By: Clyde Ramalaine
Despite the ANC’s history of being led by youth from inception, it in democracy simply does not trust its youth to lead-
Is the call for ANC veterans to convene to guide the ANC through perhaps one of its most strenuous times marked by factionalised battlelines an authentic one? On the other hand, does the ANC’s history communicate this historical old guard guidance? In a season when some argue the ANC warrant relies on its veterans to direct them out of the more than troubled waters, I would say it is a highly debatable assertion to conclude the ANC’s future lies in the hands of its veterans, however, defined.
It is a given that in any organisational setting, institutional memory embodied in tried and tested leadership is more than a welcoming indicator of a consciousness that works for a future. The notion of looking back to look forward becomes sensible if not natural. Africa’s oldest liberation movement, the ANC, birthed in 1912, and for the last 27 years in political office, less in power is in more than inclement weather and threatens written into history no different to the many historic parties such as ZANU PF across the Limpopo river. There is consensus that the ANC is one national loss away from being reduced to an ordinary historical movement and party in some circles. Despite a slew of adopted resolutions that points articulates a vision to work for organisational renewal, the ANC remains stuck in not giving effect to the utopia of renewal.
A critical component perhaps not always clearly understood or engaged in its record of mistrust in its youth. While the patriarchy debate is more straightforward framed in the gender context of male and female, a less engaged subject is the dialectic tension between the old and the new. With his interregnum notion, Gramsci told us long ago societies and nations periodically detail moments in which there is real tension between the old and the new. Is it possible that the ANC is worshipping patriarchy and remains stuck in its belief in the illusion of an old-guard syndrome? If the aforementioned is true, shall we ask if this reliance on an old guard produced in times past success?
One can make an argument for reliance on the old guard from several presuppositions. In this sense, one could do so from a pure sentimental reason, mainly if one treasures one’s desire to have a functional old-guard. I think this is what I would call the sentimentality-fantasy notion, often n less corroborated by evidence and wholly absent of a sincere self-critical analysis to justify such sentiment. One could also advocate for such confidence in the old guard trust because it’s the right thing to do, meaning the rightest notion. The problem with this right thing to do notion is that it too often resists the need to ask how that right thing notion is actualised. It also assumes that such a right thing is somewhere agreed and a true north from which the organisation moves.
Another possibility for a groping to a veteran or old guard for direction in challenging times could be out of what I choose to frame as resigned despair notion. Resigned despair as my postulated notion in this setting speaks of an awareness of a failed reality and equal incapacity to do anything about the understanding; hence at best, one resorts to mentioning it without any hope of changing the circumstances. A more recent example of this despair we hear in Lindiwe Sisulu’s words, who in her tweet laments corruption as an endemic problem that, regardless of how much resources are spent on it, appears insurmountable. Perhaps the last possibility for a groping to the past in veterans and old guard trust is what I call May- Day – May-Day notion call that communicates an innate admission of how far, of course, the proverbial ship has gone, and it’s status of having hit an iceberg. In this sense, the MAYDAY call is a call for those outside to rescue it because it cannot recover. Having attempted to advance a less exhaustive list of possible reasons for the phenomenon of seeming trust in an old guard or veterans to save the day, we must interrogate the ANC the organisation over the last 27-30 years.
This musing intends to spotlight perhaps a fifth more plausible reason why the 109-year-old organisation is spinning in the dust with no real headway circles with no progress. I think it is worth locating the analysis around its mistrust in its youth, thus my mistrust-in-youth notion. In most organisations, intergenerational leadership is a natural experience, often an automatic process inspired by visionary foresight and leadership that ultimately manifests in progress. Yet, that honest and intuitive as I herewith advance is not magic wand stuff but attest to the work put into delivering a desired outcome. That means an environment in which youth are groomed through a tried and tested system, ethos, culture that defines the organisation cadre member. The African National Congress, as a 109-year-old organisation, ought to have these in place, yet closer examination would suggest its wholly dysfunctional in its institutional infrastructure to produce the youth that will become the adults that would repeat the tried and tested cycle. It appears the ANC only talk of a political education when there is a crisis of some sort. One can, therefore, suggest the ANC does not take political education seriously; we know it because it does not invest resources in this critical aspect of organisational longevity.
The ANC, unfortunately, is not an ordinary organisation. Its original purpose for existence never was for the benefit of the masses. Its original purpose was to engage the land issue but not land for all disenfranchised but for a specific group of people restricted to the prescripts of colonial and later apartheid referential racial identity defines as the natives. ANC leaders do not want an analysis of its organisation through the lens of its actual reality, which sees the ANC not as opposed to colonialism but instead as a group comprising the elites contending for its portion of colonialism’s spoils.
