Woo those out in the cold

This week, ANC veteran Mavuso Msimang confided that he was “disappointed” with the ruling party. Join the club, mate.

Actually, Msimang did join the club. Very briefly.

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In December last year, Msimang, then the deputy president of the ANC Veterans’ League, wrote what Daily Maverick described as a “devastating resignation” from the organisation that had been his home for more than 60 years.

It caused consternation in an ANC leadership alert to the danger of potentially losing such a high-profile member – Msimang was in the high command of MK, the ANC military wing – to one of its rivals in an election year.

Msimang’s three-page letter convincingly traces back every failure of ANC governance to “manifold malfeasances … corruption somewhere in the system”.

“For over a decade I have added my voice to the many others who have consistently decried and disapproved of corruption and its harmful by-products of nepotism and incompetence.

The response of the leadership has, at best, been a shoulder shrug and a promise to do something about it,” Msimang wrote.

But barely a week later, after a quick schooling from the ANC grandees in the error of his ways, Msimang was back warming his tootsies at the ANC fireside.

He said he had been reassured that those tainted by corruption would not be allowed to stand for election in May.

This turned out to be untrue. When the ANC released its electoral list, it remained shot through with alleged state looters.

Msimang appears to be a little embarrassed by this turn of events.

Speaking at an ANC event to celebrate 30 years of democracy, he admits “absolutely” to being disappointed by the betrayal, but still thinks that somehow the corruption problem will be solved.

To sneer at Msimang’s gullibility and failure of courage is to miss the point. There are still honourable men and women in the ANC, not all of whom are long in the tooth.

But the default position of many alienated ANC voters has been to summon a plague on all the political parties’ houses, eschewing opposition for the luxury of opining loftily from the sidelines.

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Professor Raymond Suttner, a former ANC and SA Communist Party activist, before breaking ties with both because of the rampant looting during the Zuma era, is one of these influential nonparticipants.

In a recent series of columns on Polity, he notes the futility of voting for an ANC, but also argues that there are not good reasons to abandon electoral politics entirely.

Those who have remained in the ANC “despite the stealing” in the belief that it could be renewed from within have been proved wrong.

“Unfortunately, what has happened after the removal of Jacob Zuma has become as serious, if not more so, than the earlier looting.”

What, then, is the solution? Suttner finds comfort in “glimmerings” of hope in the activities of “religious, caregiving and some professional organisations” and social movements like Equal Education and some NGOs.

It’s misguided to be scornful of Suttner’s unconvincing answer to the crisis of public disengagement.

While community organisations and individuals assuaging social ills is necessary, power comes from the electoral process.

Those parties trying to flog themselves as alternatives to the ANC have to find ways to attract the alienated idealists of Msimang’s and Suttner’s ilk.

This may prove to be more of a voting puddle than a pool, but it has an importance beyond its size.