'The ANC has lost control'
by
2008-12-03 14:01
Thabang Motsohi, News24 User
It is fascinating to see that the Obama phenomenon has made more people, young and old, feel the need to exercise their civic responsibility and seriously reflect on how well they are governed and which party deserves to be the beneficiary of their democratic mandate.
This can only be good for our young democracy.
In the minds of many people, the decision by the ANC to retain the alliance partnership post 1994 was a fatal mistake. It is now evident that the locus of authority in the structure was not defined.
The ANC is the dominant partner in this relationship and in such a situation it must demonstrate visible and unambiguous leadership and control on all the key characteristics that define the brand value. This has been pathetically lacking.
The internal leadership battles that have pre-occupied the focus of the ANC in the past two years have left a serious structural weakness. The communist party has pounced on this opportunity and has emerged as the visible custodian of policy and strategic leadership during this period.
SACP stolen the leadership
It has indeed become very difficult to deny that the SACP has not stolen the heart and intellectual leadership of the ANC. This may in fact not be necessarily true, but in politics perception is everything.
There is a feeling among the ordinary people that they voted for the ANC and yet command and control seem to reside with the SACP! The decision to remove Thabo Mbeki from the Presidency, the disbanding of the Scorpions contrary to public opinion and the push for election of JZ as President of the ANC are key policy decisions that were led by the communist party.
The current split in the party is not an unexpected outcome given the lamentable absence of leadership. How else does one explain the free reign granted, by design or neglect, to this irascible youth league cretin who has the guts to threaten, in public, to kill on behalf of Zuma.
The tragic part is that these pronouncements are made in the presence of the ANC President and he has said nothing. The vitriolic comments and attacks on our institutions of democracy, like the judiciary, by the current ANC leadership is patently against the values and policies that we know the ANC brand represents.
Hope to rule?
Descent into a state of lawlessness begins with chipping away at such institutions by a leadership motivated by something less than pure public interest. It is worth recalling what Njabulo Ndebele stated recently: "If these events diminish constituted office, they do not spare the ANC itself from its own hand".
He further asks: "What kind of country, then, does the emergent ANC hope to rule when the institutions it will need to rule successfully will have been emptied out by the organisation itself (unless it defines its success as the destruction of those institutions)?"
This is a key question of the times. Political accountability is one of the critical values entrenched in the constitution and at the basic level we need to ask whether our electoral system has served us well on this question. As Van Zyl Slabbert states: "The current system, which is a closed list proportional system, does not give voters access to a public representative"
The ANC has dominated the political space for so long that it is easy to become insular and arrogant. The emergence of a new party can offer the voting public an alternative and it should be welcomed. In politics, when a break away occurs under your watch, it is a disaster of profound proportions that calls for the leader to resign.
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