We know this because the ANC dispatched several delegations to the British Crown to negotiate this particular land issue. I am also on record to have said if the land question was not as narrow an interest for the ANC, the case of the aboriginal land ownership would have naturally featured among the gatherers at Waaihoek in 1912. Unfortunately, land was not for the masses but for an elitist group better understood in Chiefs and Traditional leaders constricted to the constructionism of a native identity in which native denoted what apartheid later would rename as ‘Africa’ for Nguni tribes. In case you wonder, the ANC’s original name was the South African National Native Congress (SANNC). The ANC is and remains an exclusive organisation, and the exclusivity is the false naive notion. Let us park that for another day.
Can the ANC speak of an old guard veteran crop, as is often the case with many organisations? While some would rush to consider my question rhetorical and even prove dismissive of it, I think there is merit to argue the organic veteran or old guard in the ANC is not so clear an institutional reality as often is believed. By the time we get to 1942, the ANC led by the youth of Sisulu and Mandela’s era determined to adopt a harder line as the predecessors. Umkhonto We Sizwe, the Military Wing of the ANC is the direct product of this encounter of youth with the prevailing conditions of global and domestic politics and a reluctance to give direction on leadership who were differently calibrated. It is not far-fetched to contend that the youth of the 1940s found the administration as out of step and misreading the then predominant issues and reasoned had the old guard understood the times’ signs, it would have led to the subsequent adopted more militant stance. Producing the MK and military action was reading the signs of the times strangely not by the apparent great wiser ones but a rebellious youth arguably in a total lack of experience if experience define veterans.
The next significant marking moment came with the defiance campaign. Regardless of how the ANC has over decades attempted to airbrush and reimagined this historic event as uniquely belonging to part of its many acquired significant moments in a liberation struggle, we all know no amount of attempting to manage history in this evanescent manner can alter the facts. The ANC never birthed or led the Defiance Campaign. The typical lion tale tells the story of its hero status from 1912. May I add it was again the youth that led in Robert Sobukwe’s PAC?
Following December 1951 Defiance Campaign, we arrive at the June 1955 adoption of the Freedom Charter that owes its existence as a derivative of the 800-year-old Magna Carta. Again, here history would dictate that those gathered at Kliptown in 1960 represented fragile groups eerily but not surprisingly classified in racial classificatory labels of defined Congresses better understood in White, Coloured, Indian, Native congresses. This historical moment also marks a watershed moment since the notion of non-racialism, which I still hold, was essentially designed to give until then an excluded white identity member a foothold and presence in organisations like the ANC. The ANC adopted the Freedom Charter with all its warts. For some, I may suffer critique to talk of warts that defines the Freedom Charter.
The truth is the Freedom Charter, in its articulation of, for example, “All shall share the land…” while purportedly arriving in a claim of envisaged equality of ownership, omits to engage how this land status at the time depicts. It violently misses how a group of settlers ended up owning the land they robbed from the inhabitants they found upon arrival in 1483. It jumps to land shared in the description of equality. We must engage whose land was this. The Freedom Charter airbrushes over all this and create false realities of equality in land ownership when it lacked the appetite to entertain the historical precedent, nature, means and size of that inequality. Is this not why we are stuck almost three decades later in democracy with the same false shared land reality? I guess you would appreciate I cannot be a charterist since the freedom charter remains for me the signpost of equalising white in ownership of what they robbed from my forebears. This moment didn’t produce youth leadership since it saw ideological shifts that left Sobukwe and others in discomfort.
Then came the 1970’s. Shall I postulate again the ANC did not lead in the organic and authentic organisational production of leaders, Black Consciousness as a notion did not come from the ANC? It was birth in exchange with the Black Power Movement of the USA, which again ensembled youth who grew tired of the passive resistance praxis of the Civil Rights Movement. BC is, therefore, Steven Bantu Biko’s analysis of his society against the broader context of a USA reality of black struggle. This young man’s vision of the philosophy of blackness as psychology of response is not the product of any ANC laboratory. Later ANC leaders all drank from the fountain of BC because the ANC never really engaged in the race issue from a critical analytical sense. I make this point in my recently submitted PhD research project. Equally so, the ANC never was opposed to nationalism per se, and it is better to contend it endorsed nationalism but was against a particular type of nationalism. The aforementioned makes for another reason why the ANC, with the advent of the 1992-1994 project, could in favour of white interest produce at the hand of Joe Slovo the infamous Sunset clause that was nothing but to appease whites, therefore, extending their presence in economic and political power immanent in a Government of National Union.
In the aftermath of the advent of the Black Consciousness Movement, the internal youth of South Africa took to the streets against the better knowledge of their parents. When the youth of 76 in Soweto rose against Afrikaans as an enforced medium of instruction, it was not the ANC, neither was it led by the ANC or any old-guard of veterans supernaturally providing calculated wisdom and structure. The liberation struggle again was not led by the old guard; however, it was similarly defined by the youth’s energy and daring.
