National dialogue or factional farce? The graceless death spiral of the ANC: Isaac Mogotsi
Key topics:
ANC’s decline parallels historical national liberation movements’ fading power.
National Dialogue seen as a performative, flawed political stunt under Ramaphosa.
Neoliberalism blamed for ANC’s political collapse and loss of voter trust.
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By Isaac Mpho Mogotsi*
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce.” Karl Marx.
“History does not repeat itself. Man does.” Voltaire.
Benjamin Pogrud in 1990 published his biography of the great Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania founder Robert Sobukwe, arguably one of the greatest in the genre to come out of South Africa, and titled it Robert Sobukwe: How Can A Man Die Better.
With the now visible near-death of Robert Sobukwe’s PAC through its embrace of the Government of National Unity (GNU) formed in 2024, I suspect that were Pogrund to pen a sequel to his fascinating biography, he would most likely title it Pan Africanist Congress: How Can a National Liberation Movement Die Better.
But of course the title would as well work well for a biography on the current African National Congress (ANC) of Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa.
How does a national liberation movement die better in a democracy?
Fundamentally this is the greatest political question democratic South Africa is haunted by and grappling with since the verdict of our 2024 national election.
Political initiatives of Ramaphosa since the ouster of the ANC from being a single ruling power last year like the GNU and the National Dialogue really seek to implicate all of South Africa in the death spiral of and funeral arrangements for the ANC, politically speaking.
Yes, in that sense, as the Foundations stated, the National Dialogue is all performative.
But so too is GNU, which in addition has proven to be quite chaotic.
Will it be suicide for the ANC? All indicators point to this outcome.
Will it be pushed over the cliff electorally in 2029? That will be the voters’ last resort.
Or will someone do a Mikhael Gorbachev on the fading ANC and apply political euthanasia?
The signs and smell of organisational political death of liberation movements in democratic South Africa are all over and overpowering us, although we still lack the appropriate language to articulate the tragedy and to make sense of it all.
However the funeral preparations can no longer be postponed. They must continue even though the political life support systems must be kept working, at least until the next national election in 2029.
Strangely this is one death that does not bring tears to our eyes, nor does it really sadden us much.
We kind of feel liberated by and euphoric about its impending nature.
We kind of collectively will ourselves to shout out loud to death that:
Death, you did not rob us. You are enriching our politics.
Conventional wisdom has it that once when asked what the significance of the great 1789 French Revolution was, Mao Tse Tung, the founder of the Chinese People’s Republic (PRC), said that it was too early to tell.
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What is not too early to ruminate about for South Africans are some of the key lessons of what Hegel defined as “world-historic facts and personages” to do with the French Revolution and its aftershocks, and their possible relevance to the unseemly acrimony that has now erupted between certain Foundations advocating for a National Dialogue and the Presidency of Cyril Ramaphosa.
The spark that ignited the great French Revolution was initially as inauspicious as this undignified public quarrel between the Ramaphosa and the Foundations.
About two years before the French Revolution erupted, the French Emperor Louis XVI, facing multiple national crises devastating his tottering rule, not quite unlike what South Africa faces today, convened an Assembly of Notables to gain approval from ruling elites for his various reforms, especially to do with the parlous national finances. The corrupt rule of the Emperor, which was one of the main gripes of the public, just as there is so much national anger at the corruption under the ANC in the last three decades, and the Emperor’s massive support for the American War of Independence against his continental rival in the British ruling Royals, had nearly brought the finances of the French Empire to a screeching halt.
The Emperor’s Finance Minister Charles Alexandre de Colonne, not unlike South Africa’s Government of National Unity (GNU) Finance Minister Enoch Godongwane just a few months back, struggled to cobble together anything resembling a viable budget for the Empire.
Thus was born the idea of Emperor Louis XVI to convene a sort of National Dialogue, or what the French Emperor called the Assembly of Notables of about 144 leaders from the two leading Estates of Nobility and the Clergy in the feudal French society of the time, but who were more or less inclined, the Emperor reckoned, to support his reform proposals and help him to chart a way forward into the future which could lift the corrupt and moribund French Empire from its doldrums.
This today reads like the story of the fading ANC of Ramaphosa and its National Dialogue confabulation.
