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Andrew Mlangeni, a man of honour who trusted his party above the people

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Omry Makgoale is a rank and file member of the ANC. These are his personal views.

Andrew Mokete Mlangeni has departed, leaving a footprint of courage, integrity and service to the people of South Africa. The legend of Umkhonto we Sizwe has departed, the first MK recruit, and the first volunteer of the people’s army. We are left with his footprints to follow. We know the direction.

Andrew Mlangeni was born on 6 June 1925 in the Free State. The former bus driver joined the ANC Youth League in 1951 and the ANC mother body in 1954. Mlangeni served the country well.

His life is a mirror of South Africa and the ANC across the past 95 years. From the time he joined the Youth League and the mother body he was never not in the thick of the struggle in service of the people.

After the National Party took power in 1948 and introduced full-scale apartheid, the condition of the great majority went from bad to worse. The United Party of Jan Smuts had a semblance of liberalism but the National Party was outright racist.

Together with his comrades in the ANC and SACP, Mlangeni challenged these racist laws through passive resistance. He participated in the Defiance Campaign against unjust laws in 1952 and was a delegate in the Congress of the People at Kliptown in 1955 when it adopted the Freedom Charter, the first non-racial policy document in the history of South Africa. The adoption of the Freedom Charter led to the arrest of Congress leaders in 1956, and then to the Treason Trial. The National Party declared the Freedom Charter to be a treacherous and communist document. Though Mlangeni’s colleagues such as Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu were arrested and stood trial, he was not. He was a “backroom boy”, he said later and continued the struggle while his colleagues had to attend court.

On 21 March 1960, there was the Sharpeville massacre, when armed apartheid police killed more than 60 people demonstrating against the pass laws. From this massacre the need for armed struggle arose, and Mlangeni was the first to be recruited by Nelson Mandela. He was among the first six MK cadres to be sent for training abroad in 1961, in China, where he was trained in radio technology and communication at Shenyang in Liaoning province. Mlangeni was with his five colleagues when they were unexpectedly visited by Chairman Mao Zedong in August 1962. The Sino-Soviet dispute had not yet forced the SACP and the ANC to choose between the Soviet Union and China for military support. They had a serious discussion with Mao on military subjects.

“He advised us to consider using Algeria as another training ground, as his army had already trained the Algerians,” Mlangeni later recalled. “He spoke highly of the Algerians.”

After secretly returning to South Africa, Mlangeni was arrested at Rivonia with other members of the MK High Command in July 1963 and sentenced to life in prison as accused number 10 in the Rivonia Trial. At Robben Island he studied to prepare himself for the future alongside his comrades.

Major political changes happened while they were in prison. There was the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement headed by the previously unknown Steve Biko, together with the formation of the South African Students Organisation closing the political vacuum created by the arrests of the MK High Command at Rivonia. OR Tambo, Duma Nokwe, Moses Kotane and JB Marks had already left to establish the external mission and help mobilise the international community.

Mlangeni and his comrades could do very little on Robben Island except hope that OR Tambo, MK and the people of South Africa would liberate them from prison.

He was released from Robben Island prison in October 1989 after serving 26 years of his life sentence. He served in the National Executive Committee of the ANC and as a member of Parliament from 1994 to 1999. He again served as a member of Parliament from 2009 to 2014. During his first period in Parliament under President Mandela there was still integrity among ANC MPs. Corruption was there with the beginnings of the Arms Deal, but not yet at the catastrophic level that was already wide open for all to see when he retired in 2014. 

What became clear during Andrew Mlangeni’s last decade is that the ANC has no clear methods of dealing with large-scale corruption and State Capture. All the ANC’s Integrity Commission could do was appeal to Zuma to resign, which unsurprisingly was not successful. Unlike in the US, the ANC and Parliament had no way of removing Zuma despite him breaking the law.

Mlangeni saw the rise of the ANC from 1950 to the peak of 1994, when it assumed power, followed by its decline to an outright corrupt organisation, the shadow of its former self in terms of decency and integrity.

The ANC began to collapse in front of his eyes, especially following the ANC elective conference at Polokwane in December 2007 which saw the triumph of President Jacob Zuma over the incumbent Thabo Mbeki. 

The source of the problem is clear now. Mlangeni and his comrades from Rivonia Trial trusted the party above the people – that is, the voters. Parliamentary electoral laws which ANC leaders such as Mbeki placed in the Constitution concentrated power in the party headquarters, with no rights for voters to directly elect members of Parliament and hold them individually accountable at the next general election.

Even in Zuma’s first term as president, when Mlangeni was still an MP, corruption was glaring. As Professor Njabulo Ndebele wrote in City Press (7 June 2012):

“Has the ANC become an empty shell, traded on the stock market of tenderpreneurship? Hail to the thief! These questions should send a chilling message to all South Africans that it is time to begin to take their country back. The cumulative effect of it all is strongly suggestive to me: President Zuma seems eminently impeachable.”

Yet, unlike the United States in 1974 when President Richard Nixon was forced to resign because of illegal conduct, there has been no impeachment and no successful action in South Africa against a president who violated the Constitution.

What became clear during Andrew Mlangeni’s last decade is that the ANC has no clear methods of dealing with large-scale corruption and State Capture. All the ANC’s Integrity Commission could do was appeal to Zuma to resign, which unsurprisingly was not successful. Unlike in the US, the ANC and Parliament had no way of removing Zuma despite him breaking the law.

To his great honour, like his Rivonia Trial comrades Ahmed Kathrada and Denis Goldberg, Mlangeni took a public stand against Zuma’s corruption and abuse of presidential office. Yet it had no direct effect. He leaves the country and the ANC in a dire state, unable after a life of struggle to provide a clear practical solution to South Africa’s present crisis – by far the most dangerous in the 108-year history of the ANC.

Andrew Mlangeni was not able to show that the only way for the people of South Africa to “take their country back” (in Njabulo Ndebele’s words) is through parliamentary electoral reform, so that the people – the voters – directly elect their members of Parliament themselves.

This is the tragedy of his passing. DM

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