Branch delegate purchase at conferences, manipulation of
credentials at conferences to engineer election outcomes, funding of slates by
the criminal underworld to create a better political environment for its
existence, dearth of policy discourse at sub-national conferences, prerogative
or arbitrary disbandment of organizational structures such as the woman’s
league, conferences that convene only to elect personalities to positions with
no prospect of knowing what they represent, there appears to be little to no
hope in bringing order into Africa’s oldest liberation movement, the ANC. The often-depressing
stories about what is happening inside the ANC paint a picture of anarchy,
disarray, disorganization, and leadership decay in what is, arguably South
Africa’s dominant nexus of its politics and political economy. This does not
only have grim implications for the ANC alone, but broader ones for the
continent, SADC, the economy, and most decisively the stability of a fragile
nation-state without a nation.

This reality has gotten to a level where any notion of order
coming back in the ANC tends to be treated with skepticism. The entrenched behavioral
patterns of doing politics that started long before the watershed Polokwane
Conference, if the Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma report of the Tshwane regional
conference of 199.. is factored in, have made it increasingly difficult to
enforce any normative way of running the ANC. In fact, what does seem to be
normative is fast growing into a violation of what is accepted as convention of
in-ANC politics. Leaders that have projected themselves as paragons of unity,
renewal, and normative politicking have to date been found to have been in
large-scale operations against their political adversaries in ways that
undermine the very norms and values they espouse. For instance, the ANC
President a lead in the renewal process is endorsed in some provinces and
regions by factions led by people at variance with the law, and some are
awaiting arrest. Whilst these leaders pronounce their support of his
anti-corruption-led renewal program, they headline narratives of corruption in
their provinces. For skeptics, this is evidence that a normatively governed ANC
does not have a chance to replace what it has settled on as acceptable
politics.

However, skeptics operate in a world of instant
gratification, most of them tend to ignore that building a normative context
takes time, and in many ways requires the flushing out of a generation. Acts
that undermine what is otherwise the correct thing to do, as the elevation to
leadership of dubious individuals from all factions of the ANC, might appear to
be weakening the normative thrust the new ANC is trying to birth, but it does
not make the thrust irrelevant. The introduction of an integrity management
system with which all acts that put the ANC into disrepute will be put through
a voluntary process of self-subjecting yourself to an integrity commission has
elevated societal norms and standards as benchmarks with which being ANC will
also be measured. This can of course not happen unless the ANC itself has
accepted that norms, subjective as they sometimes can be, create expectations about
behavior that makes it possible to hold each other accountable”. Normative
contexts grow with time, they can have allies within a cesspool of the
corruptible purely because of their appeal to accountability. Normative
politicking will be disruptive, in the ANC it has demonstrated its power to
refuse ideological manipulation. It took almost two decades for the ANC to
subject its internal disciplinary outcomes to the adjudicative power of the state
and dislodge from treating itself as an ‘outside judicial reach voluntary organization
that ran amok with rules that could not be evaluated in a court of law’.

Although being normative in the context of politics presents a
challenge, international best practice has over time built norms to which the
vocation of politics and political institutions could be subjected. The
growing sensitivity of society to corruption by politicians has led to a number
of norms, standards, and enforceable mechanisms being developed to assist in
regulating the vocation of politics. As these norms become increasingly
critical to reducing the risk that anarchy could pose to the normative
governing of the ANC, there should always be a way in which society continues
to be the ultimate method of deterrence.

Notwithstanding the simplistic conclusion that deterrence in
the world and vocation of politics, integrity as a growing condition to be
elected a leader has entrenched normativity as a benchmark for political
parties to survive the growing impatience of society. Norms have not only
become the new guardrails of an integrity climb in politics but have
established a record in many professional establishments as a useful departure
point to create a sustainable normative context that best survives on peer
review and voluntary subjection by those involved. Chaotic and anarchy-dependent
politics are costly to society and their economies. The best way is to make
chaos a cardinal risk to the continuity and existential sustainability of an organization.
The inseparability of economic growth and the normative index of those
governing should be a non-negotiable when considerations of who should lead
society are made. The domain of politics, which is inherently vulnerable to
human infallibility, and a network of ever-competing interests, is hard to
police and monitor. 

In the domain of post-conflict politics, factionalism as a
core catalyst of redefining liberation struggle promises and rhetoric can
easily become one of the pillars in-liberation movement contestations are
modeled around. In addition to claiming one historical heroism or another,
especially in contexts where history in the struggle constitutes one of the
premium criteria to being a public service mandarin or a node of influence the
private sector can use and abuse to generate state procured business, the
capacity to create and sustain a faction, including buying the loyalty of its
members, is a new normal. Among the core characteristics of the new way of
doing politics are the erosion of member relationships with the policy direction
of the liberation movement, the establishment of social distance between the
ANC and society, and the destruction of branches through the purchase of members (in
order) to slow the interaction of the NEC with the basic units of the organization,
and the elevation of tribalism and personality cults as criteria to select and mobilize
for the form of the liberation movement at the dangerous expense of content
that should drive politics and attendant interests, which are the currency of
politics. 

In social and political capital terms, the cost of in-ANC
chaos to the continued accumulation of these capital forms is so high that some
in leadership can easily be classified as not only being liabilities, but their
continued membership is becoming collateral damage to the historical value of the
ANC cannot afford to keep them. As such individuals continue to be the faces of the
organization where their methods of succeeding fall through the cracks of
the integrity management systems and mechanisms that the ANC has put in place
to manage those putting it into disrepute, their threat to the continued
existential significance of the ANC as a leader of society is mounting. The
integration of the capacity of the normativity guarding institutions of the
state with political criminality, including political exposure-based
criminality by members of the ANC has to date been the most effective deterrence.
Whilst this deterrence has in certain circumstances muddied the strategic role
the criminal justice system can play in weeding out criminality in the name of
politics, the preventative role this play has to date met the benchmarks
envisaged by the integrity management system to the extent that political exposure-based
criminality is now migrating into bands of acceptable limits.

The released organizational renewal document of the ANC
needs to therefore address itself to the strategic intervention of defending
forward the liberation movement through setting up stricter criteria for
members to access political positions in both governments (the prize of
politics) and in-ANC positions (the bankable political capital to advance
towards the prize of politics). There should be the persistent engagement of
members with the integrity management system or mechanism notwithstanding its
glaring imperfections in respect of the integrity policing members.
For as long as there is disruption of patterns of anarchy and chaos, diversion from
the vocation of politics those that are in it for the perceived largesse, and
the withdrawal of membership for the incorrigible or reputation costly members,
there will be sufficient deterrence to resuscitate the moral high ground the
movement once had. CUT!!!

🤷🏿‍♂️Just vulavuling makwerhu