Elections will tear the ANC apart

The current internal contestation of the ANC suggests it is going to end these elections much more divided than it went into them. This is a huge indictment on all of the regions, structures and leaders involved in this.

For many years divisions in the ANC would appear to go to sleep during election season. Gwede Mantashe, when he was secretary-general of the ANC, once suggested during a debate about whether local elections should be combined with national and provincial elections, that anyone in his position would oppose it.

His point was that we are now in a cycle where there are local or national elections every two or three years and that was helping to keep the ANC together. He was pointing to how internal divisions could be temporarily forgotten as the party’s members and leaders all worked together.

Of course, during elections people outside the party would also criticise the ANC and this would also remind its members about the tent they lived in, forcing them to work together. No longer.

Last week, the ANC’s Eastern Cape secretary, Lulama Ngcukayitobi, threatened to sue the ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula for defamation over his allegations about why some of the province’s candidates were not registered for the local elections.

The Sunday Times had reported that the ANC’s list only arrived at Luthuli House just 30 minutes before they had to be logged with the electoral commission. This meant Mbalula’s office did not have enough time to enter all the names.

While it seems insane for one provincial secretary to sue the secretary-general, from Ngcukayitobi’s point of view he probably has no other option. He must be facing incredibly angry members who are about to lose their jobs. He now needs to prove to his constituency, the people who elected him to his position, that he was not the one at fault.

But, any legal action will reveal more about the internal disarray in the party.

In Joburg the tensions are obvious.

So desperate is Luthuli House to prevent Joburg ANC region chair Loyiso Masuku from becoming mayor, they have kept Dada Morero in office. With all of the electoral disaster that will ensue.

Somehow, the one person who could have perhaps helped to rescue the ANC in the city, Frank Chikane, has been left off its candidate list entirely.

This robs the ANC of the chance to claim that it will be able to reform itself in the city.

It also shows that this is a party prepared to treat someone who has made the immense contribution that Chikane has made incredibly badly. 

He deserves better. 

The ANC has shown that it is not capable of giving him the respect his track record deserves.

Voters will see this. And understand that if the ANC is prepared to treat someone like Chikane like that, what could it do to them? (Perhaps the answer lies in Pemmy Majodina’s coarse insult to one voter, or in Morero’s recent diatribe against another…).

While it may be tempting to believe that these are isolated incidents there is incredible proof they are not.

The incredibly public event the ANC planned to announce its mayoral candidates for metros, only to have to cancel the announcement at the last second, must count as the most embarrassing incident of this election so far (there may well be more to come).

It shows so many things:

That regions were able to prevent the announcement in the first place, that they had the power to override the wishes of Luthuli House. 

That Luthuli House was so weak that it could not prevail.

And crucially, that the people who arranged that event did not have a proper understanding of what was happening in their own party.

In other words, it shows that people at Luthuli House did not understand the true balance of power. Essentially, Luthuli House did not realise how weak it was compared with the regions.

It is also likely that the damage all of this has caused will continue after the elections, deepening the divisions further. Many people in the Eastern Cape and the Free State will come out of the elections having lost their salaries, their power and their patronage.

In the Free State the party failed to submit its full list of proportional representation candidates in Mangaung. This means it could be out of power entirely in that city.

As a result, unless it forms a minor part of a bigger coalition, the loss of power will be massive. This will result in a large number of frustrated people looking for someone to blame. 

This might intensify Ngcukayitobi’s claims that he was not responsible for people losing their jobs, while Mbalula will have to defend himself.

Of course, many of these dynamics have happened in the past.

In the lead-up to the 2021 local elections there was strong evidence that the ANC in Tshwane was unhappy with its final list. Ten years ago there were violent protests in Tshwane as different factions of the ANC took their battles against Luthuli House to the streets. 

However, the breadth and depth of the divisions on public display now are something new.

Strangely, as the ANC continues to decline, there are more and more fights over less and less political power.

The ANC now appears to be in a doom loop, where, as it loses votes, so the fights for the positions and power left over become more intense, and thus it loses more votes.

Considering how our politics as a whole is fracturing, a process mirrored with the fracturing of the ANC, it is incredibly unlikely this process can be stopped.

Instead, each public division will speed up the party’s decline.

This means that instead of elections bringing the party together, as they did in the past, each future election might instead drive it further apart. DM