An ANC grown sclerotic on the good life gets its comeuppance

A day or two before the nation took to the polls, a couple of videos were doing the rounds, purporting to show the romantic partners of a prominent ANC politician and a party benefactor on holiday in the Middle East.

The women appeared to be having the time of their lives, visiting high-end fashion boutiques and flying around in a chartered helicopter.

It is not clear whether the two people in the videos are indeed the partners of the politician and businessman concerned, or even whether the images are new or have been resurrected from the archives.

But the people who circulated the videos on the eve of the election used them  to drive home the message that in the midst of economic hardship for the vast majority of us, the political elite is having it so good that international retail therapy and sightseeing remain the favourite indulgences of its loved ones.

The message would have found fertile ground in a country where the ANC — once regarded as holding the moral high ground due to its sacrifices during the struggle against apartheid — has become synonymous with ostentatious displays of wealth.

Whereas in the 1980s the term comrade symbolised political activism and absolute dedication to the freedom struggle, these days it has become almost pejorative, referring - especially among the young - to someone whose wealth is undeserved and can only be explained by proximity to political power and authority

Whereas in the 1980s the term “comrade” symbolised political activism and absolute dedication to the freedom struggle, these days it has become almost pejorative, referring — especially among the young — to someone whose wealth is undeserved and can only be explained by proximity to political power and authority.

So when ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula — one of those elected at the party’s Nasrec conference in 2022 to lead its “renewal” process — was filmed being chauffeured in a R3m Mercedes-Benz AMG-G63 on the campaign trail in Inanda, KwaZulu-Natal, there were few expressions of  surprise.

We have come to expect this kind of behaviour from some ANC bigwigs who have grown  so “socially distant” from the communities they claim to represent that they seem oblivious to the suffering those communities endure.

Inanda is a sprawling working-class neighbourhood with high levels of unemployment and poverty. It was one of the areas hardest hit by both the 2021 riots and the KwaZulu-Natal floods.

To have the ANC’s third-in-command canvass votes while driving around in a German SUV with a rand value equivalent to the price of more than a dozen houses in Inanda must have seemed to locals like having salt rubbed into their wounds. 

Mbalula’s explanation that the Geländewagen had not been his own choice — the armoured vehicle was provided by a private security company the ANC hired to guard him during the tour — would have been cold comfort.

Sometime next year, if not earlier, the ANC secretary-general will be expected to present a report to the party’s national general council explaining — among other things — why the party spectacularly lost its majority in the National Assembly and in several provincial legislatures.

Obviously former president Jacob Zuma and his MK Party will feature prominently in the analysis. But rest assured, “sins of incumbency” will be mentioned — as they were by Gwede Mantashe before him and by Kgalema Motlanthe before him.

In fact, this problem — as former president Thabo Mbeki never tires to point out — has been identified at each party conference ever since Nelson Mandela first spoke about it when he was ANC president at the Bloemfontein conference in 1994.

But instead of doing something about it, the ANC has over the years allowed it to metastasise to such an extent that it has alienated the party from its core constituencies, culminating in the calamity of this week’s election results.

The party can blame individual leaders as much as it likes — Zuma for forming a breakaway, President Cyril Ramaphosa for too much kowtowing to big business at the expense of organised labour and other ANC constituencies, and KwaZulu-Natal chair Siboniso Duma for being so blinded by arrogance that he failed to see he was presiding over MK Party branches disguised by ANC T-shirts — but the truth is that the ANC brand had long been severely tarnished in the eyes of voters. This time, however, many voters had the courage to turn their backs on Mandela’s party.

The ANC may never again enjoy an absolute majority in the National Assembly. As EFF leader Julius Malema pointed out yesterday, the ANC’s recent track record shows it to be incapable of regaining the electoral ground it loses. Look at what happened at municipal level in 2016 and 2021.

However it is unlikely that the ANC will go the way of the National Party, which, after losing its 46-year grip on power in 1994, rapidly shrank into oblivion.

It should be around for several decades still — as long as its national executive committee sees in these results a wake-up call to take its “renewal” project seriously by acting on “sins of incumbency” and general corruption within the party ranks.