52nd National Conference of the ANC
The African National
Congress (ANC) of South Africa held its 52nd National Conference from 16-20
December 2007 in Polokwane, Limpopo, attended by more than 4,000 delegates and
numerous fraternal visitors from other countries.
The results of this conference were, in the
apt words of the Financial Times, “arguably the most significant
event in South Africa since the end of white minority rule 13 years ago”.
In the ANC’s first contested leadership
elections in more than 50 years, Jacob Zuma delivered a humiliating blow to the
incumbent ANC President (and still President of the Republic of South Africa
until 2009) Thabo Mbeki, capturing more than 60 per cent of the vote. Zuma not
only enjoyed the support of the rank and file delegates of the ANC, but also of
the organisations that provide the core of its left wing, namely the ANC
Women’s League and the ANC Youth League, as well as the movement’s alliance
partners, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South
African Trade Unions (COSATU).
Moreover, Zuma’s victory was part of a clean
sweep that dramatically shifts the ANC leadership to the left. The Financial
Times said, “in what amounted to a total rejection of his [Mbeki’s]
camp, the ANC’s five other leadership positions were all secured by backers of
Mr Zuma and by the same comfortable margin”.
The highest margin for any candidate elected
to the National Executive Committee (NEC) was enjoyed by Winnie
Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela. Like Zuma, she has
earned the bitter hatred of an establishment still barely reformed from the
days of white racist minority rule, but both are hugely popular among the
oppressed masses, whose political representatives are the ANC rank and file.
In contrast, eight of Mbeki’s cabinet
ministers, including his deputy president, lost their seats on the NEC. At the
previous ANC conference five years ago, Trevor Manuel, the Finance Minister,
noted for his enthusiastic pursuit of neo-liberal policies, was re-elected to
the NEC by the highest margin of any of its 80 members. This time he came in at
57th place.
As the new President of the ANC, Jacob Zuma is
scheduled to become the party’s candidate for the post of head of state in
elections next year, which, given the overwhelming support that the ANC still
enjoys among the popular masses, would virtually guarantee his election.
One of the very few ways to stop this would be
if he were to be convicted on criminal charges. Within days of his election as
ANC President, therefore, Zuma was charged with various offences related to
alleged corruption, concerning a long-running investigation into South Africa’s arms purchases in the late 1990s. Zuma was dismissed as Deputy President of South Africa by Thabo Mbeki in 2005, after his financial adviser was convicted in the same
affair. A previous corruption case brought against Zuma collapsed in 2006, as
did a charge of rape.
The timing of the case against Zuma would appear,
therefore, to have very little to do with any determination to root out
corruption and everything to do with a political conspiracy, relying on
unreformed and unaccountable parts of the state machine, to frustrate the
democratically expressed aspirations of the masses.
According to the South African media, Zuma is
scheduled to face trial in August, but his lawyers have indicated that they
intend to appeal to the Constitutional Court, the country’s top court, before a
case begins.
Whatever the exact course of events, we can be
certain that the South African masses will resist any attempt to circumvent the
exercise of their hard-won democratic rights by conspiracy and legal
manoeuvring. In February, the ANC, despite President Mbeki’s opposition, announced
to parliament that it intended to disband the force of prosecutors and
investigators known as the Scorpions by June. The Scorpions were set up as a
so-called “elite crime-fighting unit”, largely removed from the normal chain of
command or any effective system of checks and balances and they have been
increasingly accused of pursuing a politicised agenda against sections of the
ANC, including the framing of charges against Zuma.
There is no doubt that Jacob Zuma strikes a
chord among the masses, which has allowed him to be elected as ANC President
against the odds. He was born in Inkandla, Kwa-Zulu Natal Province, high in the
remote and hilly grasslands, in 1942, to a family engaged in subsistence
farming. He had no formal education as a child and was illiterate until
adulthood. The area still has the second highest unemployment rate in South Africa and HIV afflicts more than one third of the community.
After his father’s death at the end of the
Second World War, he moved with his mother to Durban, where she became a
domestic worker. Influenced by a relative, who was a fervent trade unionist, he
joined the ANC in 1959. Engaged first in trade union work, he joined Umkhonto
we Sizwe (MK, ‘Spear of the Nation’), the newly formed armed wing of the
ANC, in 1962, after the liberation movement was banned in 1960 following the
apartheid regime’s massacre of peaceful demonstrators at Sharpeville.
