not to last for long.

The ANC suffered innumerable defeats at the hands of the UDM in the Eastern Cape under the tutelage of Mandela himself, but by 2004 and 2006 it was as if the UDM had never existed, especially when it started losing even in the area where Holomisa himself was born.

So, will the ANC suffer at the hands of Lekota? Yes. But this must not be misconstrued as a collapse. The values for which the ANC actually stands are still relevant today. The co-option of these by Lekota shall not last; remember the Gang of Eight tried doing the same to Oliver Tambo, accusing him of losing the true ANC and being taken over by “communists”, but did that last? Check the history books!

The ANC’s moral high ground was on the rise from the late 1970s to the 1990s, but once again, the party was been infested by criminals (Bruno Mtolo), hooligans (who committed innumerable crimes such as rape and theft in places such as Angola, Mozambique and other the countries where the ANC was situated — Manto is one example) and bullies such as Pahad. They were there even before 1994, but the party has been able to shake off these elements as time went, though some are still there. Can the ANC survive problematic elements like some we have seen recently? It certainly will.

The one matter that I believe we should be dealing with here is why the ANC finds itself cracking. If we wish or even believe that the ANC would slide and collapse any time soon, we had better look somewhere else for collapses, because they are not coming from the ANC.

The issue that has sought to hang the ANC is the conflict of interest among its members as a result of the accumulation that has occurred since the ANC took state power, the Zuma-ites and Mbeki-ites among the beneficiaries.

Unfortunately the ANC has never systematically dealt with this issue. I believe the contestations between ANC members are not about the Freedom Charter, as Lekota would have us believe, or about revolutionary discipline, as others profess, but about who shall pull the strings or decide on the tender line, and kickbacks arising from government activity and those of parastatals or from BEE inclusion by private capital after government pressure. From top to bottom this seems to be the main issue.

But Rosa Luxembourg says: “Freedom only for supporters of the government, only for the members of one party — however numerous they may be — is no freedom at all.” Has membership of the ANC not been a guarantee for posh jobs in the recent years? To suggest otherwise would be to bury our heads in the mud!

This is one of the reasons why those who feel socially alienated from the new leadership and its stooges in lower structures have felt disempowered; for them the best way has been to look for alternatives, and a new party is certainly that.

This has nothing to do with the “blunder” by the ANC to fire Mbeki. After all, Zuma was fired and there was no split. Ordinary people might be fooled to believe this for the moment, but lies have short legs; they cannot cover enough ground when running and will soon be caught, and so will Lekota and others who claim to be militant, but whose militancy is only expressed in newspapers.

I must be careful not to write part three of my response to Lekota; it is still coming. This was just to Sentletse and I hope it is received well. I wanted to reach Sentletse through comments but I realised it was too long.