In the weeks leading up to the Nasrec conference, it was clear that the ANC was in trouble. A growing level of intolerance was evident among party members as they engaged in public spats on the policy direction that the party ought to take. Members traded insults and openly accused one another of hijacking the party for personal gain. The decline in the integrity of the ANC had also divided the party ideologically, and these divisions would later be conveniently exploited by some to pursue factional interests in the party.
The Nasrec conference followed just months after an equally volatile policy conference, which was held in June 2017 at the same venue. When the ANC went into the policy conference, the script that the party sold to the nation emphasised the need for the ANC to engage rigorously on policy so as to enable it to turn the country round and transform the lives of all South Africans, especially the poor and previously disadvantaged. Already at that time, it was public knowledge that former president Jacob Zuma had basically sold the nation to the controversial Gupta family, in the process collecting for himself, his family and cronies some petty cash. The media had just begun publishing the “GuptaLeaks”, a series of revelatory emails detailing how the Gupta family had suborned government ministers, civil servants and even the president himself so as to ensure that lucrative government contracts and tenders were won by or benefited a network of companies associated with or owned by the family.3
In the months leading up to Nasrec, things began to unravel for former president Zuma, who faced mounting criticism from members of the ANC alliance namely the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), about his relationship with the Gupta family. Whether the criticism from the alliance partners was based on principle or on mere political expediency no longer matters.
What can be said with certainty is that Zuma betrayed too many people in quick succession, often dumping friends without giving sufficient notice.
By 2017 Zuma’s compromised leadership was without any doubt becoming increasingly embarrassing to the party, not to mention the country. Every week the media kept revealing damning new instalments of evidence proving Zuma’s involvement in grand corruption.
With his credibility taking a nosedive at a pace never seen before, Zuma fought back. He characterised the negative reports about his leadership as driven by and emanating from so-called white monopoly capital, a term that was widely taken up in the public discourse at the time.4 In Zuma’s version, this racially categorised economic class drew on the support of certain sections of the media and some collaborators within the ANC: a rather improbable alliance. Nevertheless, the term “white monopoly capital” became the subject of intense debates at the June policy conference in 2017.
While the concept of “monopoly capital” had been used by radical, often Marxist academics as far back as the 1970s to characterise the commanding heights of the South African economy under apartheid, its redeployment in recent years turns out to have been engineered by the British PR firm Bell Pottinger, who had been hired by the Gupta family to deflect public criticism from their nefarious business activities.5 When the term was taken up within the ANC, it led to fierce debates, and ideology came to overlay factional disputes and divisions within the party.
The idea of “white monopoly capital” conveniently brought the justification required to elevate factions, based on personal allegiances to particular leaders, into ideological differences within the party. Perhaps this was inevitable. Factions within political groupings need to make sense of themselves to their affiliate members and to outside observers. If factions can be understood as churches, then ideologies represent faith. There is no strong church without a faith; there are no strong factions without ideologies. While members of factions do not usually need much effort to be convinced of the importance and moral basis of their own group, the problem lies with outsiders. They often require a higher level of justification as to why one faction should be seen as more legitimate than another. The factions that existed within the ANC required a much stronger justification for their existence than allegiance to one or other leader. This is where the idea of “white monopoly capital” proved useful, sparking a debate about the necessity or otherwise of radical economic transformation.6
At the centre of the debate, however, was a struggle between two dominant factions within the ANC, battling for legitimacy in the public space. On the one side was the anti-Zuma group, which came to occupy the anti-Zuma space that has existed within the party since he took over leadership of the ANC at the 2007 Polokwane conference. This group defined itself against Zuma by assuming an integrity ticket, openly criticising Zuma’s leadership for having facilitated what has come to be called state capture. This group was led by Ramaphosa, the deputy president, who successfully managed to remain within Zuma’s cabinet while distancing himself from the moral burden of Zuma’s wrongdoings and at the same time branding himself apart from and in contradistinction to Zuma, including as an alternative.
Logically, it is difficult to be an alternative to the system that one is part of and serving under. What Ramaphosa did, however, was to create a safe distance between himself and Zuma. When controversial decisions were taken by Zuma, especially those that negatively affected the private sector, Ramaphosa always responded by speaking to the broader context and diluting the strengths of Zuma’s position while at the same time opening the matter for further deliberation with more nuances. After Zuma’s trusted minerals minister, Mosebenzi Zwane, announced the controversial mining charter in 2017, Ramaphosa quickly moved to allay the fears of the mining industry, distancing himself from the radical charter while opening it up for further negotiations.7
In this way Ramaphosa could also ensure that Zuma would appreciate his service of fending off criticisms from what the president perceived as a hostile private sector while at the same time bringing some legitimacy to the policy positions adopted by Zuma by making them the subject of discussion and negotiation with stakeholders. It was a means of creating a win-win situation for both as they took subtle swipes at each other’s position while retaining an outward sense of collegiality. This is an example of Ramaphosa’s incremental politics, on which I shall elaborate later.
While Ramaphosa was reluctantly assisting the president with some necessary PR work and at the same time nibbling away at Zuma’s integrity whenever the opportunity allowed, Zuma pushed the idea that opposition towards his policies were driven by white monopoly capital and its allies within the ANC and civil society. The problem was exacerbated by some of the chief executives in key sectors such as banking and mining, who openly supported Ramaphosa’s attempt to spin the most optimistic and positive reading of government policy. Where heroes are scarce, the emergence of a potential saviour such as Ramaphosa inevitably sparks unchecked expressions of enthusiasm. Supporting good people in government is a noble thing and the private sector should not shy away from that. However, writing an open fan letter to an ANC presidential candidate, as one executive did, is not the way to go about it. Some business leaders could simply not hide how smitten they were by Ramaphosa or contain their enthusiasm in showing support for him. This happened both before and after Ramaphosa was elected as ANC president at Nasrec.8 But by doing so, business leaders in South Africa actually fuelled the anti-establishment sentiment within the ANC. Because of their revolutionary origins and traditions, liberation parties tend to position themselves against mainstream thinking, particularly against capitalism and its ways of doing things. This is equally true of the ANC, which displays in this way its commitment to correcting the capitalist system and the ills of inequality that come with it.
By the time of the ANC policy conference and elective conference at Nasrec in 2017, therefore, there were two extreme positions that divided the ANC. Those on the Zuma side championed the idea of “white monopoly capital” as the strategic enemy of the ANC. On the other side of the divide were those who have been emboldened to advance the idea that the real enemy of progress in South Africa was corruption among ANC members who had compromised the party by serving their own or sectarian interests. The truth of the matter lies in between the extreme postures taken by