Freedom from the ANC could be our real emancipation

Ah, Chief Dwasaho! I have been invited to dance on the ANC’s grave. I have declined, but will bring respectable sneakers to the upcoming retirement party for its hold on government. South Africa can vote the ANC out of office without wishing its history into the ground.

Founded in 1912, the organisation united people whom colonialism had preferred to divide. It built a non-racial liberation movement and helped to shape our constitutional democracy from the Freedom Charter. It made gender equality count: 50% women on parliamentary candidate lists.

These achievements belong to the country. They do not give today’s office-bearers a lifetime lease on the Union Buildings.

Think of Nelson Mandela: imprisoned from 1962 to 1990, head of state from 1994 to 1999, and possessed of that rare political wisdom – knowing when to take his leave before the coffee grew cold. Think of Oliver Tambo, who held the movement together through decades of exile amid the brutal geopolitics of the Cold War.

Think of Lilian Ngoyi and the thousands of women who marched on the Union Buildings in 1956. None fought so that Luthuli House bigwigs could lose an election before voters even reached the ballot.

Under former president Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008), South Africa recorded economic growth and employment gains, as well as an expanding social wage, failures notwithstanding. The ANC inherited those gains and treated them like a trust fund.

Under former president Jacob Zuma (2009-2018), patronage became a career path and factionalism a growth industry – a movement founded to liberate people with low incomes increasingly devoted itself to liberating tenders from the state.

The ANC has now lost its Electoral Court appeal after failing to submit the names of 181 municipal candidates by the deadline.

Picture the doorstep conversation. A resident asks when the burst pipe will be fixed. The would-be ANC councillor explains that the party cannot appear on the ballot because someone at Luthuli House failed to press “submit”. And so the sewage simply continues its smelly campaign unopposed.

The lowly newspaperman Mondli Makhanya traces the rupture to 2001, when succession battles began poisoning the ANC from within. Polokwane in 2007 was not the beginning, but the culmination of a civil war from which the party never recovered. By 2016, voters were streaming out of its manifesto launch while officials blamed the buses and the heat.

Makhanya now foresees a two-stage funeral: the second-last nail in the ANC’s political coffin on 4 November, the last in 2029, followed by the procession to the ­cemetery. On the funeral arrangements, we agree. I merely arrived at the undertaker earlier.

Armageddon approaches

Makhanya diagnoses the decline; News24’s Pieter du Toit explains the panic. His description of patronage networks facing “Armageddon” gets to the incentive: fewer offices, contracts and appointments mean less to grab and divide. Those who lived off access to power will not quietly queue at the careers centre. They will fight over the keys, then litigate over who gets to keep them.

Indeed, Eastern Cape ANC secretary Lulama Ngcukayitobi has threatened legal action against secretary-general Fikile Mbalula over who is to blame for the candidate-list failure. Mbalula is meanwhile in court with Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma over her vote-buying allegations.

The spectacle is unmistakable: comrades have retained lawyers more efficiently than they have registered municipal candidates.

Yet decline is not disappearance. Cope, the UDM, EFF and MK party all carry DNA from the ANC, but they quarrel over the inheritance. The UDM champions integrity and non-racialism; the EFF says the ANC betrayed the Freedom Charter’s economic promise; MK says it betrayed the liberation movement itself. Different children, same family feud: who betrayed the ancestors?

In the 2024 national election, the ANC won 40.18%. Add MK’s and the EFF’s votes and the three received roughly 64% of the vote. The arithmetic cannot confer a governing mandate on a coalition that does not exist. It does, however, warn any incoming government against mistaking anger with the ANC for consent to abandon the unfinished work of a non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous South Africa.

A government without the ANC could be both constitutional and a welcome relief. Given the state of many municipalities, delivering clean tap water, collecting refuse and having councillors who can tell a budget from a buffet would already count as progress.

Addressing the national question

But changing the party in power does not resolve the national question. If poverty, unemployment, landlessness, spatial injustice and inequality remain stubbornly black, the country has changed governments without changing the condition of the governed.

The ANC’s 1969 Morogoro strategy and tactics set a harder test: liberation had to mean more than formal political democracy; national emancipation had to encompass economic emancipation.

More than half a century later, that test remains. The ANC can lose the Union Buildings, but the national question does not lose its address.

Nonetheless, I foresee two funeral services. The first follows the 4 November municipal elections. Its chief mourner will be an ANC councillor candidate whose name never made the ballot. The eulogy will compete with the smell from a drain nobody fixed.

The second comes after the 2029 national election, when the ANC risks losing not merely office, but its claim to embody the liberation project. The first buries a governing party. The second buries an inheritance. History, unlike the ANC, does not accept late nomination forms.

The epitaph will read: Here lies the movement that liberated a people, then forgot whom freedom was for. Gangsters in suits picked its pockets; comrades fought over the corpse. Rest well, ANC. Your ancestors deserved better heirs.

Was the ANC undone by the counter-revolution Mbeki warned of? Or did its death knell sound in factional wars, vulgar insults directed at voters, corruption, sewage in the streets and the hunger, poverty and unemployment its leaders failed to confront?

Till next week, my man. Send me to lay a wreath at the graves of Tambo and Mandela and the women of 1956. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R39. The e-edition of Daily Maverick’s weekly newspaper, DM168, is now free for readers who are signed into their Daily Maverick account. Click on the cover of the newspaper below to access the e-edition.