The ANC’s money problems aren’t really about money at all

In 2016 when Nomvula Mokonyane was casually boasting about the ANC having blown “R1 billion” on that year’s elections, the thought that five short years later this same billionaire boys and girls club could be struggling to pay the salaries of its staff was inconceivable.

Many have been revelling in the schadenfreude, and I’m sure it couldn’t possibly happen to a more deserving group of people, but that doesn’t make it any less astonishing.

First of all, despite recent changes that would have seen it getting a lower proportion of taxpayers’ money directly, the ANC still gets the biggest chunk of the money from the Represented Political Parties Fund because it has the most MPs in parliament and MPLs in the various legislatures.

Then there’s the fact that if you were to add up the salaries of all the shamelessly overpaid ministers, deputies, premiers, MECs, MPs, MPLs, mayors, MMCs, councillors, directors-general, executive directors, the millionaire CEOs of more than 700 state-owned enterprises, several other office bearers and all the gilded squadrons and platoons of heftily paid support staff that congeal around all these officials, you’re probably starting to look at an amount that would buy you a small country.

Surely, somewhere in all of that, you could scrape together enough to keep a few ANC offices’ lights on?

The EFF requires its people suckling off the public teat to pay tithes to their party as a way to not only keep Julius Malema in Louis Vuittons, but also just to keep the EFF going at all.

The ANC, by contrast, appears to be drowning of dehydration in a sea of money.

None of the wonderful “cadres” that Cyril Ramaphosa was so keen to defend the “deployment” of when he was playing dodgems at the state capture commission seems inclined to return the favour to their party.

They appear only too willing to simply read about the misfortunes of the poor old ANC in the newspapers like the rest of us. Even if they need that ANC to put their names on a list somewhere for the next election.

And of course, no one in this country has forgotten about the vast oil slick of ANC billionaires who seeped onto the scene by way of the ANC’s BEE bonanza over the years – including, not so inconspicuously, the party’s current president.

Where, exactly, have all those guys been? Surely they could spare a few pennies for the oldest liberation movement in Africa while still telling the sales staff at the Gucci shop in Sandton to shut the doors for their latest girlfriend to choose her new handbag.

Remember those luxury Mercedes-Benzes in 2012 that were emblazoned with the ANC’s logo and the catchphrase: “100 years of selfless struggle”?

A few decades ago, the struggle was all about how to get unbanned by the brutal regime, win equal rights for the majority of our citizens, have the leading political luminaries of their day released from imprisonment and to usher in a new, hopeful era of democracy.

Today, the struggle seems to be how to pay your receptionist at Luthuli House.

All the many publicly stated reasons for why the ANC is suddenly so penniless are no doubt true. The biggest one you come across, of course, is the law the ANC themselves introduced – much to their own horror – that requires larger donations to be publicly declared.

It has clearly disrupted the ANC’s tried-and-tested funding model of taking donation kickbacks from the companies its government officials award tenders to.

That system was simple and straightforward. The people who gave the ANC money didn’t have to like the ANC and believe in it to give it money. They just had to want a contract to build some road somewhere, even if they’d then have to learn about how to build roads off a YouTube tutorial.

Now it’s not quite so easy.

And the billionaires are probably hanging on to their money because they don’t even know which ANC is going to survive next year’s elective conference.

For all practical purposes, because it is so deeply divided, it barely exists. I’m not even sure the ANC can be thought of as a concept anymore. It’s just a trove of opportunists all trying to out-opportune the next one.

Much like the person who currently leads it, no one knows what the ANC stands for now, and what it’s actually trying to do. That squabble of ageing freedom fighters are now arguing endlessly over nonsense that doesn’t make an iota of real difference in the fight against their supposed declared “enemy”, which they’d like us to believe is the “triple challenge” of poverty, inequality and unemployment.

But the only enemies they really know are each other.

The two ANCs will never find each other. There will never be unity. The divisions and the hatreds are too deep. And yet they all wear the same green, black and yellow and sip the same Veuve Clicquot behind the same fake smiles at the ANC’s birthday bashes and keep expecting the same people to keep voting for them.

That may keep convincing the voters for a while, but it doesn’t seem to be convincing anyone who would like to fund the ruling party substantively any more.

Maybe that’s not their fault because, to fund it, they first have to find it. And it no longer really exists.

If any potential funder were to feel confident the ANC is what they think it is, and that it will still be what they think it is next year after the elective conference, then they might send that EFT.

Some of them may be sending that money, thinking they’re funding Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC, only to learn in just over a year’s time that all they were doing was keeping it alive for Ace Magashule’s ANC to take over.

And that may well be just one reason among many – including that the Guptas took the family silver with them when they left – for why some of us are not being quite as enthusiastic about popping a coin into the ANC’s collection tin as we might otherwise have been.

That’s why the party’s current cash flow headaches aren’t really its biggest problem. They’re just a symptom of the real disease.