The governing party is fond of conferring vainglorious titles upon itself. The "glorious movement", the "oldest liberation movement in Africa" - as if somehow this makes the ANC the party with the most wisdom and experience - and "the only hope for the poor".
Some of these terms of endearment, one must assume, were coined as a declaration of the party's aspirations while banned and in exile. Take "the leader of society", for instance. The term must have been crafted by people who desired to see the ANC take up leading roles in key sectors as it built a broad alliance of resistance to the apartheid state.
For much of the late 1980s and the '90s, it almost mastered that role as hardly anything could happen in SA without the involvement of the ANC or its associates.
Post-apartheid, party theorists would argue that - as a leader of society - the ANC needed to be involved "in all terrains of struggle", from running the central government right down to participating in community struggles on township-street level.
Such an approach obviously has its own contradictions and often results in the ANC sending mixed policy signals.
This was the case this week when a group of students at Wits University shut down the institution and engaged in strike action in support of their demand for the university to allow students with massive debts to register for the new academic year.
They also took to the streets in opposition to national budget cuts that have seen the National Treasury giving less money to higher education than required, hence potentially shutting the door to thousands of first-year students across the country who were banking on the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) to help them get educated.
Unfortunately the protests took a tragic turn when a bystander, Mthokozisi Ntumba, was shot and killed by a policeman.
A day later, ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule was in the streets with the students, professing his party's support for their demands. The curious thing, however, is that he took the students on a march from Luthuli House to the Constitutional Court.
Given his troubles with the law and the ongoing power struggles within the ANC, it would be foolhardy to dismiss the strong suspicion that [Ace] Magashule 'hijacked' the students' struggle in a bid to win over this important constituency ahead of the many battles that are to be fought within and outside the ANC
To do what, exactly, is unclear as policy decisions on such issues as budget allocation and the provision of access to education to the poor are the preserve of parliament and the national executive, both of which the ANC controls comfortably.
Given his troubles with the law and the ongoing power struggles within the ANC, it would be foolhardy to dismiss the strong suspicion that Magashule "hijacked" the students' struggle in a bid to win over this important constituency ahead of the many battles that are to be fought within and outside the ANC.
Some of his utterances when accepting a memorandum of demands from the students before the start of the march to the ConCourt clearly, albeit indirectly, targeted higher education minister Blade Nzimande and others in President Cyril Ramaphosa's cabinet who are regarded as being opposed to the secretary-general.
But it would be a huge mistake to single out Magashule for this kind of opportunism, and populism, and leave out the rest of the party.
The fundamental problem is that the "leader of society" appears to be more comfortable leading marches, sometimes even against itself, than doing what millions of South Africans elected it to do: govern.
Tshilidzi Marwala, the vice-chancellor at the University of Johannesburg, tweeted the other day that three senior South African politicians - one assumes they were all ANC - took a trip to an Asian country to attend a conference.
"Their Asian counterparts said: you guys sing a lot in your conferences. You will be bored in our conferences where we have PowerPoint presentations and thinking," tweeted Marwala.
One has not independently verified the story of the Asian trip, but it seems to perfectly sum up the main problem with the ANC when it comes to dealing with complex issues such as funding for higher education. There is a lot of singing and sloganeering about "free education" - giving desperate students false hope - and inadequate discussions about how this can be funded in a sustainable manner, especially given the state of the national fiscus.
A party that aspires to be taken seriously as "a leader of society" would spend more time in the parliamentary portfolio committee interrogating the finance minister's budget for possible solutions instead of taking to the streets with students as if it is some powerless NGO.
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