To cut a long story short, the French were not fooled by their corrupt Emperor and it all ended in tears.
The Assembly of Notables, call them Eminent Persons Group, to use President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa’s phraseology, could not even agree among themselves and splintered in public acrimony and mutual recrimination, not to mention that they could not agree with any representatives of the Third Estate representing mainly the insurgent, militant but still inchoate French bourgeoisie or capitalist class.
Doesn’t this sound eerily like the feud between the Foundations and President Ramaphosa over the National Dialogue?
The ill-advised initiative of French Emperor Louis XVI so agitated the Third Estate (who enjoyed unofficial support of the Fourth Estate, namely the media), that by the end of 1789 let us just say the rule of Emperor Louis XVI was guillotined.
It is thus easy to see why Hegel, Karl Marx and Voltaire were right about history, even though at first glance their statements may provoke cognitive dissonance in some amongst us.
There is a more salutary example history provides of how a ruling elite confronts, is deeply shaken by, embraces, steadies itself from and is energised by the loss of political power to reimagine itself and emerge triumphant on the other side from a shattering experience of loss of political power, without resorting to the cheap political gimmicks of an Assembly of Notables of the French Emperor Louis XVI or a National Dialogue of Cyril Ramaphosa.
The first step to take in that difficult, bruising long journey is to accept to go back to your political roots and to the basics of politics.
In 1979 Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), formed in 1961, took power through a popular Revolution that overthrew the hated and cruel Samoza dictatorship and carried out radical, leftist policies for over a decade, until they in turn were booted out of power as a result of an electoral defeat in 1990. For the following sixteen years the Sandinistas accepted their reduced, humble political standing in society and went on to sit on parliamentary benches chastised as the official opposition in Nicaragua.
No political gimmicks like forming a Government of National Unity (GNU) with its lifelong sworn political enemies like Nicaragua’s National Opposition Union or calling for a National Dialogue after the loss of political power.
The Sandinistas humbled themselves and with great dignity accepted the verdict of the Nicaraguan voters’ harsh judgment on their political rule between 1979 and 1990. They resolved to work harder to regain the trust and confidence of the Nicaraguan voters and to reconnect with their grassroots supporters at an even deeper political level than they did before they lost political power.
Their great and shining ruling record between 1970 and 1990 stood them in great stead in their very successful oppositional role.
In a delicious historical comparison, the Sandinistas won 40.8% of the vote in the 1990 election they lost, whilst the African National Congress (ANC) of Ramaphosa won a paltry 40.2% of the vote in the 2024 election they dismally lost, performing worse than even the Sandinistas at their weakest political moment.
The Sandinistas’ post-power political strategy between 1990 and 2006 worked miracles for them.
They won the parliamentary majority back in the 2006 election and have been in power since.
However the principal political difference between the dying ANC and the Sandinistas is that the Sandinistas at no stage of their political rule ever implemented a neoliberal economic agenda the way the ANC did over the last three decades.
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Neoliberal policies were never allowed to be implemented in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas to sunder the strong and enduring political bond between the vast majority of Nicaragua’s poor and Sandinistas’ leaders.
Here in an object political lesson for the ANC of Ramaphosa!
The appropriate epitaph on the ANC’s tombstone should read:
“Killed by a self-served overdose of neoliberalism.”
This is a hard path to regain power which the factional, weak and corrupt African National Congress (ANC) of Cyril Ramaphosa, which is ideologically and zoologically committed to neoliberalism, flatly refused to countenance following its rejection by the South African voters in the national election of last year as it continues to hallucinate that it remains “the leader of society,” even after it was rejected by 60% of the voters last year.
Instead they are comforted to ladle themselves in the cheap political gimmicks akin to those of the corrupt and feudal French Emperor Louis XVI’s Assembly of Notables
Nothing is sadder than witnessing a formerly glorious and mighty national liberation movement like the ANC die a slow-motion death in a democracy from a thousand self-inflicted neoliberal stabs of the last three decades.
The 2024 election outcome clearly demonstrated that the incredible political bond which existed between the ANC of Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma and the vast majority of our people post 1994 has been rendered asunder, in all likelihood permanently so.
