Leading a Fragmented Nation
Ramaphosa’s campaign for the leadership of the ANC was partially organised and managed from outside ANC party structures. It is significant that it was the first time in the history of leadership succession in the ANC that a candidate enjoyed greater support and legitimacy from outside the party than from within. At times during the build-up to the ANC elective conference held in December 2017, one could easily have concluded that Ramaphosa was campaigning for the presidency of the country, and not of the ANC.
The campaign that was built up around Ramaphosa was packaged as an integrity ticket. It presented ANC members an opportunity to choose a leader who sought to re-ground the ANC within society. If successful, this project would see the ANC shifting from an inward-looking organisation towards a party grounded on broader societal values shared widely outside. This has deep and serious implications for how Ramaphosa will most likely lead the party and the country. While he will depend on allies from within and outside the ANC, his leadership style will be grounded on broader values shared by a wide spread of people outside the ANC. If the ANC had drifted away from the people under the leadership of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, then Ramaphosa’s accession to power was an attempt to bring the party closer to the people.
If the ANC still wishes to continue to lead the country, it will need to adapt and learn to appreciate the value system that is shared and demonstrated by the broader society. This means that the ANC will have to justify its moral claim to leadership of the country by looking beyond party membership. Despite numerous attempts to modernise the ANC22 and ensure that it reflects the values and complexity of the society it leads – a post-liberation market society with a vast backlog of social deficits – the party still needs to ground itself partially, if not wholly, within the very society it seeks to lead.
Since its return from exile and taking over political leadership of the country, the ANC has been battling to position itself as more than a liberation movement. To demonstrate its diversity in terms of membership, and by implication the breadth of its political agenda, ANC members often assert that the party is “a broad church for all”.23 Nevertheless, the manner in which the ANC carries itself shows that the party has thus far been inward-looking in its understanding of its identity and in its approach to leadership of the country, and that it struggles to connect with broader societal values. The ANC often justifies its conduct and action on the basis of an inwardly developed agenda consistent with its role of a liberation movement guided by such historically defined goals as the liberation of black people from all forms of colonialism and oppression.24 In this way, the ANC appears parochial and only concerned with its historical constituents, which are narrowly defined as the poor black working class. Its main objective is to reinstate those who were previously excluded from political and economic participation in society under the apartheid system. This is the basis from which the ANC draws its moral authority to lead.
The question then arises: what happens when the party can no longer appeal to its historical constituents by using the historical justifications based on the effects of apartheid on society? This is not to argue that the society is becoming blind to the historical impact of apartheid. It is one thing for the legacies of apartheid to be still visible on the ground; it is quite another for such effects to provide a basis for justifying a political project in an open, democratic society. Apartheid identities were essentially exclusive. Thus, black was defined to exclude white, and vice versa. Therefore, a solution that seeks to target this historical problem by appealing strictly to those historical identities will end up entrenching those identities and appear to be based on exclusion: the very historical challenge it seeks to remedy.
In the meantime, South Africa has evolved to the point where the effects of apartheid no longer serve as sufficient justification for a political project in the country. What is needed instead are innovative policy remedies to historical challenges such as inequality. Failure to pay heed to this will limit the party’s growth in a modern society. Even worse, many South Africans have remarked that the apartheid government was better organised than the ANC-led government.25 This is often an expression of frustration with the shortfalls of the democratic system, particularly when it comes to the effectiveness of the bureaucracy in carrying out basic functions and delivering services to the people. For example, it is often stated as fact that the education system under apartheid was far better than what is experienced in post-apartheid South Africa.26 This is not true: the post-apartheid education system is in fact better than apartheid’s Bantu Education system.27 Such remarks are common ways of expressing frustration with poorly implemented education policies in a democratic South Africa. Historical challenges such as inequality, which have their roots in the apartheid system, remain endemic and therefore a source of political rallying in South Africa. It is what keeps the EFF relevant, because the democratic dispensation has been unable to address this impasse. In the longer term, however, as South Africa evolves and gathers more experience in experimenting with democracy, historical factors such as these will lose their impetus as a basis for justifying political action and political leadership.
At the same time, as South Africa becomes an increasingly complex society, political parties will need to craft correspondingly complex political projects to lead society. This applies not only to the ANC. The Democratic Alliance (DA) follows a similar approach to that of the ANC by focusing on the interests of whites as its core constituents. Within the DA, blacks are often regarded simply as an electoral strategy, not as an integral part of an evolving identity that will enable the party to adapt to a complex society. It is in this sense that both the ANC and the DA have political identities that are inward-looking, focusing on how each historically understands its place and role in South Africa, while at large the country is rapidly shifting away from this mode of understanding and grounding leadership. The two parties are merely two sides of the same coin: an apartheid-minted coin which is losing its shine.
Consider, for example, how the ANC often handles its relations with the black middle class in the country. Those who enter this category through some form of social and economic mobility automatically become an irritant to the ANC since they are no longer catered for by the party’s stagnant identity based on its historical role as a liberation movement. The middle class, or the “clever blacks,”28 were the first group of people to fall out with the ANC, migrating to parties such as the Congress of the People (COPE) and the DA, where they felt more at home.
It was also not by accident that some outspoken ANC members have found refuge outside the party, predominantly within civil society, a space where soundness and common sense prevail. The formation of the Save South Africa29 movement, for instance, is a clear indication of how members of the party are seeking to craft a basis for leadership by looking outside. Made up of disgruntled ANC members who experienced displacement under Zuma’s embarrassing version of African leadership, Save South Africa was an attempt to re-ground leadership by relocating its moral basis outside the ANC. The message of Save South Africa was that the ANC had been hijacked by Zuma and his allies. Therefore, the best way to save the ANC was to forge a platform outside the party, upon which to reclaim the moral ground for leadership. This is the group that supported Ramaphosa, who himself decided to rebuild the ANC from the outside while remaining on the inside.
Of the two groups at the centre of power within the ANC, the Zuma group rejected any attempt to re-ground the ANC in the broader society. They did not approve of any measure to bring external sources of justification into the party. These are the people who drove the anti-establishment sentiments within the ANC, rejecting anything approved of in the mainstream society. Their approach is reflected in the common retort by the ANC that the party cannot be dictated to by other people as to how it should run its own affairs.
The logic is that if something makes sense to the ANC internally as a party, then it does not necessarily have to make sense to the broader society. The message is that the ANC will not bother to find out why the party finds itself far removed from society when it comes to handling contentious issues such as the upgrades to Zuma’s private residence at Nkandla. As a result, the ANC was isolated on this issue from the broader mass of society in its insistence that Zuma did not need to pay back a portion of the taxpayers’ money spent on the renovation of his private home, as the Public