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Containing the crisis: what the ANC conference did – and
did not do
Steven Friedman
Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, Volume 96, 2018,
pp. 95-101 (Article)
Published by Transformation
DOI:
For additional information about this article
[ Access provided at 8 Sep 2020 11:24 GMT from University of Johannesburg ]
https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2018.0004
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/697677
TRANSFORMATION 96 (2018) ISSN 0258-7696 95
Comment
Containing the crisis: what the ANC conference
did – and did not do
Steven Friedman
sfriedman@uj.ac.za
Logic suggests that deeply stressed organisations – and societies – are not
miraculously cured because a backroom deal allowed one politician to
narrowly beat another to the governing party presidency. But organisations
and societies can achieve a semblance of normalcy that way. Which may
well be what happened at last December’s African National Congress
conference.
The conference may be remembered as one of the most vivid political
‘before and after’ events in history. Before it, the ANC seemed in such
deep crisis that it seemed unlikely that it would be able to hold the
conference at all. After it, it appears to be at the beginning of a strong
resurgence which will ensure its continued dominance of formal politics
for years. Before the conference, the ANC’s travails were clearly a
consequence of deep-rooted structural problems in the wider society and
so its crisis often prompted deep pessimism about South Africa’s problems.
After the conference, a new optimism seems to stretch from international
bankers (Head 2018) through to citizens, or at least those who enjoy
access to media.
This contribution will discuss how this transformation came to pass and
will assess whether the conference really was the seminal event
conventional wisdom believes it to be. It will argue that the conference did
initiate a shift which may alleviate the crisis, at least for the next few
years. But the structural problems which caused it were not addressed by
the change in ANC leadership and it is not at all clear that they will be.
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The crisis and its (apparent) cure
In the weeks leading up to the conference it became clear that the ANC
would not be able to hold a contested election unless a deal between its
factions sharply reduced the cost of losing.
This was a consequence of two realities. The first was the scale of the
contest. The battle between the supporters of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma
and Cyril Ramaphosa was not about loyalty to particular politicians – the
divide was a product of South Africa’s economic development trajectory
since 1994; the two factions were located differently in the economy and
had very different economic priorities. Development since 1994 has been
heavily path dependent (North 1990) – a consensus between the new
political and old economic elites held that the goal of post-apartheid
South Africa was not to change the highly concentrated and exclusionary
economy apartheid bequeathed but to incorporate black people within it.
The result was the inclusion of those black people able to gain access to
the formal economy – in effect, wage and salary earners – and the
exclusion of millions who have been unable to gain entry (Webster 2013,
Friedman 2015).
This division ran through the ANC. Ramaphosa’s support was drawn
from those who had been able to gain entry (including the trade unions) and
whose economic prospects depended on the health of the market economy.
Dlamini-Zuma’s came from politicians whose prospects depended not on
the market, but the state. They saw the public purse (and the resources of
business people who sought access to public resources) as a means to
acquire wealth and to distribute it as patronage to the excluded, one of
whose survival strategies is to attach themselves to politics and politicians
to secure the economic lifeline the market denies them (von Holdt 2013).
While we might expect the latter group to win overwhelming support
among the grassroots poor, election results suggest otherwise: the wage
and salary faction may represent economic insiders, but most outsiders
did not see the appropriation of public money by patronage politicians as
a gain and so grassroots voters increasingly abandoned the ANC in protest
at patronage politics.
