No, Gwede, you are 77% wrong about the ANC’s succession ‘tradition’

Politics and hypocrisy just go together, right? Like Coke and diabetes. Or sex work and herpes. It’s just a disease you’re likely to get at some point if you indulge or engage in too much of it.

We’re seeing it now from various veteran politicians such as Gwede Mantashe who have hitched their ride and South Africa’s hopes to Cyril Ramaphosa in their insistence that there is some sort of tradition that the deputy president of the ANC succeeds the president. But they would just as easily say the opposite if they didn’t like Cyril, and there’s more than enough that can be said to support either position.

‘Tradition’ is a strong word, and it would imply that this is just the way things have always happened in the ANC, and anyone questioning it would have to be some sort of breaker of a long-established code. But how established is this “tradition” in the ANC?

I was genuinely curious about whether a case can be made for it, because the ANC’s succession tradition has become a matter of some dispute of late.

Decide for yourself: There have been 13 ANC presidents in the party’s history since 1912. Of those, three came into the job after serving as deputy president. Oliver Tambo, who was deputy president in the 1960s, became the acting president in 1967 when Albert Luthuli died after being struck by a train in the then Natal. Tambo was formally elected president after the 1969 conference in Morogoro, Tanzania.

In more recent times, Thabo Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela and Jacob Zuma succeeded Mbeki.

At the time of his succession, Mbeki was in any case already performing many of the duties of president and it was almost a foregone conclusion that he would take over after Mandela indicated he would not run for a second term because he wanted to set a good example to the rest of Africa and its pitiful infestation of leaders-for-life.

Zuma’s accession, by contrast, was a brutal and bloody battle, the result of which most analysts predicted poorly. Very few figured Gedleyihlikisa would mount a successful challenge against Mbeki in Polokwane in 2007, and his rise to power tore the party apart.

Zuma’s victory, obviously, in no way therefore represented the kind of typical and “traditional” handover one might expect in power structures that closely follow prescribed traditions, such as the succession of kings and queens in monarchies.

Zuma’s supporters were at the time doing all they could to sell the concept of this tradition, which Mbeki clearly thought was nonsense or he would not have stood for a third term. He even made it clear that one should not even assume there’s a tradition that the ANC president should automatically become the president of the country.

Now, these very same Zuma supporters must be horrified that their own nonsense is being used against them by Cosatu and others in the ANC who support Ramaphosa.

Zuma himself, in an obvious bid to boost Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s chances, made the first about-turn in January when he declared there had never, in fact, been a succession tradition in the ANC. He called the two recent examples of it happening nothing more than “coincidence“.

The historical maths tells us the ANC’s “tradition” has been “observed” a mere 23% of the time in the party’s history. Even by South Africa’s rather generous education standards, that’s not a pass. Not even Angie Motshekga could adjust that score.

The truth is traditions are often dreadful things that get invoked as mere conveniences in the arsenal of those in power whenever it happens to suit them – who would otherwise call such ideas “old-fashioned relics” that need “reform” or “updating”. There’s nothing about tradition itself that by default makes it a good thing, even if it’s been going on for a long time.

There used to be a tradition in Europe that you could kill a man in a duel (or be killed yourself) using either your sword or pistol if you felt he insulted you. The Chinese have long had a tradition of binding and mutilating the feet of young women. I could probably list hundreds of other traditions the human race is better off without.

Even so, this succession thing in the ANC is clearly not a tradition, and, even if it was, it would rightly have to be decried as undemocratic. Accepting or rejecting this should hardly affect Dlamini-Zuma’s chances in either event, because the argument that South Africa needs a female president simply because all the previous incumbents have been male is equally empty.

Whoever wants to be the next president should be making their case based on what they can offer: and neither tradition nor an extra X chromosome are things that will affect the price of bread. Both Ramaphosa and Dlamini-Zuma have long records and numerous achievements that need to be assessed, along with their respective failures.

Mantashe, as the ANC secretary-general, should be the caretaker of the ANC’s true traditions of democracy and the facts of its history. Quite frankly, he could have done a lot better than his lame attempt over the weekend at invoking the vague threat of “crises” if “ANC traditions” are not followed.

The fact is, Mr Mumbles, the ANC – along with the rest of us – are already in a crisis, and “traditions” are not going to fix that.

Charles Cilliers