And it is these neoliberal economic policies accounting for the ANC’s political death which the envisaged National Dialogue of Ramaphosa’s government will not be allowed to ditch.
The bitter fallout between Ramaphosa and the Foundatios remind us also of the farce aspect to history which Karl Marx referred to.
The National Dialogue advocated by and being convened by Ramaphosa harks back to the Kempton Park Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) talks of the early to mid-1990s. Even the leading lights of the current iteration of the National Dialogue initiative like Ramaphosa himself and Roelf Meyer were leading players in the CODESA of the 1990s.
Karl Marx would have mockingly remarked about “…the same caricature occurs…” By this he would have meant that when history repeats (or, as Voltaire would say, when man repeats himself), it or he does so in a highly degraded, comedic tragedy sense.
Even pensioners Ramaphosa and Meyer, let alone Brigalia Bam at 92, must know that they are shadows of their former, robust 1990s selves in terms of their intellectual energy and output.
The current iteration of the National Dialogue is as farcical as Mosiua Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa styling their party in 2009 as Congress of the People (COPE) after the historic 1955 Kliptown Congress of the People which adopted the Freedom Charter, or Jacob Zuma styling his party as Umkhonto we Sizwe Party (MKP) after the historic Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC during apartheid times, or Floyd Shivambu’s Mayibuye Consultative Initiative after the anti-colonial struggle slogan Mayibuye i’Afrika!
It’s all a political farce. And the great antecedents are hugely cheapened by such attention-seeking political stunts
The most critical point in all of this is that the current initiative to convene the National Dialogue attests to the sad fact that elite elements of our society led by Ramaphosa have failed to make sense of what our robust democracy, constitutional order, periodic elections, the free media, strong and active citizenry, new social media outlets, non-governmental organisations, our Constitution and the various rulings of our judiciary as well as the very rich heritage of our democratic and representative national Parliament provide daily in terms of dialogues on the state of our country and the nation amongst the citizens of South Africa and how to chart a way forward.
If Ramaphosa is so intolerant to dissent from the Foundation which broadly support his questionable National Dialogue initiative about a small matter like when to convene the National Dialogue, what chance is there that he will even entertain say Jacob Zuma or Zuma’s MKP or Solly Mapaila’s faction of the SACP (not the SACP’s Blue Light GNU brigade) in terms of a robust debate in such a National Dialogue?
Again the Foundations are right that the current iteration of the National Dialogue is performative and, as Mikhael Gorbachev would protest, driven by self-imposed calendar dates and not a democratic and least so a revolutionary imperative.
Clearly this is not a National Dialogue but more a factional backslapping by Ramaphosa’s fan base, it would seem.
The National Dialogue in its current iteration is not a brilliant idea but a photo-shopped copy. In fact it is a demonstration of abject failure of political imagination in the mist of our overlapping acute and worsening national crises. It is intellectual flailing by desperate ruling political elites at their wit’s end.
The current National Dialogue initiative may in fact be an attempt to supplant and displace all these rich democratic voices and instruments with a contrived, elite-driven and technocratic consensus about a vision for democratic South Africa’s future that does not even enjoy electoral imprimatur required in a democratic society.
It will seek to hijack by stealth a national democratic mandate that must always reside with a national parliament elected freely by the people in a democracy, and not seek to overshadow the voices of the people as given expression by our elected parliamentarians.
This is the reason why the voters in the national election last year were never canvassed by any political party in manifestos about the GNU and National Dialogue, although all opinion polls indicated clearly more than a year before the election that the ANC was destined to lose its majority.
Therein may lay the biggest risk and threat posed by the current heedless stampede to convene the National Dialogue so soon after South Africans rendered a clear verdict on the State of the Nation in the national election of last year.
A proper National Dialogue can only happen after our 2029 election, and not even in December 2025, when all political parties would have been given the chance to canvass the electorate about its wisdom and desirability.
Otherwise this rushed National Dialogue will fail just as the National Development Plan (NDP) has failed and continues to fail dismally, something some of us also predicted and warned about soon upon its release in 2012.
Once bitten, twice shy.
*Isaac Mpho Mogotsi Historian, Award-winning Author, former Freedom Fighter, former Teacher, former Diplomat, Economic Diplomat.
Founder & Executive Chairman, Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)