The ANC has been managing its own finances and administration with the same incompetence it has often managed the government.
The ANC is broke. It could not pay employees last month, has not paid their provident funds for the past 28 months and medical-aid subsidies are in arrears.
Last month the South African Revenue Service (Sars) obtained a garnishee order for the ANC's Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) allocation of R17m, in part-payment of the party's tax liability.
The party is regularly taken to court by suppliers over nonpayment. In 2018, the City of Johannesburg obtained a writ to seize ANC assets worth R300,000 at the party's Luthuli House headquarters because the party had not paid legal fees owed to the city.
ANC staff have threatened to picket Luthuli House and provincial offices next week.
If the party were a business, it would be liquidated because it is unable to pay its debts - and it would cease to operate.
Although the focus has been on the party's inability to pay its bills, it has been incompetently run for a long time now. Its basic administration is often in shambles and its staff has become bloated since it was unbanned in 1990.
In 2018 the ANC had to postpone its national list conference, which selects candidates for parliament and provincial legislatures, because of administrative chaos.
Of course, it was also partly to do with attempts by competing presidential factions at the 2017 national conference - those of President Cyril Ramaphosa and his then challenger Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma - to manipulate the candidates list to get as many of their own people into parliament and provincial legislatures.
Party leaders, like acting secretary-general Jessie Duarte, have blamed the new Political Party Funding Act for the organisation's funding crunch. This is not true. The ANC's financial woes started long before the act was even contemplated.
The ANC has become a job-creation
— Writes William Gumede
scheme for cadres
The act, which came into effect in April, compels political parties to disclose the sources of donations of more than R100,000. It prohibits donations of more than R15m from a single donor.
In the past, ANC party managers could mismanage the finances and get corporations, state-owned entities and tenderpreneurs to cover shortfalls. With the Political Party Funding Act, many donors have become reluctant, fearing public scrutiny of their donations.
Under Jacob Zuma's leadership, party management deteriorated sharply.
At the time of the ANC's 2017 national conference, the party had R140m in provident-fund debt, owed Sars R80m and had almost R40m in outstanding medical-aid contributions.
Compared with many of its modern governing party peers, the ANC is overstaffed. It has an oversized head office. Provincial party branches, which have also increasingly become a patronage machine for provincial party leaders, have ballooned.
The party has increasingly appointed those who failed to make it to parliament, legislatures and municipal councils to its bloated in-house bureaucracy. More recently, under the leadership of now suspended ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, those who got the axe for corruption, wrongdoing and incompetence in the cabinet, legislatures and the government have been deployed to the party.
Like the public service and state-owned enterprises, the party has become a job-creation scheme for cadres.
The party should be right-sized. It should be able to operate on at least a third of its current staff; the rest need to be retrenched. Party members can volunteer to carry out functions for which they are now paid.
A few years ago, the ANC introduced a remuneration policy that set salaries, fringe benefits and bonuses to functionaries on the same scale as those of their counterparts in elected offices and in the government.
Of course, both South African elected and public representatives are overpaid compared with our emerging peers, and considering the size of the economy. Paying party functionaries at the same rate as those in legislatures and government is unsustainable.
The party must be managed within a budget, setting the costs of objectives, activities and projects, and then focusing on achieving those against the budget.
The party's internal administration is not only chaotic, it's archaic. Although work has in the broader economy moved online, the party administration is still largely paper-based.
The ANC's structure needs an overhaul. The party needs a review of its organisational structure to define roles, relations and responsibilities more appropriately. Finally, it may do well to recruit a CEO to run the party on professional lines.
• Gumede is associate professor, School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand, and author of 'Restless Nation: Making Sense of Troubled Times' (Tafelberg)
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