Tafelberg Short: The ANC's Battle of Mangaung. Susan Booysen

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      In the run-up to the ANC’s national elective conference in Mangaung it is essential to unpack the ‘no-campaigning campaigns’ that were converting into seemingly massive advantages for the Zuma side (Chapter 3). They plunged the ANC into a whirlpool reminiscent of the Polokwane putsch of 2007 (Chapter 4). It was simultaneously a set of different organisational challenges and insistence on change (or tolerance for non-change) that unfolded. Core role players had learnt the Polokwane lessons (Chapter 5), which included organisational splits and fallout suffered in government. In working to prevent a repeat of the Polokwane thrill, however, they unleashed new sets of pressures. On one level the strains appeared set to enforce organisational stability. On another, the politics in the pressure cooker were changing the ANC as irreversibly as Polokwane’s open contest had done.

      The 2012 Zuma campaign stood in the light of the chief incumbent at first pitching himself against the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) and especially its expelled former president Julius Malema. This endured at least until other opposition to Zuma consolidated from October onwards. The ANCYL’s blurred lines of political challenge and political and public finance ethics became entangled in the future ANC-South African president’s election (Chapter 5). The ANC’s mid-year 2012 policy conference in Midrand and the eventual September 2012 confirmation of the resolutions indicated the nature of the ANC at the time of Mangaung (Chapter 6). When the ANC ran out of options to guarantee a better life for more in the foreseeable future, its governing-party plans for additional and more concrete delivery and transformation shifted further into the future, and particularly became lodged in the real or make-believe public statements that a second-term Zuma would bring the realisation of the promises of the first term. The ‘Lula moment’ was the vessel to carry the factional belief that Zuma was the ‘good president’ who was just too busy during the first term to make good on his Polokwane promises.

      Policy-replacement actions circa 2012 were ambiguous. Nationalisation of mines and other strategic operations or redistribution of land was twisted to become rhetorically promising, yet substantively in retention of much of the black economic empowerment (BEE) status quo. Nationalisation of the mines – in addition to the more conventional meanings – could very well entail that empowerment-operations-gone-wrong in the minerals industry had to be rescued, or that the state should own 51 percent, which would then be farmed out for management by an expanded class of patriotic capital.

The sub-theme of the second transition versus the second phase of the transition went beyond the 2012 policy conference to epitomise the mid-year phase in the Battle of Mangaung (Chapter 7). The policy conference’s ‘second transition’ first promised turnarounds to the national democratic society in the 30- to 50-year term. Later, the compromise ‘second phase of the transition’ posed 20 years as the realistic date. The final announcement of the resolutions was silent on the ‘delivery date’. The fact that this debate hinged on whether transformation was to be carried out in a ‘transition’ or a ‘phase’ in a transition illustrated the farce that the discourse of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) and its stages had become.[3]

      The concluding Chapter 8 deals with the ANC’s Mangaung moment linking into the Centenary celebrations. Can the flickering Centenary flame rekindle the ANC that most South Africans do not believe has spluttered to its last, even if much is in the balance? Did the celebration of the lives of the organisation’s preceding presidents show up the shortcomings of recent incumbents more graphically than intended – to a point that it etched out the need for a profound change in ANC direction? The ANC’s centenary year nurtured memories of struggle and inserted the past into the present. South Africa was reminded that the struggle was not finished. The lingering question, perhaps being taken up by a generation of emerging leaders (will they show themselves at Mangaung?), was how to revert to delivering on struggle goals rather than massaging the whims of comrades in party and government that are driven by private privilege rather than public good.

      The year 2012 was seminal for the ANC, for many more reasons than just being the Centenary filled with celebrations. It witnessed the ANC trying to take out insurance against shortfalls on expectations. The Zuma grouping encouraged nationalist mobilisation – both broadly to let the ANC’s centenary remind South Africans of the unjust racial past and how it continuously impacts government, and more reactively against acts of cultural insensitivity like artist Brett Murray’s depiction of the president in his painting The Spear. Things came to a much more serious point when Marikana’s labour revolts turned into a massacre by the South African police. This was paired with international rating agencies Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s downgrading South Africa’s credit rating – to some extent inappropriately, given the immediately pending Medium-term Budget Policy Statement that would put many of the uncertainties to bed – and the Economist singing the woes of Cry, the Beloved Country in a cover story. Well before, and foreshadowing, Marikana, community protests became more frequent and more violent. Unemployment remained just about intact (and in 2012 was shown to have grown) and growth prospects for the economy were adjusted downwards. All this was while the ship of state ploughed forth with well-fed commanders on board. Nkandlagate ahoy! The developments etched out the deficiencies of the post-liberation project and revealed the thin balance between life as we have known it from 1994-2012, and a future that was not anchored in belief in the ANC and its alliance partners.

1. The writing of The ANC’s Battle of Mangaung was finalised on 11 November 2012.

2. See Susan Booysen, 2011,The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power, Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press; Susan Booysen, 2012, ‘Regeneration of ANC political power, from the 1994 electoral victory to the 2012 centenary’, in Noor Nieftagodien, Arianna Lissoni & John Soske (Eds), One Hundred Years of the ANC, Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press.

3. David Moore, 2012, ‘Two perspectives on the national democratic revolution in Zimbabwe: Thabo Mbeki and Wilfred Mhanda’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 30, 4, pp. 119-138.

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