It’s 1989 in Cuba and the South African Communist Party is holding its seventh party conference, chaired by “Comrade Zukov” aka Thabo Mbeki. Oh, I’m sorry, you didn’t know he was a communist? He had been a member of the central committee of the SACP since June 1970.

Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, when writing about the impending banning of the Communist Party, tells us of a meeting that Moses Kotane called in 1953, in which the executive announced that the party would henceforth cease to exist. The argument put forward was that when the National Party won the whites-only election, the first legislation their Parliament passed was the Suppression of Communism Act. Hence it would be simply a matter of time before they would be arresting communist members and make them forfeit all the assets of the Party.

So, to give the enemy no room to manoeuvre, the Communist Party would be no more. Rusty said it was the shortest meeting he had attended of his beloved party. He recalled telling a comrade as they were leaving the meeting that surely the leadership had a plan and that he expected them to be back in revolutionary business soon. It was not to be. The Communist Party was not heard from again until 1959.

Kotane and the party leadership argued that in order to prepare for the eventual banning, the party had to prepare itself to operate and function as a banned organisation — therefore the drastic step had been taken. They recruited their membership from scratch and this time they made it secret. A vetting process had to be undergone and another communist of repute had to vouch for you before you could join the party.

OR Tambo wanted to join the SACP at one point, but Kotane would have none of it. He met Tambo and insisted that the separation between the ANC and the SACP had to be retained so that those who joined were clear about why they had joined either party. Tambo agreed in the end.

Kotane also had a similar attitude ab0ut the formation of an armed wing. He did not relish an armed force falling under the ANC banner, but wanted the SACP to be seen as the organisation adopting an armed struggle. Nelson Mandela and others would have none of it, and hence both Joe Slovo and Mandela were appointed to oversee the formation of MK.

I mention this bit of history to illustrate that organisations must at times adapt to their circumstances and at times must take rather radical decisions if they are to withstand the influx of compromised people. People who don’t really support the ideals of the organisation, but who come in from the cold to feather their own beds.

But I digress.

One of the key arguments at the Cuba conference was whether the SACP should become a mass-based membership organisation or whether its members must remain secret. Zukov (Mbeki) insisted membership should remain secret while Slovo and Chris Hani argued for mass-based members. The latter two won that argument and Mbeki allowed his membership to lapse coming into the 1990s. Ironically, everyone saw him henceforth as a neoliberal.

Why am I mentioning this history to you? Well, because the ANC too, though it did not have secret members, had a discussion about how the organisation should be reintroduced inside the country after its lengthy exile.

Now one can only assume that because the ANC was worried about its hegemony, given that there existed an internal mass-based organisation, the UDF, the ANC wanted to ensure there were no competing power bases. The apartheid regime also preferred this because it thought that by dealing with the exiles they would be slightly more ill-prepared for complicated negotiations.

One example of how the ANC ensured its hegemony is with the convening of the Conference for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa). Here it insisted that Cosatu could not attend the conference because, I suspect, it was the largest organised formation with a membership at that time, tallying almost one million members. And we can’t have that now, can we, because they might just think they have a bigger say in matters.

The question at the time was, should there be branches in each community, village and suburb? These were some of the questions haunting the ANC at the time. Should it be mass-based and open to all and sundry? Or should we subscribe to “better fewer, but better” principle?

In the end, it was decided to opt for a mass-based membership. This, I argue, was the beginning of the end for the ANC.

Quality was immediately diluted because voices of reason and intellect could be drowned out by the majority. Ambition replaced commitment. Vanity instead of revolution. Money instead of volunteerism. Political education replaced with popular jargon.

The one big mistake we all made was to think that the ideology of racism was our only enemy. We never in our wildest dreams thought that it would ultimately be money. Given our history and poor backgrounds, the lure of money was to become the blight of our struggle for emancipation. Fancy watches, German-engineered cars and Louis Vuitton became the order of the day. And what about the masses, I hear you say. Well, darling, we didn’t exactly struggle to be poor, did we? So some comrades tell us these days. Every man for himself.

From the 1991 ANC National Conference in Durban, anyone could join the ANC without anyone having to vouch for you.

The ANC was, of course, not oblivious to this reality and so requested that a few cadres should research this phenomenon and then write a discussion paper. They aptly titled it “Politics as a vocation”. In other words, careerism within the political realm. What to make of it?

Another attempt at suppressing this phenomenon was to develop a guiding document — it’s not really policy, but a guide called “Through the Eye of the Needle”, that tells us what calibre of person or cadre can join the ANC. It talks of integrity, loyalty and discipline. But all of these academic interventions come to naught these days. The latest attempt at regulating good, upstanding and disciplined comrades was the ANC structure named the Integrity Committee. Made up of elders, this committee is supposed to ensure that the right kind of cadre can join, and indeed can maintain the required level of discipline in the organisation.

At first, it had no real teeth and its bark was always louder than its bite. At the Nasrec ANC conference in 2017 though, delegates remedied this situation and gave the committee some more teeth with which to bite. Its first real test is now before it, as it reviews the ANC elections list. I wish I could say “watch this space”, but alas, I fear we will not be seeing any significant bites from that lapdog.

Can we change the constitution of the ANC, can we be better with fewer, but better? Do we have to be a mass organisation? Should we change the electoral system of both the ANC and the country when it comes to the presidential election?

I don’t know the answers, but one thing is clear. The current crop at the helm, bar one or two, perhaps, is rotten to the core. And unless we give Cyril Ramaphosa a decisive mandate come 8 May, we get what we deserve. Because without that solid mandate, he will never be able to clean out the rot that has set in. DM