The
way in which the ANC elects its president is deeply flawed, is skewed towards
churning out poor quality leaders and turns members and supporters into
frustrated and impotent bystanders.
Firstly,
the 4500 voting delegates that will vote for the ANC president at the party’s
upcoming December 2012 national conference are not representative of ordinary
ANC members and supporters, let alone the country.
Currently
every branch has one vote (this rise to two or three if it is a large city
branch) at the ANC’s national conference. Each branch sends one voting delegate
(or 2 or 3 if it is a large branch) to the ANC’s national conference, to vote
on behalf of the branch.
The
voting delegate usually sent by the branch is often one of the most senior
branch leaders: either the secretary or the chairperson of the branch.
Furthermore, the branch secretary or chairperson is usually either an elected
representative such as a mayor or local councilor or a senior civil servant, or
a prominent businessperson doing business with the government.
This
means the voting delegates coming from the branches would normally be the ANC’s
establishment. The voting delegates therefore are most certainly unlikely to be
your ordinary ANC supporter: working class, unemployed, or those in economic
distress. Neither are they the type that will be using the lethargic public
hospitals, send their children to ineffective state schools, or one of the
majority who daily risk their lives using minibus taxis to go from one point to
the other.
PRIVILGED
ANC ELITE VS RANK & FILE
In
fact, there is a deepening social gap between the ANC’s leaders who in most
cases live in luxury far remove from the daily grind of ordinary ANC supporters
and members. This is for example, why the Marikana explosion could happen in
Rustenburg, with the ANC’s local (Rustenburg) branch leaders there caught
totally caught off guard (off course the ANC national and provincial leaders
were also flatfooted).
Many
of the voting delegates coming from the branches will be conflicted as they
will instinctively vote for the current president or national leaders, on whom
they depend on for retaining their and government jobs and government tenders.
Many would naturally fear that voting for a new president may mean the end of
their party and government jobs as councilors or their supply of government
tenders.
Voting
at branch level for who should be the branch’s candidate for the presidency is
mostly by a show of hands, not secret ballot. It is not hard to imagine that an
ordinary member at branch level who votes “against” the presidential candidate
preference of the local leadership will be isolated: meaning unlikely to get a
job, RDP house or government contract.
TRANSPARENCY
LACKING
In
the current ANC system branch membership records are kept by branch
secretaries. This means branch secretaries can conveniently make the membership
of members, who disagree with their choices of candidates or policies, disappear
– and so make them illegible to vote - at branch annual general meetings. For
another, since the branch secretaries keep membership records they could easily
stack meetings with allies whose membership cannot be independently verified.
Audits
of ANC branch membership are done by the office of the ANC general secretary –
not by an independent outside institution. If the general secretary is running
for re-election, he or she is obviously conflicted. The real danger then is
that the sitting general secretary wanting re-election may penalize branches
suspected of opposing his or her re-election, by finding reasons to make the
dissident branches ineligible to vote. The sitting general secretary running
for re-election could also prop up non-functioning branches that favour him or
her for re-election.
THE
POWER OF “PRE-SELECTION” & DEPLOYMENT COMMITTEES
In
the ANC’s internal election process nominees for the ANC presidency is usually
pre-selected by a small, shadowy, and elite group. The ANC’s national deployment
committee often plays a key behind the scenes role in the pre-selection of ANC
presidential candidates, nominees or selection deals.
These
pre-selected presidential nominees are then “presented” to the ANC provinces
and branches to “select” their preferred candidates from.
The
idea of deployment committees which not only exist at national level, but also
at provincial and municipal levels, undermines the ANC’s internal democracy.
Exactly
who the elite group that pre-select ANC presidential nominees and how they come
up with their decisions is covered in a veil of secrecy. Not only is the group
that pre-selects who should stand as ANC presidential candidates too narrow,
the choices of presidential candidate nominees “presented” to provinces and
branches are obviously far too limited.
ANC
deployment committees often pre-select favoured candidates not only for
leadership within the ANC, but also for positions at all levels of government
and sometimes even tenders.
These
deployment committees are often dominated by the faction in national control of
the ANC – since the 2007 ANC Polokwane national conference – Zuma. In the last
local elections, deployment committees pre-selected candidates that would be
ANC local councilor candidates and mayors.
VOICES
OF ANC MEMBERS DO NOT COUNT
Zuma’s
inner ANC coalition that brought him to power at the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane
national conference has now disintegrated. There is now a fierce battle between
the now divided Polokwane Zuma coalition for control of these deployment
committees.
Presidential
candidates who pre-selected nominees will not make any inroads. This was the
case with Tokyo Sexwale ahead of the 2007 ANC Polokwane national conference,
where he stood as presidential candidate, but was not “approved” as a nominee.
Branches and voting delegates were encouraged not to endorse a Sexwale
presidential nomination.
The
fact that the branch delegates send to the ANC’s national conference are mostly
senior local ANC leaders linked to government or government business means that
the voice of ordinary members and supporters in reality do not count for much.
We
see public protests at local level against poor public services, indifferent
public representatives and official corruption almost daily now. Most of these
protests are by ANC members.
