How the mighty ANC has been humbled

Opposition parties continue to sniff blood as a weakened ANC limps towards the 2019 elections.

An EFF supporter stands during a march outside the house of the late Winnie Mandela in Orlando West, Johannesburg, 3 April 2018. Picture: Yeshiel Panchia

I doubt that I’m the only one who has noticed that since its 2017 national conference at Nasrec, the ANC has realised it can’t rule forever – or until the second coming of Jesus Christ, as its former president Jacob Zuma frequently so blasphemously used to say.

I don’t doubt that the real reason the ANC decided to climb down from its high horse were the 2016 local government electoral outcomes that saw it losing Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay. It had also been troubled by Julius Malema to change its strategies.

The ANC couldn’t fathom that the country’s economic hub, its administrative capital and seat of government and an economically significant city in its traditional powerhouse of the Eastern Cape, had fallen into the hands of the erstwhile opposition party.

Significantly, too, the ANC has realised it had been overtaken by the new kid on the block – the EFF – in terms of policies that appeal to the masses such as land redistribution. It also realised these outcomes are not due to the strength of these parties, but are a result of its own governance mistakes. So much high-level corruption has been reported – and the more graft is investigated and prosecuted, the more of it is committed.

The DA is now strategising on how to oust the ANC in the Ekurhuleni metro and elsewhere where the ruling party is weak. DA leader Mmusi Maimane and his team sell the good examples of governance in the Cape Town and Midvaal municipalities. The party is consolidating these achievements in Johannesburg and Tshwane to display for the 2019 polls.

But the EFF appears to be running ahead, even stealing some ANC strategies. The young party knows ANC weaknesses and uses them to its advantage. Malema and his party read what the masses want and where the ANC failed to deliver. In the process, they used the pre-liberation ANC strategy of mass mobilisation – particularly on land reform.

Mass mobilisation was part of the ANC strategy and that of its internal wing, the United Democratic Front, to collapse apartheid by making the country ungovernable.

The EFF saw the gap and occupied it when the ANC kept on dilly-dallying on the issue of land expropriation without compensation. Malema, instead of going the legal route, encouraged land grabs similar to those espoused by the ANC-aligned Mass Democratic Movement in the 1980s.

It may be unpalatable to some, but land expropriation – with or without compensation – is the best option to quicken land reform and redistribution if we are to reverse a colonial legacy that deprived the black majority of land ownership.

This especially so after the government’s “willing seller, willing buyer” policy failed as a result of there being no willingness to sell by the current owners or the decision of some to hike land prices to unaffordable levels.

Next – similar to land expropriation without compensation – the EFF would force the ANC to nationalise mines, in line with the Freedom Charter.

I know the ANC would never agree that the DA’s growth and the EFF’s policy strategy and tactics are responsible for its decision to opt for cooperation with the opposition.

But, as the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them – and the ANC is on its knees in the electoral sphere.