The threat to democracy posed by Julius Malema and the ANC Youth League leadership may be the most entertaining political story in town – but it is a sign of a far deeper crisis which will not be fixed unless the ANC does far more than disciplining Malema.
By Steven Friedman
Battles between the Youth League leaders and the ANC make for exciting reading, listening and viewing. But the excitement can distract us from what is really happening inside the majority party. It could mislead us into imagining that a healthy, happy, organisation’s only serious problem is that it faces a challenge from young hotheads. In reality, the ANC is neither happy nor healthy; and the “young hotheads” are merely a symptom of a wider problem.
To understand the real crisis, we need to recall that the ANC after Polokwane is a very different organisation to that which existed before December, 2007. Before Polokwane, the ANC managed to keep most of its contests for power under wraps. Obviously, politicians competed for positions behind the scenes.
But to actively seek a position was considered selfish and divisive, and so there were relatively few open contests for posts. All this changed at Polokwane – within months, open contests were not only common, they sometimes seemed to have become the ANC’s main activity.
In one sense, this was a step forward for the ANC: contests for posts give members power because they force ambitious politicians to care about people in the branches whose votes they need. ANC leaders today are far more worried about pleasing the party’s active members than they were before Polokwane because they know that, if they ignore them, they could be voted out of office at the next conference.
But contests are only healthy if they happen within agreed rules, which ensure that the losers accept that they lost fairly and the winners recognise that the losers still have a role.
The ANC’s contests have not been like that at all. The losers often complain that the winners cheated, the winners try to drive the losers out. In some cases, contests are accompanied by violence.
One reason for this is that contests are new to the ANC. Unlike Cosatu, which has been running competitive elections for years, the ANC has not yet found a way to ensure that free and fair internal elections become a habit. But another, very important, reason is that much more is at stake.
Before 1994, to hold office in the ANC was to make a sacrifice – today it is to get in line to enjoy power and privilege. The contests are often heated because for many people they may be the only road into the middle class or above. And for some, the opening within the ANC since Polokwane has made it possible for more than a middle class life: it allows them the promise of wealth and power because they can use public office to enrich themselves and can then use their riches to buy the support of others.
If this diagnosis sounds harsh on the ANC, much of it can be found in its own documents tabled at its national general council last year, which were the product of work by a task team appointed by the national executive. So everything which has been said here is known to a section of the ANC leadership. But it cannot fix the problem because another section of the leadership does very well out of it and so wants it to last as long as possible.
This is why the real divide in the ANC is not that between the Youth League and the rest of the organisation – or between the ANC and its alliance partners – it is the battle between those who want a politics in which positions mean money and money means influence – and those who oppose them.
The league leadership’s role in this is to be the public face of the first grouping which is well represented at the top of the ANC – it is, as this column has suggested before, not itself powerful but it is protected by powerful politicians who find it useful.
But those who back the league are strongly opposed by a loose alliance, which is trying to prevent the politics of wealth and power from destroying the ANC’s credibility.
Whether Malema and his colleagues are disciplined then, does not depend on what a united ANC decides to do about the league. It is about the balance of power between the two types of politics. At the top of the organisation, members of the faction of which the league is a part will insist that it be left alone while their opponents will demand that it be disciplined. What happens in each case is a test of which faction, and so which type of politics, is stronger. Much of the time, the decision will show that neither side can get entirely what it wants because the other is strong enough to prevent that.
The battle is likely to continue for some time – years perhaps – and it will decide the ANC’s future. Competition for posts is inevitable in a democracy and the ANC will never return to the days when office-bearers were chosen without open contests. But competition needs to happen within rules, which ensure that the winners win because most members want them, not because they had more goodies to offer.
And contests must be about who leads, not who takes all the spoils at everyone else’s expense. Unless the ANC can achieve this, its crisis will continue whatever is done or not done about the league.
What happens to the ANC Youth League leaders may tell us something about which type of politics is winning. But we need to keep in mind the bigger picture.
The key issue is not whether some young politicians are disciplined but whether the ANC can adapt to life in a democracy without selling its soul.
Steven Friedman, Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy Rhodes University and University of Johannesburg. He writes in his own capacity.
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