RW Johnson: “People think they can do as they wish”

Obed Bapela's recent actions highlight growing indiscipline within the ANC. Despite South Africa's stance against Morocco, Bapela misled his party, taking a delegation to Morocco to discuss trade, defying ANC policy. With figures like Bapela and Panyaza Lesufi challenging central authority, the ANC's fragmentation may accelerate, signalling the decline of its once cohesive and powerful influence..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..By RW Johnson .___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Listen to the article in full.Obed Bapela has just lost his seat on the ANC's National Executive Committee – and with it his deputy chairmanship of the ANC's International Relations Sub-Committee – after a fairly remarkable piece of indiscipline. South Africa has no diplomatic relations with Morocco because of its support for the rebel movement, Polisario, in the Western Sahara. Bapela told the ANC he was going there on holiday but in fact he took a "delegation" with him and claimed to the Moroccan authorities that he could increase trade and investment between the two countries He met with their foreign minister, invited their businessmen to South Africa and generally posed as a person with governmental status and authority. All of this in complete defiance of ANC policy. Explaining Bapela's punishment, the Secretary-General, Fikile Mbalula, said "We have reached a stage in the organisation, like the ANC, where people think they can do as they wish.".Yet last week the President of the ANC Youth League, Collen Malatji, announced that at least 50% of government ministers must represent the youth, that the government had to "fix unemployment" which so blights the young, and that if Ramaphosa did not do these things by Christmas he, Malatji, would install himself as President instead. He then led a youth march to the JSE in Sandton to demand jobs and "economic freedom"– a laughable waste of time – but, interestingly, the Gauteng premier, Panyaza Lesufi, marched with Malatji despite the fact that the latter had effectively just threatened a coup against the sitting President..Lesufi himself, of course, has continually taken his own path more or less in defiance of Ramaphosa's GNU, most notably by working to exclude the DA from a government of provincial unity in Gauteng and then by forcing the dismissal of Cilliers Brink as mayor of Tshwane. Lesufi is a populist and SACP member with exaggerated hopes of becoming President himself. When challenged by Helen Zille Lesufi has angrily insisted that his actions have been backed by the ANC's NEC and that the ANC is a national and democratic centralist body and "not a federalist party" like the DA. This is true inasmuch as he has managed to get NEC confirmation of his position but Lesufi acted first and then demanded and got ANC backing. Had the NEC not backed him it would have created an open split in the organisation, something Ramaphosa is desperate to avoid at all costs..Read more: 🔒 Hartford: SA's political crisis – The ANC faces a reckoning as populist offshoots split the nationalist legacy.So what is going on here and what do all these acts of open indiscipline mean ? I would argue that these incidents are symptomatic of the way that the ANC is pulling itself to pieces and that they ultimately imply the death of the ANC. But let us go back: when did this begin ? And why ?.The fundamental moment came in 2005 when Mbeki dismissed Zuma as deputy-president. Mbeki, habituated to the iron discipline of the exiled ANC, assumed that that would be the end of Zuma. Cut off in disgrace by the centre and devoid of all patronage or even a salary, he would disappear into ignominy. That had been the fate in exile of anyone who had fallen foul of the central authority. But that was because the centre controlled all the patronage, all the funding, the arms, the jobs, the scholarships, everything. When the Gang of 8 were expelled in 1975 the gang gathered no following at all. It had no patronage to distribute..The ANC has been a broad church in every way – ethnically, ideologically and otherwise. So splits could be expected. But apart from the centralised system of patronage distribution it was united during the Struggle by the great enemy, apartheid. But apartheid has long gone and although there has been an attempt to invent a new, unifying enemy – white monopoly capital – this is just an empty phrase and people know it. The apartheid system created bantustans, operated pass laws, prevented Africans from doing certain jobs and intervened unpleasantly in many aspects of black life. "White monopoly capital" does none of these things and in practice most Africans would be delighted to be working for any major corporation, white-led or otherwise. .Once the ANC returned home its cadres spread out round this large and diverse country and quickly became embedded in all manner of opportunities, enterprises and rackets which the centre did not control or, sometimes, didn't even know about. Mbeki felt threatened by the growing independence of local elites and tried to insist that he as President would nominate not only the cabinet and the boards of all state institutions and SOEs but all premiers and mayors. This was an attempt to re-assert the centralist strait-jacket over increasingly vigorous local interests and their sprawling patronage networks. .Mbeki