Dire omens for ANC in 2022

There was a time when South Africa’s festive season somnolence stretched from the Day of Reconciliation public holiday on 16 December well into the second week of January.

In this faintly remembered pre-Covid world, by canny exploitation of half a dozen public holidays – both official and unofficial – as well as wake surfing the month-long shuttering of the construction industry, South Africans could parlay a couple of weeks of annual leave into a month-long absence of work.

The rush to the seaside or rural family homesteads would eerily empty the cities.

And with parliament in recess and the media even more unfocused than usual, politicians would sulkily accept being put on mute for a while.

Of course, after almost three decades in power, the ANC has added its idiosyncratic curlicues to these traditions.

One of those is a massive nationwide celebration of its 8 January “birthday”, which has all the trappings accorded an entitled toddler: fireworks, musicians, and favourite songs.

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No birthday party would be complete without lashings of chocolate cake, which the ANC dignitaries stuff down their gullets with an enthusiasm that Marie Antoinette would have approved of.

This year, it’s been a bit more muted, despite it being the 110th birthday. It’s difficult to have a rip-roaring party when the party coffers are bare.

Another pall cast over the celebration was the torching of parliament, supposedly by a speedily arrested homeless man.

Nevertheless, Cyril Ramaphosa last week proceeded manfully with the ANC’s January 8th Statement, a ritual that started 50 years ago. Like many political party traditions, this one has not aged well.

Although the 1972 delivery by Oliver Tambo was grandiose – “January 8th is the birthday not merely of the ANC, but of a nation” – it at least arguably met the brief of rallying the faithful against a powerful regime.

The statement has since deteriorated into a mendacious mix of folklore and fantasy.

It puffs mediocre achievements as great milestones and makes promises that not even the party faithful believe.

And its intellectual fibre content, never substantial, has shrunk in direct proportion to its wordiness: Tambo in 1972 spouted a few thousand words, Ramaphosa this week three times as many.

Ramaphosa’s favourite platitudes and euphemisms got a good run. There was the customary imperative for the “joining of hands of social partners … in a social compact”.

The July riots in which at least 370 were killed have been downgraded to “institutional and social disruption”.

Whatever the propaganda served to ANC members, the auguries are not auspicious for 2022.

The president, the party and its alliance are all aware this may be the last chance to pull out of the disastrous tailspin that started with Zuma in 2009 and has, if anything, worsened under Ramaphosa.

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SA’s deterioration will become irreversible if Ramaphosa does not stop dithering and defeat the radical economic transformation faction that is with increasing militancy moving to retake control of the ANC and SA.

There has been nothing, as yet, to indicate he has the stomach for such a battle, a battle that will almost certainly end any semblance of ANC “unity”.