Arrested, he was sent to the notorious Robben Island, arriving there in March 1964, a few months before Nelson Mandela. They were
bleak times, but it seems that the young Zuma played a key role in rallying his
comrades. In a profile article (The left-leaning Zulu) published in the Financial
Times on 1 December 2007, journalist Alec Russell wrote that he “had an
irrepressible urge to lighten the atmosphere… ‘He was the leading light at
choral singing and Zulu dancing,’ says Ebrahim Ebrahim, an ANC veteran, who
shared a cell with him. ‘He was always very cheerful even when we were on our
way to the island. In fact, whenever he goes to a meeting he wants to sing.’”
Zuma was to spend 10 years on Robben Island, followed by 15 years in exile, in which time he rose to become the head of
the ANC’s intelligence service. Last year, he told guests at his 65th birthday
celebrations:
“I am just a little herd boy from Inkandla
who happened to be a trade unionist and politician who participated in the
struggle. Rest assured, I will always be what I am. I will never change.”
However, whilst individuals are certainly
important (and it is important to note that Thabo Mbeki himself was born into
the liberation movement and has worked for it all his life, his father being
the late Comrade Govan Mbeki, one of South Africa’s greatest revolutionaries
and communists), what is at stake in the recent and unfolding events in South
Africa is far more than some clash of personalities. Rather it is about the
whole future course of South Africa’s development, about whether or not South
Africa’s national democratic revolution, which achieved a great victory in 1994
with the formation of a democratic, non-racial government, will be continued
and deepened, so that South Africa’s impoverished masses can at last enjoy some
real economic fruits from the political liberation they secured in 1994.
Founded in 1912, the ANC is Africa’s oldest
liberation movement and as such continues to occupy a special place not only in
South African life, but also in the politics of the whole continent and, to a
degree, in the world progressive movement generally. For decades it waged a truly
heroic struggle against colonialism, apartheid and imperialism against the most
difficult of odds and a most brutal foe. However, as Comrade Mao Zedong
famously observed: “You cannot win at the negotiating table what you have
not already won on the battlefield.”
This observation is particularly apposite to
the circumstances of the ANC’s 1994 triumph. On the one hand, the apartheid
regime had been significantly weakened by a combination of mass and armed
struggle, defined by Nelson Mandela, in a famous letter smuggled out from
Robben Island, as the hammer and anvil between which apartheid would be
crushed, which were increasingly fusing into a single mighty stream of
resistance. The key turning points were the uprising led by the school students
in the Johannesburg township of Soweto in June 1976, whose brutal crushing led
to a huge influx into the ranks of the ANC and MK; and the Battle of Cuito
Cuanavale in Angola ten years later in 1986, when a combined military force of
Cuba, Angola, the former Soviet Union, the ANC and the Namibian liberation
movement SWAPO decisively routed the South African racist army, shattering the
myth of white invincibility, expediting the liberation of Namibia, and thereby
moving the frontline of the struggle to the borders of the apartheid state
itself.
However, the collapse
of the Soviet Union, and the east European socialist states, a few years later,
after decades of revisionist degeneration, deprived the ANC of its strongest
source of external support and pushed it, along with many other national
liberation movements and progressive governments in the Third World, in a
necessary direction of compromise.
For its part, feeling
that the threat from communism had at last abated, imperialism increasingly
found its apartheid client state, with its crude racism and brutish methods, an
unnecessary embarrassment, especially when confronted both by the risen South
African people and the moral repugnance against apartheid that increasingly
gripped working and progressive people in their own countries. In fact, the
system of open and institutionalised apartheid had to a great extent been the
response of the Afrikaner section of South Africa’s white community to their
own relatively subordinate position within South African white society and
hence within the wider global imperialist system. The multinational companies
and monopolies, such as Anglo-American, Oppenheimers and De Beers, that
dominated (and continue to dominate) the mining and mineral industries that are
the mainstay of the South African economy as well as the key to the country’s
vital importance to imperialism, were more closely aligned to US and British
imperialism than to its local surrogates, and were increasingly of the view
that apartheid had actually become bad for business. Faced with preserving
apartheid or preserving imperialist super profits, there really was no contest.
Apartheid had to go.
Hence, there was a
situation where some but not all of the necessary components for a
revolutionary change were in place. The masses were no longer prepared to be
ruled in the old way. The ruling class was no longer able to rule in the old
way. However, the enemy, whilst significantly weakened, was far from smashed.