had grossly miscalculated. Zuma was able to marshal all the discontented and a large swathe of Zulu opinion and at Polokwane in 2007 he overthrew Mbeki. Away went all thoughts that the centre would choose all the premiers and mayors. Moreover, now that there were two ANCs to choose from the press was liberated to criticise and Mbeki was considerably weakened by that. .Zuma, when he took over, consolidated his power by creating an alliance of quasi-independent local bosses – the so-called Premier league. These bosses – David Mabuza in Mpumalanga, Supra Mahumapelo in North West and Ace Magashule in the Free State – could pillage their provinces to their hearts' content provided they supported President Zuma. Zuma wasn't interested in party discipline for its own sake – he just wanted to control the votes to guarantee his own position of power. Equally, neither Zuma nor the Premier League were interested in the constitution. They did as they wished and ignored the rule of law. It was rule by autocratic African chiefs..When Ramaphosa succeeded as President he knew from the outset that almost half of the ANC had voted for his opponent, Nkosasana Dlamini-Zuma, and that powerful figures from the Zuma camp were still well-placed in the ANC, none more so than the party's Secretary-General, Ace Magashule who, from the outset was openly hostile to the Ramaphosa administration. There was no question of Ramaphosa attempting to discipline such powerful elements. His strategy was simply to out-wait them, to allow at least some of them to fall in line so as to continue to enjoy the benefits of patronage and to replace some of those on the margin. This has worked but Ramaphosa has never been truly the master of his party and has continually to worry whether the NEC will move in directions he doesn't want. .It seems clear that the next ANC leader will have an even weaker position. Party unity depended for many years on the struggle against the great enemy, apartheid. .The concomitant fact of the Struggle was that those who played leading roles in it gained a large, national reputation and following. But Ramaphosa is the last ANC leader to have played a role in the Struggle. Whoever succeeds him is likely to be someone only known in their home province and without any real national following. Such a person will struggle to impose themselves on the powerful provincial and metropolitan bosses..Party unity was a sacred cow in exile but Zuma's rebellion broke the great taboo of "democratic centralism". When Zuma rebelled against Mbeki after 2005 he always insisted he was loyal to the ANC and would remain so while he lived. But this no longer holds. He showed other dissidents that it was possible not just to rebel and win but even to leave and win. When the Zuma faction lost power some of its adherents created their own little parties like the African Transformation Movement and finally Zuma himself launched the MKP, though cleverly using the name of the ANC's old military wing. This enables Zuma to claim ownership of the most militant ANC tradition and kinship with the many dead heroes of MK..And South Africa's PR electoral system makes it easy for ANC breakaways to get into Parliament. The lesson of the last decade is that if the central ANC attempts to exert its authority over factional leaders, it will pay a heavy price – expelling Julius Malema resulted in his EFF stealing around 10% of the vote from the ANC and in 2024 the EFF, MKP and other breakaway fragments robbed the ANC of its majority altogether..So the prospect the ANC faces is that its central authority will get weaker and its provincial and metropolitan bosses will get stronger and more independent. The first time that that happened was with the Premier League and that example casts an ominous shadow. African politics can be very tough and violent and ANC leaders have not infrequently become involved with gangsters as they exploit their dominant positions to amass resources by hook or by crook. Both in David Mabusa's Mpumalanga and Supra Mahumapelo's North West a number of people who got in the way – whistle-blowers and the like – were murdered. In other words independent provincial and metropolitan bosses can easily become warlords. .Panyaza Lesufi has just proudly told Helen Zille that the ANC is not a federal party – but it is clearly on the road to becoming one. That is, the ANC will become more like other South African parties – the old National Party was always torn by tension between its Cape and Transvaal wings, the DA is quite formally a federal party and so on. As this happens South Africa itself will become more of a federal state, whatever the constitution says. But, in the ANC's case, there is a serious risk that quasi-independent provincial bosses could morph into something far more sinister..The real question is whether these centrifugal forces will tear the ANC into yet more fragments or whether party discipline will become so loose that almost anything goes. Either way, the notion of the ANC as the great unifying broad church of all African people is already lost..Read also:.Stay in the fight: The ANC, DA and SA's GNU – KatzenellenbogenDeath of a liberation movement: How the ANC became just a regular political partySean McLaughlin: How the ANC and DA can find each other

RW Johnson: “People think they can do as they wish”

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