For the ANC, this split also meant that too much was at stake in the
election of a new leadership: whoever lost would lose the capacity to steer
the economy and so the cost of defeat seemed extraordinarily high. This
problem was sharpened by the second reality, the ANC’s increasingly
public internal malaise. ANC documents have repeatedly acknowledged
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Comment: Containing the crisis – what the ANC conference did, and did not do
the internal crisis created by intense factional differences and the use of
politics to gain access to resources. A discussion document for December’s
conference observed: ‘The ANC faces declining fortunes. Internal
squabbles, money politics, corruption and poor performance in government
all conspire to undermine its legitimacy in the eyes of the broader public’
(ANC 2017:4). As the congress neared, this manifested itself in repeated
challenges in court to the election of delegates and to regional and
provincial structures. Amid evidence of manipulation of internal elections,
the ANC lacked an institution which enjoyed enough legitimacy to settle
disputes and so it seemed inevitable that the faction which lost a ‘winner
takes all’ election would challenge the result: given the disarray of its
internal processes, it seemed likely that this would overturn the result. It
was not even clear that an election could be held in these circumstances:
conferences of the ANC’s leagues and regions had been abandoned
because no agreement could be reached on who was entitled to vote and
this seemed a distinct possibility at the national conference.
Given this, the only way the ANC seemed likely to be able to choose a
new leadership was a deal between the two factions to share posts. While
that seemed implausible given the depth of the divisions between them, the
alternative – the ANC constitution’s stipulation that no leadership could
serve for more than five years means that if no new leadership was chosen
in December, the courts would be bound to declare illegal all ANC leaders
– would be so debilitating that a deal seemed the only way in which the
ANC could survive, making it an imperative whatever the factions thought
of each other.
And so it proved. The elections produced a leadership split almost
exactly between the two factions. The 80-member national executive
committee, which runs the organisation between conferences, consisted
of almost exactly equal numbers of members who appeared on the election
slates of Ramaphosa and Dlamini-Zuma. Unless we believe that some
5,000 ANC delegates somehow contrived to vote spontaneously in the
only way which could prevent internal war, we must conclude that the
result was the outcome of a deal – probably one in which it was agreed that
there would be an open contest for president and that positions would be
divided evenly after that.
This outcome literally kept the ANC in one piece, but seemed to do
little else for it or the country. While Ramaphosa’s win should have
signalled a clear victory for the wage and salary faction, it seemed unlikely
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to change much. Before the conference, the ANC had been engaged in
trench warfare – a continuing battle between the factions for advantage
which produced small victories for both but little movement. It seemed
inevitable that this would continue under the new leadership, given the
even split the conference produced. And this seemed to mean that the wage
and salary faction would be unable to do what the evidence suggests much
of the country wanted it to do – prevent the colonisation of public
institutions by private interests.
The patronage faction melts into air?
Events since the conference have confounded expectations that the ANC
would continue an inconclusive internal war, probably as public support
melted away.
In only a few weeks, the new leadership has ensured the appointment of
the judicial inquiry into ‘state capture’ – control by private interests of
public resources and institutions – recommended by former public
protector Thuli Madonsela. It has appointed a new board for Eskom, the
country’s largest and most lucrative state enterprise, which seems united
in its opposition to the use of the power utility for private gain. Police who
found repeated excuses for not investigating links between public officials
and private money began zealously investigating politicians and officials
accused of colluding in state capture, including a raid on the office of the
Free State premier and new ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, a key
figure in the patronage faction. The new leadership successfully pressured
Jacob Zuma to leave office, apparently with significant support from the
ANC national executive (NEC) (Nhlabathi et al 2017). The attack on
alleged state capture and corruption which was expected had Ramaphosa’s
faction won control had begun to happen anyway.
This may have been unexpected, but it is not an illusion. Power does
seem to have shifted decisively from the patronage faction to the wage and
salary group, from Zuma to Ramaphosa and his allies. There seems little
prospect of this reversing soon. How was this political conjuring trick
achieved? The change was helped by the fact that the ANC was in danger of
losing its majority in 2019 if it did not change tack – this may have
influenced Dlamini-Zuma supporters concerned about their political
futures. The attack on state capture – or at least the version currently on
offer – is popular with economic and cultural power holders as well as
grassroots citizens and this may be a further incentive to switch sides. But
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Comment: Containing the crisis – what the ANC conference did, and did not do
the chief reason lay in a political reality which ANC documents and
rhetoric routinely question (Gerber 2017) but which is not less real for
being challenged by the governing party – the power of government in
general and the presidency in particular.
