If Ramaphosa wins re-election, he will earn the privilege of burying the ANC

Beyond 2024, the ANC will not command more than 50% of the vote nationally. So, when delegates gather for the party’s 55th national conference at Johannesburg Expo Centre in Nasrec on Friday, they do so for the last time as representatives of a governing party.

From here it’s all downhill: continuing the slide that began when Jacob Zuma was elected party leader 15 years ago.

This week’s event is an instalment of a drawn-out funeral which will resume at the 56th national conference in 2029, by when the ANC will be closer to burial.

Commentary about President Cyril Ramaphosa resembling a “dead man walking” obscures the fatal condition of the party itself. The ANC as a “glorious movement” is dead. It is now stumbling, zombie-style rather than walking.

ALSO READ: Phala Phala: Must Ramaphosa go? These ANC members voted ‘yes’

Motivated by the creed, “it’s our time to eat”, the ANC has become a feeding scheme parasitically plundering the public purse. There is no selfless struggle.

Comrades are driven by narrow self-interest immortalised in the words of former party spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama: “I didn’t join the struggle to become poor.”

At the time, Ngonyama was defending his role in a Telkom BEE share scheme where he stood to make R160 million. Enrichment of an already well-off elite has been an ANC trademark for decades. It may even have been one of the reasons for the 1993 murder of Chris Hani, according to RW Johnson.

But that’s a long diversion. The idea of working hard for an honest living has not taken root in the ANC. During the apartheid years, many of the exile elite lived handsomely off donors.

WATCH: Phala Phala vote: What if the president of SA is a spy? – Malema

This was followed by a period where deals, “were struck between capital and the liberation movement”, according to Pieter du Toit’s new book, The ANC Billionaires.

“After 1994, a cadre of politically connected businessmen, such as Tokyo Sexwale, Cyril Ramaphosa, Saki Macozoma and Patrice Motsepe, emerged who had access to preferential empowerment deals brokered by companies like Anglo American – all became very wealthy”, he says.

The inability to create wealth, instead of simply receiving it from wealth creators, is central to the collapse of the ANC, which is repeatedly unable to pay its own staff. Indeed, the organisation has a bizarre relationship with money.

At one stage, the ANC was saying media houses would have to pay for space and facilities at this week’s conference. Despite a ceaseless grasping for money, ANC cadres, wherever they are deployed, are generally incapable of financial management.

That is why so many state-owned entities, municipalities and other organisations run by deployees face ruin. It could be argued that general mismanagement is one the key reasons for the ANC’s ineluctable demise.

As for their most prominent leadership candidate, what kind of management skills result in hundreds of thousands of dollars being stuffed into furniture on a game ranch?

ALSO READ: Ramaphosa no different than Zuma – Steenhuisen on Phala Phala vote

People fret too much about what will happen if and when Ramaphosa goes. The sky won’t fall in. He’s made a mess of many things, including Eskom.

If he wins re-election, he won’t suddenly become a dynamo of effective action. He will earn the privilege of burying the ANC. His sombre countenance is well-suited. RIP. SA’s struggle continues.