In its attempt to make sense of how its electoral fortunes have spectacularly plummeted from a high of 66.35% in 2004 to just over 40% this year, the ANC and its allied structures have been doing a lot of soul-searching.
Much of this introspection covers the same old issues the party has been highlighting as threats to its survival ever since the first national conference it held, in Bloemfontein in 1994, soon after attaining power.
Proximity to power; the growing social distance between the leadership and ordinary members; the widening gap between the membership and the rest of society; rising numbers of “cadres” who see access to state power as a means to self-enrichment through corruption — in a phrase, what the party calls the sins of incumbency.
In other words, the ANC identified the main source of its troubles as being internal.
In one document prepared for a past conference, for instance, the party said: “The use of money to buy votes for elections in the party is at the heart of the decline of the quality of structures across the board. Money has replaced consciousness as a basis for being elected into leadership positions at all levels of the organisation…
“The general decline in the quality of membership is a product of… mass recruitment of membership… [and] a weak induction programme [that] leads to a big membership that does not understand the organisation.”
While much of this self-criticism continues to hold, the fallout over the MK Party breakaway and the resultant haemorrhaging of support — especially in KwaZulu-Natal, southern parts of Mpumalanga and parts of Gauteng — seems to be fuelling yet another theory of why the party is losing popularity: counterrevolution.
Now that’s a word one doesn’t often encounter in the political discourse outside of conference season, during which comrades resort to “struggle terminology” in a bid to assure voting delegates that — even though they manage a capitalist democracy as the government — they remain ideologically in tune “with the people”.
In the 1997 ANC national conference that elected Thabo Mbeki as ANC president and Jacob Zuma as his deputy, the party defined “counterrevolution” as “a combination of aims and forms of action that are mainly unconstitutional and illegal, to subvert and transform”.
“These include setting up intelligence and armed networks parallel to and within the state to sabotage change through direct political activity or aggravation of such social problems as crime. They also entail underground efforts to undermine the country’s economy, including investor confidence and the currency, deliberate acts of corruption.”
The report makes an extraordinary claim that 'the counter-revolution was so determined to realise its goal' of leadership change that 'it actually brought to Polokwane an armed group of hired assassins'
In the weeks running up to the elections in May, it was Mbeki who first brought up the argument that what South Africa went through between December 2007, when he was ousted as ANC president, and February 2018 — when Zuma was removed as the country’s president, was a counterrevolution.
The space in this column is too limited to properly explain Mbeki’s reasoning but his full speech on 30 years of democracy — delivered at Freedom Park on April 30 — is available on YouTube.
Judging by the deliberations at the ANC’s national executive committee meeting this weekend, this theory — which essentially blames the ANC’s failings on the evil intent of unnamed apartheid-era military intelligence generals and their spies within the ANC — is gaining traction within party ranks.
In one of the reports presented at the ANC meeting, the party even suggests that Zuma’s election at the 2007 Polokwane conference was engineered by “the counterrevolution”.
The report further makes an extraordinary claim that “the counterrevolution was so determined to realise its goal” of leadership change that “it actually brought to Polokwane an armed group of hired assassins” who would have been unleashed “if for some reason it had failed to achieve the leadership changes it wanted”.
Now these are pretty serious allegations, especially because many in the current NEC were not only delegates at that 2007 conference, but actively campaigned for Zuma. Were they willing participants in the “counterrevolution”? If so, how can they be trusted to lead the recovery and renewal process, which includes, among other things, the rebuilding of the many state institutions that were destroyed by the “counterrevolution”?
As one trade unionist used to say, a “counterrevolution” never announces itself, so no-one can gainsay the existence of a “counter-revolutionary” cause.
While it is feasible that remnants of the apartheid regime might have wanted to bring down the democratic state through underhand means, it is hard to believe they could have been powerful and convincing enough to take over the entire party and government using sleeper agents.
The ANC’s failures are mostly of its own making.
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