You have to give it to the political attachés in some embassies – they have been more diligent than some journalists in getting the news from the horse’s mouth, flying across the country to attend party rallies at the weekend in the hot sun, for instance. Some, notably the ANC in its peace and security discussion document, might call these people the bladdie agents of Foreign Intelligence Services, out to weaken the South African state and “mobilise the unsuspecting masses” to rise up.

Remember the spy cable leaks a couple of years ago describing Africa as the “El Dorado of espionage” with South Africa at its centre? Yes, these ANC policy documents rely on facts.

But lest that sends readers into fits of paranoia, there’s actually a much more mundane explanation for why the ANC has decided not to invite or accredit any ambassadors or diplomats to its conference.

ANC spokesperson Zizi Kodwa explained that “we are one of the countries outside of America with the highest number of diplomats” and the ANC had to limit those on the guest list because Nasrec, the conference venue in Soweto, was only that big.

He said diplomats from countries “we’ve always had very historical relations with, like liberation movements, and anti-apartheid movements in some parts of the world” were invited. He didn’t have a list with him to expand on that.

There are, however, 134 foreign missions in Pretoria.

A number of European embassies have not been able to get access to the conference, including some of South Africa’s biggest trading partners. Kodwa, however, said if diplomats from a mission were not invited “it doesn’t exclude that we have good relations with those countries”. It just means there wasn’t enough space.

The party’s national executive committee had to take a decision about the number of people who could attend the conference, which would include 2,500 branch delegates, fewer than at an elective conference, so that policy discussions would be more manageable, and a staggering 1,500 journalists.

Another 1,000 or so guests are set to attend, bringing the total number of accreditations to about 5,000, Kodwa said.

The media presence at this conference really is the story – previous conferences had about 300 to 500 hacks present, but this time around the number was bloated because there was a lot of interest from the community media. Local radio stations, like Hillbrow FM, and newspapers made up 35% of all accredited – and contrary to rumour, Kodwa said nobody’s accreditation was turned down purely because of space.

Policy uncertainty currently has free rein in South Africa, and many foreign businesses with interests – or prospective interests – here would love to know where things are going. While the ghost of the National Development Plan will try its best to haunt the discussions in the various commissions this weekend in an effort to get ANC cadres to maybe take it seriously, realistically speaking the plan seems somewhat dead in the water.

Diplomats would love to hang around the conference to try gauge what the party’s policy debates would yield – seeing that these would manifest in government policy soon after – so they could in turn speak with authority to investors or whoever else might ask their opinion on this.

One said they would be interested in knowing if the revolutionary language in the documents – think “radical economic transformation”, for example – will remain rhetoric or be realised in government policy.

The volume of the songs sung and the ultimate outcomes of the commissions could be a barometer of where the votes could ultimately go in the party’s elective conference in December, where the main contenders are expected to be former African Union Commission chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa.

Perhaps, amid the recent ratings downgrades and technical recession, and with the different lobbies in the ANC fighting each other harder than any EFF member could in Parliament (the two-day “consultative conference” that will follow the policy conference could see a lot of dirty political laundry being aired, for instance), the ANC would prefer the details of its collective thoughts to remain a bit of a blur for as long as humanly possible.

As a consolation prize, some diplomats will be allowed to go to the Progressive Business Forum’s gala dinner and business breakfasts during the conference. They might not be able to mingle with the grassroots there, but at least they’ll get a slightly sanitised version from the horse’s mouth when heads of party subcommittees brief them on policy directions.

The ANC has had diplomat issues for a while. In better days, diplomats were even allowed to sit in on some discussion sessions closed to the media.

In 2010 there was a bit of a spat when diplomats were “disinvited” from the party’s national general council (NGC), which takes place midway between conferences, but party secretary general Gwede Mantashe had to explain that they had, in fact, not been invited to the past two NGCs.

Mantashe did, however, stress that many diplomats did attend the party conference in Polokwane 2007 – an event that didn’t quite go down in the annals of history as the movement’s proudest.

There were reports that ambassadors had been “putting out feelers” about attending that NGC, which took place in Durban, but the party very considerately decided not to invite them because they would have to fly from Pretoria for roughly two hours of open time during the opening and the closing speeches.

It’s perhaps a little similar to the African Union, where Dlamini-Zuma banned Western diplomats from attending summits and inviting African government officials and leaders to side-meetings so that the continental body could get on with its work – except that most of the AU’s money still comes from these countries and they felt this warranted them a right to come close enough to keep an eye on how their money was being spent.

At least the handful of diplomats that didn’t make the cut to the policy conference can console themselves with the thought that the event could turn out to be one of the most well-covered political conferences in South African history. DM

Photo: ANC President Jacob Zuma’s speech at Mangaung conference, 18 December 2012 (Greg Nicolson)