While we – those of us who have been writing about politics since the late 1980s – have been waiting for a momentous and dramatic split for more than three decades, the ANC has, instead, shattered ngonyawo lonwabu.
This shattering may not be over. We may, in a few years from now, be left with a grand old liberation movement that is a shadow of its former self and a return to power of those who broke off/away from the ANC since the government of Thabo Mbeki.
Let’s go back further.
There was speculation for the first decade or so after that fateful day of 2 February 1990, about the SACP and Cosatu splitting from the ANC. We believed that the communists could try to make it on their own and that the trade union federation would be out of place as part of the government.
We were wrong. During the Mbeki presidency this speculation petered out; the Tripartite Alliance consolidated its base and the country was placed on a solid footing for (future) political economic stability and expansion. Nobody saw the significance of Jacob Zuma’s fall in 2005, his vengeful rebirth in 2009, his departure from the presidency in 2018, and his (once again vengeful, Frankensteinian) return with uMkhonto Wesizwe party (MK) in May’s election.
In hindsight, those four years between him losing his job as deputy president and his return to the presidency in 2009 may have been the catalyst for the changes in the ANC that would follow over the next 15 years or so. Zuma rattled the golden cage of the ANC in 2005, uncovered its expanding middle-class orientation, went back home and returned re-energised in 2009 – and then started shaking the republicans, liberals, constitutionalists and secularists out of the system.
Flaws and misdeeds
He would come to represent all the flaws and misdeeds of the ANC. Something else was happening contiguously.
Centripetal forces pushed power to the centre, now occupied by Zuma. Centrifugal forces gave birth to the Congress of the People, which saw Mosiuoa Lekota, Mbhazima Shilowa and colleagues split from the ANC.
A short five years later, Julius Malema, Floyd Shivambu and their colleagues split from the ANC to form the Economic Freedom Fighters in 2013.
In another decade or so, Jacob Zuma and his family split from the ANC and created the MK party in 2023.
In between these dates there have been fragments that fell from the ANC, and that tried, with very little success, to create new parties that, when we look back at their movements, seem more like the skid marks of our politics of the bowels.
Most notable among these were Ace Magashule, who created the African Congress for Transformation (also in 2023), and stains like Jimmy Manyi, Hlaudi Motsoeneng and Karl Niehaus, each one of whom was happily once in the liberation movement. By last May’s election, the MK party had attracted old ANC loyalists into a loose affiliation. This affiliation would be tightened up with expulsions, and the withdrawal of legislators from Parliament.
Then the EFF lost its deputy leader to the MK party.
Floyd Shivambu’s dextrocardia may turn out to be the defining moment of the ANC’s shattering. There is every possibility that he will, effectively, lead a migration of people from the EFF to MK. Shivambu may be setting a trend that leads to people like Andile Mngxitama ingratiating themselves with those who cling to life.
The ANC, too, is filled with people whose hearts belong to uBaba, people vain enough to pretend loyalty to Zuma, but are really in it for the money. Players like Andile Lungisa for instance, would be a perfect candidate for switching play, but he will probably follow the money.
If we have learned anything from this shattering in slow motion it is that we simply don’t know what we’re talking about (my hand is raised first); that democratic politics can shake things up in ways that Abraham’s children would describe as “mysterious”; that the ANC was not too big to fail, and that once sources of rent-seeking are shut off in one place they can be turned back on elsewhere.
His heart belongs to daddy
Put differently, the ANC may have weeded out the criminal and incompetent (Zuma, Brian Molefe, Lucky Montana, Magashule, Niehaus etc), but there are other teats to suckle from. Tony Yengeni may have made a play for the caddy, but his heart belongs to daddy…
It would be easy to imagine that Zuma and Shivambu have the best interests of “the people” in mind. It is easier, however, to see them as disaffected with the ANC because ready access to power, privilege and pecuniary gain have all been shut down. They want to return to the front teat.
It is not difficult then to imagine a country, say five years from now, where all the old skollies expelled from the state-party nexus created by the ANC form the next government of South Africa.
One outcome is that the ANC, having been so convinced that it would reign until the Second Coming and quite unable to have anticipated its own demise and likely collapse, has failed to prepare a unifying vision that could take root in South African society.
Such a vision would have served as a blueprint for a process – it is not a “just-add-water” method – towards a great society that would move much of the population out of poverty through economic expansion, greater coherence, cohesion and trust, with prosperity shared more equitably.
No evidence
There is no evidence that it would be achieved by a polity created and led by MK with Shivambu in its leadership (Shivambu has already become defanged, and even romanticised by public intellectuals).
The leaders of MK, essentially Zuma, his family and the people he promoted or appointed during his presidency, have convinced very many “people on the street” and “ground forces” of their presence and purpose. Their actual leadership ability and trustworthiness have been tested, and they have failed. That does not seem to matter.
For as long as Zuma, and now Shivambu, can, at least rhetorically, convince people that they are in control and offer access to power, privilege and pecuniary gain they will attract people from the ANC’s back benches.
Julius Malema famously claimed that he was in charge (that he had the ANC by the “scrotum”) but what seems more apposite, now, is a passage by Mary Shelley: “Remember that I (Jacob Zuma) have power… I can make you (the ANC) so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master…”
One thing that seems clear is this: the ANC has changed over the past three decades. Jacob Zuma and populist sentiments have not. Zuma has been the pull, again, of centripetal forces as he plots the completion of the shattering of the ANC and prepares a feast for carrion-eating crows on whatever is left of the grand old liberation movement. DM