AT THE start of elective conferences of some organisations - notably the ANC, Cosatu, SA Communist Party or the ICU-consigned Cope - there is always an early item on the agenda.

It is about whether delegates in attendance have the right credentials - or whether their participation is legitimate.

It's contentious because it could qualify or disqualify certain delegates and thus swing debates or votes. Now there is a noticeable trend that this process is being extended beyond conferences.

Increasingly, for criticism to be taken seriously, it has to be accompanied by the credentials of the critic.

Let's consider a few of the worst cases.

When the man of letters was in charge, ANC Today, the ruling party's mouthpiece, used to attract huge traffic. This was because the online newsletter published a regular acerbic column by former president Thabo Mbeki.

His column became popular for the wrong reasons. It was vicious towards the people with whom he disagreed.

Only the insane would have liked to face the presidential machete - which is what his column should have been called.

Mbeki and the ruling party at the time appeared all too happy to receive accolades and to be mimicked.

Many critics got a lashing. One such victim of the machete was none other than Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Tutu's crime was that he had had the audacity to criticise the government's black economic empowerment policies and what he believed was a lack of debate within the ANC.

Tutu criticised the BEE policies that benefited what he termed an "elite that tends to be recycled". He also accused the ANC of stifling debate and said "unthinking, uncritical, kowtowing, party line-toeing is fatal to a vibrant democracy".

In response, Mbeki rolled up his sleeves, picked up his machete and tackled Tutu head-on in a cold-hearted manner.

"Evidently the Archbishop thinks there is something wrong with ANC members agreeing with ANC policies they have decided," Mbeki wrote in his missive.

"He [Tutu] contemptuously dismisses the members of our movement. The Archbishop has never been a member of the ANC, and would have very little knowledge of what happens even in an ANC branch. How he comes to the conclusion that there is 'lack of debate' in the ANC is most puzzling.

"Rational discussion about how the ANC decides its policies requires some familiarity with the internal procedures, rather than gratuitous insults about our members."

With these few lines, Mbeki had decreed that for someone to earn the right to criticise the ANC - the party that claims to be a leader of society - that person ought to have been a member.

At the very least the person ought to have participated in some of its activities and be familiar with its operations.

Mbeki introduced a strange and potentially dangerous element in debate: the need to politically qualify to criticise. Those not politically qualified were to be dismissed with contempt. Even if not entirely dismissed, their views were deemed illegitimate.

What mattered was not so much the views they held - however wrong or right - but their credentials.

What gave them the right to criticise? Did they have a political locus standi, to borrow a legal term, in the matter?

Mbeki departed from the domestic political stage in 2008.

But political qualification of a sort remains a requirement to criticise the ruling party. ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe took businessman Reuel Khoza to task for writing in his Nedbank chairman's report that South Africa had a strange breed of leaders whose "moral quotient" is degenerating.

Among Mantashe's litany of concerns was that Khoza had not sought a meeting with the ANC's Polokwane leadership - unlike other business people who were more patriotic.

Khoza, according to Mantashe, is a beneficiary of the ANC's BEE policies and had also associated himself with a faction of the ruling party.

Here, Mantashe extended the political qualification to a need to meet the ruling party leadership and also the importance of not belonging to the wrong factions.

Mbeki had left political qualification to branch membership level and the importance of some "familiarity" with the workings of the party.

Khoza has badly fallen into the trap. He has now seen the need for him to splash his political curriculum vitae.

He told Business Times that the "real leaders from [Robben Island]" knew his track record, that he was a successful businessman long before BEE.

"And then you have little upstarts coming later, not understanding where I hail from," he said.

But, do we really have to justify where we come from before we express our opinions about the country's state of affairs whose politics is naturally dominated by the ruling party?

The need to politically qualify does not stop here.

It goes further and gets trickier. You could be an advocate of political qualification in one context, and be a victim in another.

Mantashe's is a classic case. Little did he know that after legitimately criticising Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's support for expelled ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, he would be slapped with a political disqualification.

Malema questioned whether Mantashe was qualified to call Madikizela-Mandela to order.

"Gwede Mantashe never grew up in the ANC, was never in the underground movement, was never involved in any operation against the apartheid regime, was never arrested and never went to exile like all freedom fighters of his age did."

Suddenly, Mantashe's well-known political credentials were under fire.

The trouble is that by its nature political qualification or credentials are elastic and tend to be subjective. (Does Malema's presence at Chris Hani's funeral in 1993 mean that he is more politically qualified than others?) It's unlike a university degree of which you either have or don't.

But, why do we have to go down the route of political qualification and credentials 18 years into democracy?