TK Pooe
Johannesburg - The African National Congress (ANC) 2022 policy document has been released and is, in theory, supposed to set the stage for the forthcoming policy Conference in late July, if held.
And I think it is commendable that the ANC has always, post 1994, made it a point of publicly announcing and allowing for non-ANC members to debate and put their two-cents worth into this process.
And truth be told, more political parties in South Africa, should be adopting this approach. Yet, the policy document according to this article, scores a 3/10 for actual policy ideas and its ability to give direction for a better South Africa.
A good description of this 2022 policy document is the great Italian epic spaghetti Western film, starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Sergio Leone, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
The Good
The ANC acknowledges and is aware of the changing economic landscape and global economy in its articulation of the notably complex digital economy in Chapter 3, “Digital Communications and Battle of Idea”. Some of the discussions within this chapter are not at all new or nuanced, and have been seen in previous ANC policy documents.
However, it was interesting to read about the party’s nascent understanding of key fields being developed like, “Fintech, Data Centres and Cloud Computing, Space and Satellite, Manufacturing”.
The ideas and debate are not cutting edge, but nascent as stated previously. However, it is good to see that there is a possibility for growth and actual investment into these areas by the current governing party. However, it will be pivotal how they are translated into government practice and linked to the wider need to foster employment and large scale manufacturing in South Africa.
The Bad
Chapter 2, “ANC Organisational Renewal: Progress and Challenges”, can only be thought of as being bad for two key reasons. Firstly, how many times can a party, or rather entity, commit itself to the idea of ‘renewal’ and yet simply operate in the opposite manner?
In the case of the ANC, it would seem renewal actually means impoverishment. How else can the ANC, in its 2012 policy document, speak about the problem of “Financial sustainability” yet, in 2021, fail to pay salaries to its staff.
Renewal should mean doing things differently and arriving at a different outcome, but it seems the ANC is unable to come up with new or sustainable means of financing the party.
Therefore, if renewal was a true ideal and practice, the ANC would have been able to muster together nuanced and sustainable means by which it can sustain itself as an institution. But alas, the current 2022 policy document is another failed attempt at actual renewal.
The second bad aspect of this policy and chapter is the impoverished, if not incorrect view, the ANC has concerning itself. It states of itself: “The present ANC has all the hallmarks of a modern political party, not a liberation movement operating underground. It is necessary that members experience greater ownership of the renewed ANC.”
Notwithstanding the inability of the party to advance new ways to pay its own staff, it’s rather interesting that the ANC policy document in this quote doesn’t see the contradiction present in this statement.
The contradiction present in this statement is that the ANC views itself as a modern political party, but in fact operates as a liberation movement as seen in the alienation of its ordinary members from actual levers of power.
A quick snapshot of the composition of the national executive council (NEC) clearly details an elite composition, which hardly reflects the socio-economic and geographical make-up of rank and file of current ANC members.
A prime example of this existence within the liberation loop, is the fact that no succession ladder exists as the very premise of assuming positions of leadership in the ANC loops back to liberation operation and tactics.
It is for this reason the ANC is unable to produce a ready-to-lead generation of renewed leaders, who come from the 1980s/90s or 2000s generation of men and women born in townships, rural or even suburban South Africa.
The ascent to power to structures like the NEC, still require “struggle credentials”. Therefore, the “badness” of this 2022 policy document is its omission on these two critiques.
But the ugliness of this document is more worrying and truly tells of the impoverishment of the ANC.
The Ugly
The ugliness of the ANC’s 2022 policy document in this article can be said to lie in two critical failures of the document; namely, (a) mis-development of rural and township South Africa, and, (b) missing energy debate.
The idea of mis-development refers to the policy document’s inability to understand how the ANC has wasted and continues to misdirect economic development, allow for actual policy reform for employment generation and discard actual infrastructure development.
For instance, where is the actual vision and results for new market creation and development in rural and township South Africa? The premise of ANC development still sees all development being spearheaded by metropoles such as the Cape Town, Durban and the Johannesburg-Pretoria regions.
If all faults were weighted and quantified, this article would contend that the inability of the ANC to lead economic development in rural and township South Africa post-1994 would rank as high as their inability to operate as an actual modern day political party, like the Chinese Communist Party, British Conservative Party or even United States Republican Party.
Finally, it would be negligent of this article to not discuss how the ANC policy document is actually short selling, if not being disingenuous, about the idea of energy supply and generation in South Africa.
While the document does speak about ideas such as “Just transition” and “Greening”, it does so in the absence of understanding what the general South African or even ANC member understands.
If anything, it can be argued the debate around such concepts has been left to the “elites of the elites” by a small precarious click of lobbyist in and around the ANC.
How else can one explain the absence of an actual debate surrounding the agreement reached between the South African and ANC-led government deal with the European Union in 2021, namely the “$8.5 billion (R145bn)” loan?
And yes, folks, the makers of this agreement will use all manner of technical terms, but at the end of the day the EU is giving a long term loan to a state that has great energy insecurity, but the governing party is not opening this generational matter to general ANC members and non-members. These two and other points do speak to the ugly side of this policy document.
In closing, this article scores the aforementioned policy document a 3/10 owing to the points raised in the previous sections. Yet, in truth the low score also speaks to the fact that the policy document is a poorly conceptualised and ill-informed document.
Moreover, it is a parrot of the previous documents over the last two decades and misses the fact that what was needed is a brave reflective policy document explaining how the ANC has missed the boat on economic development and change for millions of citizens.
The ANC of today, and possibly 2027, is much like the British Labour Party of the 1980s. It needs a total overhaul and this is what the policy document of 2022, needed to be concerned about.
Alas, when one is watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, can we expect anything else other than this?
* TK Pooe (PhD) is a public policy specialist at Wits School of Governance.
He writes in his personal capacity.