The ANC’s election season has reached a crescendo. Contenders are being sifted from the list of also-rans. It is increasingly becoming clear where the lines are being drawn. Individuals and groupings within the party are choosing sides.

This is to be expected. The ANC is a contested organisation. It is also a democratic entity, where anyone can contest for positions.

Over the weekend, it emerged that cooperative governance minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma had entered the race to become ANC president. Other reports suggested that the ANC leadership in Mpumalanga had decided to stop supporting former provincial premier and current deputy president David Mabuza.

Many more such pronunciations can be expected in the coming days.

What should not be expected is that anyone needs to die or be hurt because of their preferences. ANC activists must learn to fight robustly without fighting dirty. The ANC must formulate and enforce rules of engagement.

This will not just be good for the party but also for society. While we might not care about the ANC and its internal squabbles, its internecine strife spills over to other areas of South African life.

It is not acceptable that it has become normal that when the ANC goes into an elective conference, state resources become a tool in the hands of the various factions. Much-needed state resources are directed at furthering the aims of different groupings within the party.

When this happens, service delivery suffers. The credibility of state institutions is irrevocably damaged.

For instance, it has been almost 15 years since the ANC’s Polokwane conference yet we are still dealing with the ramifications of processes that took place ahead of that conference, particularly the decision on whether or not to charge former president Jacob Zuma.

The memory of the last ANC conference, where the SAPS attempted to procure, at a cost of R45m, a grabber –  a type of malware that captures private information such as usernames and passwords directly from a web browser form or page - still remains.

The argument given was that the state had become aware of a “security threat” to certain prominent persons at the conference. 

Investigators from the police watchdog, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, later charged that the procurement was an attempt to flush funds out of the Secret Service Account to “buy” votes at the ANC’s conference.

These are just two of many examples. Those who contest for ANC leadership must not only think about the power they desire but also about the kind of state they want to lead should they win the conference and possibly state power later.