One
of the reasons for them venting their anger in the streets – often violently,
is because they have, as ordinary ANC members, little power in their branches
to hold their local ANC leaders, who in most cases are the local councilors,
accountable through branch meetings.
Some
members even vent their frustration in their inability to influence the
policies and leadership elections of their local ANC branches by violently
attacking local ANC councilors.
The
reality is that for Kgalema Motlanthe and the “Anyone but Zuma (ABZ) campaign
to change the branch delegates from voting for the incumbent president will
need them to be individually reassured that they will be re-appointed as
councilors or their new government contracts will be renewed, even if they are
ineffective as public representatives, corrupt or do not deliver on government
contracts.
NEED
TO MODERNISE & DEMOCRATICISE PROCESSES
Clearly,
the whole flawed internal ANC electoral process encourages corruption.
The
decisions on who should be pre-selected to be nominated for the ANC presidency
and who vote on them is a closed system, inaccessible to ordinary ANC members
and supporters.
The
ANC urgently needs to modernize, democratize and renew its internal workings or
face becoming wholly ossified.
The
elements of such a modernization program must include opening the ANC
leadership elections, so that every individual member or supporter, affiliate
organization or tripartite alliance partner can nominate a presidential
candidate. Any ANC member should be able to avail him or herself for the
presidency.
Nominated
presidential candidates compete at a provincial level through competitive
elections, in the same way US party candidates compete against each other. A
system could be introduced whereby nominated candidates must be able to have a
minimum number of verified nominations, let’s take an arbitrary figure of say,
1000 individual ANC members.
The
winners of the provincial voting contests must then compete in a national
contest. The presidential candidates must publicly debate their policy
positions, and then all ANC members must vote in their individual capacity, not
through branches. Such new system would be like the US primary system, or the
method introduced by the French Socialist Party last year, which gave all
members and supporters and chance to vote for the party’s presidential
candidate.
In
such a new system, every ANC member must be able to vote in their individual
capacity, not through a branch, or through sending a proxy to a national conference.
President
Jacob Zuma’s acumen has been that he knows how to use the current opaque
internal electoral system of the ANC to his own advantage. Furthermore, being
the sitting president, Zuma has the added advantage of being able to use state
power, institutions and patronage to reinforce his own power in the ANC. Zuma
can use his control of state patronage to sideline would-be critics, opponents
and rivals, by either barring them from state jobs or contracts or rewarding
them.
SYSTEM
ENTRENCHES PATRONAGE
In
the current internal electoral system of the ANC, even if ordinary ANC members
and supporters want to replace Zuma as leader, they will find it an uphill
battle.
In
general elections, most ANC members vote for the ANC as a movement, not for the
individual ANC leader. Therefore, even if an ANC president is unpopular among
broader society, he or she only has to be able to manage or control the
internal electoral college of the ANC – and that person will be elected the
country president because ANC members mostly vote for the movement, the
so-called “collective”, not the individual leader.
The
very obvious short-coming of the ANC’s current electoral college is that it
does not measure leaders on their ability to manage the country, government or
ANC well; but on whether they will be able to reward the ANC electoral college,
the party establishment and whether they will be able to ensure influential
factions are provided with patronage or at least left alone to accumulate
wealth.
This
means that unless the ANC modernize, renew and democratize its internal
election process, it will produce leaders that will keep the ANC’s
establishment happy, but who will be ineffective in governing a complex
country, with complex problems, operating in an increasing complex world.
Clearly,
the ANC internal “democracy” when it comes to leadership election is
dangerously flawed, and unless the ANC introduces genuine democracy into its
internal election process, it will continue to produce flawed leaders.
The
big question is at what point becomes the social distance between the ANC’s
leaders, whether at branch, provincial or national level, and its members and
supporters so deep, that the supporters don’t identify with the leaders anymore
and as a consequence don’t identify with the party itself anymore, and won’t
vote for the ANC anymore? For now, the disconnect between the ANC’s leaders and
its ordinary members and supporters have not been translated into the ANC
losing elections.
MARIKANA
REFLECTS ESTRANGEMENT FROM THE MASSES
However,
the Lonmin Marikana mine explosion may be the tipping point, which has showed
that the social distance between the ANC leaders and ordinary supporters may be
now so deep that it may translate into the ANC losing votes dramatically in the
next general elections.
The
Marikana crisis was a manifestation of the social gap between the leaders of
the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and ordinary becoming so great that the
ordinary miners could not identify with their leaders and trade union anymore
and therefore sought leaders and established a new organization, the
Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union.
Clearly,
the social gap between the ANC leadership and ordinary members has now become
such a gulf that many ANC members may not be able to identify themselves with
both the leaders and party anymore. A case in point is Zuma’s building of a
R200m compound with taxpayers at his Nkandla homestead, while villagers living
in the area live in dire poverty. Yet, astonishingly, the president and
‘communist’ leaders such as higher education minister Blade Nzimande cannot see
anything wrong with this.
Unless
there is change in the ANC’s leaders, including replacing Zuma as president,
the ANC may fragment, just as happened with the NUM at the Marikana mine: we
may see more frustrated ANC members standing as independents at local level,
breakaway ANC provincial parties forming at provincial level, and more Congress
of the People (COPE)-like breakaways at national level.
