It must be so depressing to be one of the sensible members of the ANC. Every week the party of Nelson Mandela invites the nation to watch as it proves yet again that it has become so impaired it can’t organise a drinks party in a brewery.
September marks 12 months since former Western Cape premier Helen Zille was announced as the DA’s mayoral candidate for Joburg. It’s seven months since ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba threw his hat in the ring for the position. They respect voters enough to want them to get to know who they are and what they are offering before election day on November 4.
In the year since Zille started her energetic campaign, the ANC has descended into such dysfunction that it cannot even choose a mayoral candidate for Joburg — the key battleground in this election — or any of South Africa’s other metros or towns. Every weekend for the past month, South Africans have been promised that the ANC would announce its candidates. Every Monday, the nation wakes up to news that the country’s biggest and oldest political party cannot agree on just one candidate for one city or town.
It makes you snigger, but it’s not funny. For the ANC, this is a harbinger of things to come. For Joburgers and ratepayers everywhere, it is a warning: the ANC is broken.
Three weeks ago President Cyril Ramaphosa invited the media to Sandton for the big reveal of the party’s candidates after months of consultations. The scheduled 9am announcement came and went without a word. The rescheduled 11am came and went. Ramaphosa eventually took to the stage to announce … no candidates.
Instead, the party named three shortlisted Joburg candidates, whom we’ve known about for months now. The ANC has failed at the first hurdle. It can’t even decide on the one person who is going to fix Joburg, or any other city, on its behalf.
The whole event must have been galling for Ramaphosa. Just three days earlier, he had met business leaders who pledged expertise and resources to support efforts to address Joburg’s financial and governance crisis. Now he couldn’t even put forward a name to work with these leaders.
After the non-announcement, the ANC branch in Joburg invited the Rev Frank Chikane, a solid veteran leader rumoured to be Ramaphosa’s preferred candidate, to join its election campaign. This was after the face of the ANC’s campaign in Joburg, mayor Dada Morero, told a pensioner confronting him about criminality that he was “talking shit”. Anyway, Chikane went along and posed for pictures with the third ANC mayoral hopeful, Loyiso Masuku. What an embarrassment for a process-driven administrator like Chikane.
Last week the ANC held two “special” national executive committee meetings about its candidate lists. Still no candidates were announced.
This is a party that has seized up. This level of dysfunction is a liability not just for the party but for the city and the country. How will the ANC resolve South Africa’s increasingly complex policy contestation when it is so gridlocked itself?
Joburg, in particular, is not an entity to be trifled with. We’ve had the ANC hand leadership to a 1% party (Al Jama-ah) twice in the past four years, and that turned out to be one of the worst political experiments in the city’s history. Joburg is (some would say was) the heartbeat of the country, generating 16.5% of national GDP. The ANC’s inability to choose the best among its members to turn Joburg around tells you everything about what will happen to this city after November 4 if the party wins: factions will flourish, corruption will deepen and the decline will continue.
There are many good people who can run Joburg. Zille, Mashaba, Rise Mzansi’s Lukhona Mnguni and others have put up their hands. The ANC, which won only 35% of the Joburg vote in 2021, seems oblivious to the fact that by failing to name a candidate in Joburg, it is disrespecting voters and putting its deep dysfunction on show.
For that, it deserves the drubbing that’s coming to it.