The entire ANC leadership knew that Ramaphosa would become state
president. This, of course, gives him the power to make cabinet and other
appointments which shape – or end – the careers of ANC politicians. And
so there was good reason for members of the new NEC who supported
Zuma and Dlamini-Zuma to switch sides to ensure they would remain in
office. There were members of their faction for whom this was not an
option – they knew they would lose office if Zuma went and so their only
option was to doggedly defend him. But a sizeable section of the Dlamini-
Zuma slate had reason to believe that joining the Ramaphosa train could
yield rewards and they have done just that. Similarly, prosecutors and
police who did Zuma’s bidding because they wanted to keep their jobs are
now beginning to do what they think Ramaphosa wants.
The great irony of the unexpected sea change since the December
conference is that it is not the product of some deep rooted social force
or of the will of citizens to hold power to account. It has a much more
prosaic source: the power of the state presidency and of government over
that of the party.
Back to ‘normal’?
It is important to place this change in perspective.
The beginnings of an assault on politicians and business people who try
to turn the state into their personal instrument is not trivial. Fighting the
current version of ‘state capture’ and corruption is a necessary condition
for social and economic progress: patronage politics erodes the living
standards of the poor and makes progress against poverty and inequality
impossible. The changes Ramaphosa and his allies seem likely to bring are
essential if South Africans are not to be thrust into even more severe
poverty than many currently endure. But the changes are, thus far at least,
not a cure for the structural crisis which made patronage so effective.
If patronage politics is a symptom of path dependency, its longer-term
antidote is an assault on that dependency. Unless the ANC can generate
proposals for structural economic and social change and can negotiate
these effectively with private economic power holders (Webster 2013),
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the propensity to patronage will remain, even if, as seems likely, the
government tries to fight it rather than encouraging it. Here there is little
sign of change. Media reports insist that the ANC has embarked on a
‘radical’ new direction on issues such as free higher education and
expropriation of land without compensation. Closer examination reveals
that there is no new ANC economic thinking. The higher education change
was a theatrical gesture which may not be sustainable beyond 2018: it was
certainly not the product of a new analysis of the economy’s ills. And the
land resolution has been thoroughly misreported – it says it will not be
implemented if this has any negative effect on the economy, which seems
to rule out change (Friedman 2018). This measure too shows no new
thinking which would suggest a recognition of current realities – neither
do ANC documents (ANC 2017a).
This does not necessarily mean that an attempt to negotiate a new
approach to the economy is excluded – pressures may make it a possibility.
But for now, the agenda is consumed by the perceived need to restore the
status quo ante Zuma. That may be a necessary step towards the health of
the ANC and the society but it is not sufficient. Until a serious attempt to
negotiate a more inclusive economy begins, the immediate danger has
been averted, but its cause remains lurking in the shadows.
References
African National Congress (2017) ‘Organisational renewal and organisational design:
consolidating the ANC as movement for transformation and the centre of power’.
Discussion document national policy conference, March 8.
African National Congress (2017a) ‘Economic transformation’. Discussion document
national policy conference, March 10.
Friedman, Steven (2015) ‘The Janus face of the past: preserving and resisting South
African path dependence’, in Xolela Mangcu (ed) The Colour of Our Future:
does race matter in post-apartheid South Africa? Johannesburg: Wits University
Press.
________ (2018) ‘Is South Africa’s ANC bent on radical policies? Here’s why the
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theconversation.com/is-south-africas-anc-bent-on-radical-policies-heres-why-
the-answer-is-no-89801
Gerber, Jan (2017) ‘ANC will be centre of power – Mbalula’. News24, December
20. Available at: https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/anc-will-be-centre-
of-power-mbalula-20171220
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Head, Tom (2018) ‘“South Africa will be the big emerging market story of 2018” –
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Nhlabathi, Hlengiwe, Setumo Stone, S’Thembile Cele and Andisiwe Makinana (2017)
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