ANC’s decline: Blaming others won’t help

The ANC, South Africa’s most dominant political party over the past 30 years, went into introspection mode this past week and explained why the ANC’s electoral support dropped by 17% between 2019 and 2024.

The head of the ANC’s political school, David Makhura, blamed the breakaway political parties – uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party in the main – for the ANC’s misfortunes in the election. He says they stopped fighting inequality, unemployment and crime.

The ANC reckons these are the reasons they lost the election, but they miss the point spectacularly.

Credit must be given where it is due. Jacob Zuma and his MK chickens did indeed come home to roost in their ANC nest that they had been preparing for many years before.

All those more than 10 motions of no confidence that they helped Zuma with to survive when the whole country wanted him gone many years ago came back to haunt the ANC in the 2024.

The breakaway MK and EFF are not the reason why the ANC lost the election, they simply put the final nails into the coffin. If the ANC genuinely wants to understand why the electorate finally said “this far and no further”, their introspection needs to be honest to the point of embarrassing.

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The seeds of the ANC’s destruction were planted long before it assumed power in 1994.

While still in exile, it redefined collective responsibility to mean that individuals with questionable morals and who had done wrong could not be punished for their misdeeds.

“There is no dustbin for revolutionaries”, or some such misguided slogan, meant that comrades who swindled the movement’s money or were accused of sexual misconduct in the camps still managed to hold influential positions in the organisation.

If something is done regularly over many decades, it becomes the culture of the people practicing it. “Collective responsibility” became the shield for corrupt individuals.

Any suggestions that the ANC lost its way because of corruption or letting individuals with questionable morals rise to the very top is always met with righteous indignation and “what aboutery” that says “even apartheid leaders and its government were corrupt, it’s not only the ANC that is corrupt”.

ANC members and supporters defended the ANC’s wrongdoings not by reflecting on what was pointed out, but by pointing out that they were not doing anything new because, in fact, everyone else was doing it.

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When the focus becomes “it’s our turn to eat”, it is impossible to focus on the basics such as fighting unemployment, reducing crime and getting rid of inequality.

The focus becomes how to get rid of those leaders who are standing in the way of those who want to “eat”. Ask former president Thabo Mbeki, he wasn’t the first victim of that mentality, he was just the biggest victim.

And the looters of public funds do not really care who they put in place, just as long as that person is not in the way of their looting of public funds.

It is a culture the ANC cannot shake off. Such that they even allow individuals without a vision to lead what was once the economic heartbeat of Africa, the City of Joburg.

They cannot rule the city themselves, but they cannot let the EFF, the DA, Patriotic Alliance or ActionSA lead Joburg out of this rot because all these parties would stand in the way of their “eating”.

This is the embarrassing introspection that the ANC needs to face up to. They must look in the mirror and hate what they see, otherwise they will not fix it.

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