Last week, the Financial Mail ran a cover article entitled ‘Waiting for Dawn: Why isn’t Ramaphosa winning the war on Corruption?’ It’s a grim read that probably reflects the sentiments of much if not most of the country.
Dealing with it was central to his promise as president of the ANC and of the country. For a great many people, it was this that established him as the alternative to Jacob Zuma.
And of all the multitudinous challenges bedevilling South Africa, corruption is probably the most reviled, and universally condemned. For every predator and conman feeding off the system, Ramaphosa could have counted on the backing of a hundred honest people.
Yet, those honest people would raise the question posed by British journalist Richard Quest at Davos in early 2020: ‘How many people have gone to prison so far?’
On News24, meanwhile, Adriaan Basson penned an agonised piece entitled ‘Analysis paralysis: Why hasn’t Ramaphosa fired Sisulu?’
President’s virtues
Extolling the president’s numerous virtues, and defending his record (‘It is not his fault that the Hawks and NPA aren’t moving fast enough on state capture prosecutions’), Basson was confused by his failure to punish Lindiwe Sisulu for her ‘open defiance’. She had, lest one forget, taken issue with the country’s constitutional order, decrying mentally colonised black judges and various other things.
Was he overthinking this, Basson mused? The ‘long game’ taken too far?
‘Mr President,’ he implored, ‘sometimes we just want you to do the right thing. Stop overthinking this matter and drop your mysterious “long game” strategy for once. Act on principle, act boldly and fire Lindiwe Sisulu from your Cabinet.’
No doubt here too Ramaphosa could count on the support of millions of South Africans who value constitutional governance. He chose rather to make a flabby, indirect semi-defence of the constitutional order.
So here we have two mystifying failures. They are widely recognised as such. All good sense and incentives would say that the president should act swiftly and aggressively, yet he has declined to do so. Why indeed!
Party unity
The Financial Mail provides valuable insight into this. ANC veteran Mavuso Msimang is a respected and insightful voice in South Africa – a rare commodity. His view on Ramaphosa’s unimpressive record on corruption was direct and damning: ‘There’s a very simple answer. It is that the president’s blind commitment to so-called “party unity” is what is costing him this fight. Some of those he still works with, in his own circle, are corrupt. And no action has been taken against them by the party, let alone by agencies like the Hawks.’
That much is true. We at the IRR have previously pointed out that credible allegations of corruption have been levelled against a majority of the ANC’s National Executive Committee. A small minority can definitely be said to be free of any such taint, while not enough is known of the remainder to conclude whether any such allegations exist. Under these conditions, there is simply not much enthusiasm for tackling corruption, and certainly not from within the ANC.
But it is the mention of ‘unity’ that catches the eye.
On one level, party unity is a bog-standard political imperative. Keeping a party together is pretty much essential for its functioning. For the ANC, though, the stakes are higher.
Unity is a word that has been central to the ANC’s lexicon for decades. Browse its annual January 8th statements and it is an invariable theme. This year, the theme is ‘The Year of Unity and Renewal to Defend and Advance South Africa’s Democratic Gains’. Maintaining unity is described, not infrequently, as an ‘historic task’. Indeed, then deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, in 2012 said in a speech to the ANC Youth League that ‘in the ANC nothing matters more than unity.’
The ANC, he said, ‘was founded on the principle of unity, the unity of the people. And it is that principle which we must take to heart; it is the principle which sustained the ANC throughout these glorious 100 years.’
Professor Anthony Butler devotes one of the five chapters of his book, The Idea of the ANC, to the theme of unity. This can be traced back to the founding of the organisation in 1912. Faced with the white-controlled state, it was imperative to overcome the divisions among the African population (remember its initial name, the South African Native National Congress). Hence, its determination to extirpate the ‘demon of tribalism’.
Coalition of forces
Subsequently, it embraced a broader coalition of forces by aligning with other organisations, by opening itself up to a wider community of ideological interests or by expanding the terms of its membership. African nationalists were at times suspicious of communists. Until the late 1960s, the ANC reserved membership for Africans, and so on. Each such move implied the possibility (even the inevitability) of internal division and conflict.
In 1990, Nelson Mandela told an American newspaper: ‘The ANC has never been a political party … the ANC is a coalition … Some will support free enterprise, others socialism. Some are conservatives, others are liberals. We are united solely by our determination to oppose racial oppression. That is the only thing that unites us.’
Unity, ever the watchword, was tenuous.
As the ANC steamed towards and eventually entered government, this intensified. With apartheid gone, the visceral basis of unity was no longer there. Competing visions as to how the country should be run frayed relationships. Those with long memories will recall that in the 1990s, a perennial point of discussion was the durability of the alliance between the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions – if not the durability of the ANC itself.
The ANC’s Mission
Thabo Mbeki alluded to this from time to time but emphasised that the ANC’s ‘mission’ would keep it and its alliance partners together. The mission – its ‘historic task’ post-transition – would be the settling of the ‘race question’. The maintenance of unity would be necessary for this. Indeed, ANC documents from this time warned dourly that sinister ‘counter-revolutionary’ networks lurked in dark corners and would foster division to bring about the ANC’s defeat.
With some irony, Mbeki’s strategy for unity meant keeping a lid on the ANC alliance’s left-wing and pursuing a narrative that veered into – or at least dog-whistled – racial nationalism. Unity for the ANC legitimated the further fissuring of the society.
Yet for an organisation – nay, a movement – with an ‘historic task’, this might well have seemed like an acceptable price to pay. After all, such an organisation, a ‘liberation movement’, extends its sense of mission into a self-conception that defines itself as the embodiment of ‘the nation’. It’s survival and momentum is ipso facto that of the society in which it exists.
To jeopardise that unity is – to quote a South African politician of a very different stripe – ‘too ghastly to contemplate’.
Professor Butler goes on to discuss the stresses and strains that have developed over the post-transition period, under the revealing heading of ‘unsustainable unity’. ‘The pursuit of unity,’ he writes, ‘has brought stability and compromise to the ANC in government, but primarily by circumventing fundamental differences of principle rather than confronting them.’
It’s doubtful that one could make the argument that the unity of the ANC and its alliance brings much stability anymore, unless that is understood as the stability of paralysis. But the rest of the analysis holds. Differences in principle, to the extent that they exist, are unlikely to prove divisive. Neither the persistence of corruption nor a rejection of the Constitution would likely trump the need for unity overall, even if in individual cases (such as that of Ace Magashule) some action may be taken.
The price for the unity of the ANC becomes ever higher.
In the ANC’s 2017 January 8th Statement, then-President Zuma made this call to his party colleagues: ‘Above all, we must commit to the unity of the ANC and the only noble fight that we must engage in is a fight to serve the people and not ourselves! We must learn from President OR (Tambo) and continue to demonstrate to the people, in word and in deed, that the ANC remains the organisation most capable of leading South Africa. The ANC must unite so that we are able to unite the people against our common enemies – unemployment, poverty and inequality.’
‘Above all’, to be sure!
South Africans need to ask whether this quest for unity is not the great ally of those common enemies.
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