ANC mimicking Kenya’s Kanu

This afternoon, the national executive committee (NEC) of the ANC will commence a weekend-long virtual meeting to discuss various matters.

For its position as the governing party, many South Africans, regardless of their party political affiliation, take a keen interest in what happens – or does not happen – in the ANC. This meeting takes place at a time when public attention on the ANC has been heightened for all the wrong reasons.

These include Covid-19 related corruption, decidedly arrogant postures like last week’s swearing in of corruption-accused former eThekwini mayor Zandile Gumede as a member of the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Legislature and ongoing intraparty factional warfare.

One of the issues that should worry each of the party’s multiple factions is that for these reasons, in the past two weeks alone, questions about the relevance of the ANC as a political institution have again gained ascendancy more generally and in sections of its support base, in particular.

No one knows how this is likely to evolve, but the ANC’s commissions and omissions seem to be doing exceptionally well in helping to facilitate doubt about its relevance. The ANC surely does not need enemies. There is obviously no better litmus test for a political party’s support than an election.

However, in a dynamic yet highly unequal and divided society like South Africa, there is a limit to the extent to which any party can go through what the ANC has experienced in the past decade and a half and survive without meaningful reform. So, assuming they all genuinely care about the party’s survival, the issue for each of the ANC’s factions may no longer be which one gains hegemonic control of the party over the other.

Since it appears increasingly to be losing the respect and support of the people, the overwhelming expression of dissatisfaction suggests that there may soon be no ANC to speak of. The trouble with corruption is that it morphs a political party into an association for private gain and infuses organised criminal instincts, whose manifestations repel even its social base, because the latter’s quality of life deteriorates rather than improves.

This exacerbates existing divisions in the party and in society in as much as it germinates new ones since to maintain power, such a political party must increasingly rely on patronage, rhetoric that may have been relevant yesterday but ill-suited today, the state apparatus of coercion, or a combination of any or more such factors. The trajectory obviously carries the seeds of its own destruction which should be obvious to all.

The question that should exercise ANC members, leaders and associates, who are or may in future become persons of interest to law enforcement agencies, is whether they would profit or become worse off from the party’s loss of support, which eventually leads to loss of power. An imprecise reading of the options available will not save anyone. Furthermore, a corrupt political party is not a dependable ally for other struggles for political and social justice elsewhere in the world.

As the following brief episode from an earlier period illustrates, history is not without ample evidential material. Ian Smith’s 11 November, 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) featured prominently in the deliberations of the summit meeting of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in November 1966.

Independent Africa was incensed at Smith’s institutionalisation of Zimbabwe’s version of internal colonialism as in South Africa’s 1910 Union government which excluded the African majority. The British colonial governor to Rhodesia, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, referred to the development as “treasonous”, while Africa demanded Her Majesty’s armed forces’ intervention to stop the treason.

Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson advised the Africans that he would not make war on “our kith and kin”. Kenya’s second vice-president and former foreign minister Joseph Murumbi led his country’s delegation to the summit where he expressed condemnation of Britain’s handling of the matter. No sooner had the summit got underway than Murumbi received an instruction from then President Jomo Kenyatta to the effect that Kenya should support the British position.

Unable to reconcile himself with Kenyatta’s position, Murumbi immediately flew home. On landing in Nairobi, he drove to Kenyatta’s office to hand over his resignation. The government’s communique put the reason for his resignation down to poor health. At around that time, Murumbi told a group of exiled South Africans that the reason for Kenya’s change of position was that the British had handed out money to some key personalities in the government.

The incident occurred a mere two and a half years after Kenya had attained independence from British colonial rule, on 1 June 1964.  It is probably at around that period that Kenya’s then ruling party, the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), began its descent into corruption, repression and mutation into a laboratory of all manner of political perversions.

With the passage of time, the unfolding de-ANC-ification of the ANC increasingly looks like a carbon copy of the de-Kanu-fication of Kanu, at least with respect to corruption and the gradual erasure of a commitment to serve the people. This is substituted for a value system of personal accumulation of wealth at all costs and probably other factors that are yet to surface in the public domain.

Whereas at its founding in 1944, Kanu was firmly in the progressive African liberation movement fold, by time it lost the 2002 Kenya general elections, it bore no resemblance to the ideals that drove it in the years after its founding. The Kenyan experience surely holds many lessons for the ANC as it does for the African liberation movement as a whole.

Could Kanu, which so easily betrayed the African position on Smith’s UDI, have been a creature of principle at home? What Kenya became during and after the Kanu years is a classic case of the corrosive nature of corruption. This weekend’s meeting of the ANC NEC will once more prove whether our borders are gravitating towards the east of the continent or remaining where they are.

Ratshitanga is a consultant, social and political commentator

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