×

We've got news for you.

Register on SowetanLIVE at no cost to receive newsletters, read exclusive articles & more.
Register now

ANC must deliver to the working class or lose power to the opposition

At the invitation of the Sowetan newspaper, top political analysts and commentators are tackling the topic of political leadership in South Africa. To contribute to the debate, send an e-mail to: letters@sowetan.co.za and tellus@sowetan.co.za
At the invitation of the Sowetan newspaper, top political analysts and commentators are tackling the topic of political leadership in South Africa. To contribute to the debate, send an e-mail to: letters@sowetan.co.za and tellus@sowetan.co.za

SOUTH Africa is on the threshold of that inevitable make-or-break 20-year mark, at least by African standards, when liberation movements-turned-governing parties are assessed, lose power or hang on, through the barrel of the gun.

The ANC is losing the dejected African middle class of their own volition, probably to the DA. And as Cosatu goes to its 11th national congress, from September 17 to 20, the focus will be on declining numbers and pressure to deliver the working class to the ANC.

And for the first time in SA's young democracy, the signs are ominous. President Jacob Zuma has been branded a dictator, at least in party corridors, after being plugged-in as a stopgap to prevent a third-term ANC presidency of Thabo Mbeki.

This, ironically, at the party level, is a beacon of hope for the continent in this regard, giving the country four presidents in 18 years.

And notwithstanding incessant power grip at national level, the ANC has accepted defeats in two of the country's nine provinces, to nemesis the DA in Western Cape, and before that to the now defunct New National Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party in KwaZulu-Natal.

Questions have been asked about how the ANC will react when it ultimately loses power. And recent shootings of its own citizens, at times with live ammunition, as it gets frustrated with service delivery protests against rampant inequality, unemployment, maladministration, graft and corruption have provided portentous clues.

The education and health systems are crumbling under the Zuma administration.

Fortunately the new breed of youth south of the Limpopo river - those in matric, and have been affected by Limpopo textbook shambles, failed by defective state-issued condoms-HIV test kits and orphaned by the tragedy at Platinum miner Lonmin - will be voting for the first time in the 2014 national and provincial elections.

These compatriots are in the increasing majority that identifies more with Andries Tatane than the Soweto June 16 revolt, and equally, more with Lonmin-Marikana massacre than the distant Sharpeville massacre.

As the ANC goes into its 53rd national (elective) conference in December, it ought to find a solution to an unanswered question alleged to have been bravely posed by Joel Netshitenzhe, a respected thinker within the movement: "What does the ANC (and the alliance) do now that its primary objective (of the national democratic revolution) has been met?"

The national democratic revolution objectives were the liberation of the African majority and creation of a nonracial, nonsexist and prosperous society.

The ANC is apprehensive of what will become of it, should it give the masses education and upgrade the conditions of the indigent.

Cosatu's lifeblood, for example, is not that unemployed man on number nine omnibus. But for it to stay in business, it has to keep low-end employees forever unskilled and marginalised.

Successes are stage managed, and problems manufactured for easy victories.

How else does one explain, that Cosatu's only "successes" are against government or are in the public sector. Could it be that lax in leadership around the Marikana massacre had been intended, and that the ANC through government was trying to save dwindling working class numbers at the National Union of Mineworkers and its main alliance partner, Cosatu?

The ANC has paid its liberation debt on the continent, and at home to the Robben Islanders, exiles, BEE brigade and the whole the hierarchy. It's time for the brave souls who stayed home to have a say in the running of the country.

Further political disqualification from the ANC, will only help create a leadership vacuum in the political environment or ANC (and swell the ranks of opposition parties and business), while the party continue to be exposed to inept and at opportunist times populist leadership of the calibre that is the double-whammy of Zuma and churlish Julius Malema.

  • Mothapo is a marketing and communications practitioner. Follow him on twitter @SocietyNews