I have always loved covering ANC conferences and am now a veteran reporter in 2022 – the ANC’s 55th conference at Nasrec outside Johannesburg is my fifth. 

The organisation’s founding ethos as a congress of the people; its practice of convening to discuss that which impacts the people was deeply resonant as we grew up in an authoritarian state. Ordinary people from communities organised themselves into self-help organisations, and wise leaders turned this famous dynamism into a movement that took on colonialism and later apartheid. And won. 

From early in the 20th century, the then South African Native National Congress (the precursor to the ANC born in 1912) came together in “congress” to decide on its programmes which were birthed in the lived experience of the people who gave it life. It was an animating vision and a praxis I have followed with enthusiasm even through its internal incarnation, the United Democratic Front.  

Ferial Haffajee stands among media colleagues during a tense moment as the new president of the ANC was being announced at the previous ANC elective conference held at at Nasrec, 19 December 2017. (Photo: Leila Dougan)

At those early conferences of the ANC as a governing party, the philosophy was still apparent of a movement reflective of the people it represented and with a keen sense of its moral and political purpose. The branches were, in the main, collectives of professionals, workers, community organisers, later trade unionists and always revered intellectuals – the salt of the earth. The founders of the ANC had instilled this character into the movement, being one that thrived in the world of ideas. While they were pretty grand, the views of the equality of congress and people ensured that the social distance was mediated. This was a vision for a fairer and more equal world.  

I learnt my chops at the early conferences because you had to be fast and attentive to keep up with the quality of the debates. I quickly learnt the intricacies of development economics, social solidarity systems like the basic income and the difference between liberation organisations and political parties. Either the ANC has aged badly, or I have. 

When I read policy documents these days, it sounds like the same ideas and concepts (rural development, the district development model, urban regeneration, narrowing the social distance, a basic income) are being recycled and never implemented, like the phraseology of a finer age. 

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In earlier years, you could walk easily among delegates, getting to know them and hearing them and developing a sense of who the ANC is. We had exposure to great minds, which immeasurably improved the quality of my reporting. That started changing about 2007 at the ANC’s Polokwane conference as the battle lines hardened. The meetings became dominated by the ethos of the security state.

Earlier this week, I joined a queue of hundreds when I got to the FNB Stadium to fetch my accreditation to the ANC conference. When I checked if I was in the right one, the man in front of me asked if I was the police. As I would find, the snaking queue of hundreds were all police officers. There are more police in Nasrec than I have ever seen gathered in Johannesburg, which can make Mexico City look like a Sunday school picnic on a bad day.

Because of the confluence of Cabinet members and the ANC NEC, a security structure called the NATJOINTS (National Joint Operational Security Structure), made up of the police’s finest intelligence and first responders, had designated Nasrec a national key point. The city’s electricity utility company, City Power, also granted Nasrec an exemption from Stage 6 rolling blackouts after the Generals made the request. (City Power grants load-shedding exemptions for significant events, explained the spokesperson Isaac Mangena). 

But the securitised precinct, with the heavy police and army presence, made the occasion feel increasingly like an Orwellian Animal Farm to me; Nasrec like an island of light and safety in a sea of darkness and people at their Stage 6 wits’ end.

In addition to deep blackouts, Johannesburg is in freefall after floods on 5 December. As the conference started on 16 December, the city’s mayor Mpho Phalatse asked that the city be declared a local state of disaster. She said the remains of a three-month-old baby had still not been found after being lost in the floods after a tragedy at the Jukskei River, where 15 people died as the banks washed away. The emergency services are on 24/7 duty and too thinly spread to mediate the disaster, yet Nasrec has many emergency personnel sitting idle in case the powerful need them. The city’s most vulnerable informal settlements have been hit hardest, with 61 shanty homes damaged. When last I checked, there were 5,000 logged additional power cuts at City Power, so it will be a dark Christmas for many of the city’s six million people. 

The fully lit Nasrec, oblivious to the context of depleting power cuts, raises the obvious metaphor of it as an island of power privilege or an Animal Farm. The people’s leaders have grown fattened and distant; some are more equal than others. 

A stall selling ANC regalia stands just beyond a flooded pavement close to the area where delegates neral view of stalls outside one of the delegates accreditation areas in Johannesburg, South Africa, 17 December 2022. (Photo: Leila Dougan)

When asked about the exemption, the ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe got agitated at the question, saying Daily Maverick was trying to drive a wedge between the party and the people of Soweto, where the Nasrec industrial exhibition ground is built. He said the party’s headquarters, Luthuli House, in the inner city get power cuts like any other building. 

The ANC Conference may well be a particular case which needs a load-shedding exemption, but in a country that is on its knees in the worst year of blackouts since rolling scheduled power shedding started in 2007, the ironies were like shards. 

I know from years of experience that many salt-of-the-earth people in the ANC are in stand-up fights against the forces of patronage. The media people who run an open show, the officials, who keep the wheels turning, and the die-hard activists running the elections and committees.

But from whom did the people’s representatives need so much police protection, I wondered as I wandered past the barricades that kept some from others.  

The party’s journey from haloed congress to distant and powerful incumbency seemed tragically near complete. DM