When we in the 1980s, as Cape-based youth and students, decided to take on apartheid, again the youth led the liberation struggle. When Dr Allan Boesak led us in the Rocklands Civic Centre at the launch of the UDF 38 years ago, he was 38 years old, and his leadership at the time was less so because some old guard of the ANC was directing him to lead us, but produced from the challenge of the moment thought absent of a continuum of the liberation struggle. Of course, some will raise a red flag to say, but the UDF was the ANC, the ANC initiated it, and thus it was an ANC organisation. To this day in entrance for this debate remains hazy. That a common struggle defined our reality is undeniable, that liberation from an oppressive system was the aim indisputable, that emancipation into a fullness of a common humanity is nowhere contested – yet how that was structured will never be owned by one organisation and particularly not the ANC in singularity. I prefer thinking of the UDF as a confluence of events pregnant in the space of geographical South Africa not absent of international support but not the unique orchestration of exiled ANC leaders that made up camp based ones, others living it up in UK and USA as students smoking pot and getting high.
I guess you can see where I am going with this; I am seeking to declare an authentic ANC old guard’s practice as more mythical in reality if an objective attempt of its historical context is made. The adage leads history to repeat itself the first as farce the second time in tragedy. While no one in the ANC ever in honesty and for the sake of organisational growth ventures to critique Oliver Reginald Tambo, who arguably remains the longest-serving ANC president, we must increasingly ask what we have today in veteran status, not his leadership’s true legacy?
Fast forward to the creation of the veteran notion. I shall start with a hypothesis: Is it possible that the invention of a veteran status is relatively young in concept and practice in the ANC that necessarily details the last 27 years, meaning it coincides with the democratic era. It appears the lines between the presence of democracy and ANC veteran status are intertwined; we now were introduced to stalwarts and veterans, Granted the ANC constitution defines a veteran as someone with more than 40 years of unbroken service. Yet the stalwarts and veterans notion is also a creation of the media in which it sought to separate leaders by affording those it appreciates for whatever reasons as senior, more grounded, more loyal to the ANC and necessarily the meridian of sanity and order. We saw how people like Cheryl Carolus and many others became stalwarts and veterans while making access to the moneyed white control world. This situation produced a hybrid veteran in the ANC. The ANC’s strange thing is that Veterans don’t regard other veterans in the ANC, and often the central identity is the factional veteran status.
Furthermore, ANC veterans are just as contaminated by the influence of capital and the endemic factional agendas that increasingly defines it at the DNA level. I think the ANC’s future cannot escape the normalcy of life, meaning it can’t look back in the hope of looking forward in which it invokes the sanity of an old guard, veterans, stalwarts notions when these all are intrinsically and endemically part of the challenges that face the ANC at an authentic level. In this regard, I would advance the ANC must do what it always did, which was to allow itself to be led by the very youth it registers less in confidence. The youth that will deliver the new ANC must respond to the unique challenges and anomalies of this era, unfortunately not the past factional stuck veterans who often pontificate in the emptiness of genuine commitment to change.
I have very little faith in the ANC’s usage, idea, meaning and praxis of what a veteran means. The evidence that the ANC is stuck in an older men’s club is made self-evident in this that hitherto it cannot convene an ANCYL youth leadership team in the aftermath of Julius Malema and that crop expelled from the ANC it is yet to find itself and its threatening almost of decade of directionless and emptiness of youth an essential cog in crafting a future. How serious can an organisation take its future existence when it refuses to plan structure and be directed by the youth. Typically, it’s not strange to hear older ones refer to an almost 40-year man as a young man in the ANC. We saw this recently when Duduzane Zuma made it emphatic that he, as a loyal and disciplined member of the ANC, will run for presidency in 2022.
The ANC must learn to trust its youth and stop being an old boy’s club that claims 40-year-olds are boys and girls. To meaningfully confirm it’s trust in its youth, it should be natural to have 75% of the current ministers and leaders all step-down and consciously develop a crop of 250 core leaders, all 45 and younger. Equally so, every five years in the ANC ought to produce another crop of 250 until leadership is not a peripheral and accidental positional issue in which connections make you rise but the organisation’s philosophy ideology and praxis. I was hoping you could explain how 70-year-olds who are yet to access their pensions and enjoy retirement are contesting for positions in all spheres. Tendencies of its veterans and old guard define entitlement, self-serving, and self-interest forms that threaten the ANC’s very future.
To still debate who must take over leading the ANC and confining that debate to a crop of 60/70+-year-olds is not to have understood contemporary times. In a headstrong sense, will the ANC continue its history of patriarchy and old-guard reliance in not trusting the youth? At the same time, it falsely takes refuge in the questionable identity of a veteran stalwart old- guard status that are highly contaminated by the influence of capital, personality politics, and factionalism? Or will it sober up to admit it has hitherto failed to trust its youth and see it opportune to let the youth lead? Come 2022, its NOB’s and leadership must produce its youth as it way forward instead of the rotating chairs of 60+-year-olds.
The ANC thus fails to trust its youth because it does not produce youth its more interested in musical chair leadership among an older guard peer group that increasingly defines the death of the party.