The resulting,
inherently unstable for the long-term, compromise therefore saw the political
representatives of the oppressed people, the ANC, assume the leadership of the
state, whereas the economy and much of the governmental, military, security and
judicial establishment remained to a great, although not total, extent
untransformed and unreformed.
In such a situation,
a transition to socialism was clearly not on the immediate agenda. At the same
time, something clearly needed to be done to address the expectations, demands
and needs of the oppressed and impoverished masses.
The answer to this was the Reconstruction and
Development Programme (RDP). The RDP was drawn up at the request of the ANC
leadership by the movement’s most prominent economist, the late Comrade Vella
Pillay. Pillay was not only a brilliant economist, but also a staunch
communist. A founder of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) in Britain, he was also a pivotal figure in arranging military training for ANC cadres in both the
Soviet Union and China. More particularly, for more than four decades, he worked
in a senior capacity in the Bank of China in London, with a crucial role in
international financial transactions and the management of China’s foreign exchange reserves. In other words, Comrade Pillay was the man for the job.
His RDP envisaged a policy of public spending
and state leadership of the economy to deliver real benefits to the poor. It
stated:
“The RDP aims to set South Africa firmly on
the road to eliminating hunger, providing land and housing to all our people,
providing access to safe water and sanitation for all, ensuring availability of
affordable and sustainable energy sources, eliminating illiteracy, raising the
quality of education and training for children and adults, protecting the
environment, and improving our health services and making them accessible to
all.”
Unfortunately, the proposals were only ever
implemented in a very half-hearted fashion. For example, Pillay had proposed
the building of one million low cost houses to replace the shacks in the
squatter camps in one year, but only a small fraction of this number were
built.
Instead, in June 1996, Finance Minister Trevor
Manuel unceremoniously dumped the RDP, replacing it with GEAR, Growth,
Employment and Redistribution, which discarded the national democratic thrust
of the RDP in favour of an embrace of neo-liberal commitments to open markets,
privatisation and an open door to foreign investment on terms unfavourable to
the country.
It is true that GEAR has delivered economic
growth of some five per cent per year and, for example, doubled the percentage
of the population connected to the national electricity grid to some 70
percent. However, with the urban unemployment rate in the townships estimated
at some 40 per cent, the overwhelming feeling among the poor and the mass of ANC
members is that the economic growth has not benefited them and that the
neo-liberal policies embraced by the government are to blame. As one ANC
activist told the Financial Times:
“Business is growing. You see new shopping
malls. But people are still living in the same 45 square metre houses.
Capitalists put in nice malls but their concern is to build business, not the
people.”
The significance of the shift from RDP to GEAR
was seen in a June 2007 article in the South African financial publication, Business
Report, which stated:
“Behind the latest series of spats between
senior members of the governing tripartite alliance is the spirit and legacy of
the late Vella Pillay… [The tripartite alliance refers to the ANC, SACP and
COSATU.]
“As early as 1991 senior ANC figures had
begun to reject Pillay’s stress on an interventionist state to rectify the
distortions of the apartheid economy. Pillay was sidelined to make way for
economists favouring the liberal, private enterprise policies promoted by
international big business at venues such as the World Economic Forum…
“When Nelson Mandela went to Davos for that
meeting, it was to deliver the first public statement about the economic
policies that would be followed in a post-apartheid South Africa. The task of
preparing this detailed statement was given to Pillay, then still in exile in England.
“Pillay’s document was included in the
first draft of the speech, a draft that was inadvertently released and
published in South Africa, to the consternation of business and the general
glee of the trade unions. But it was not the speech that was delivered.
“Fearful of alienating powerful potential
investors, the ANC delegation decided on a rapid rewrite. Tito Mboweni, later
to become labour minister and now Reserve Bank governor, is credited with
drafting what one commentator accurately described as ‘a carefully written,
harmless and mildly reassuring’ outline of proposed economic policy…
“Pillay, once tipped as the first ANC
governor of the Reserve Bank, found himself increasingly favoured by the trade
unions and sidelined by the government. At the same time, business, through the
SA Foundation, was drafting an economic policy document that emerged in March
1996 under the title Growth for All, promoting trade liberalisation and
privatisation…
“This still sums up the fundamental
division: stress either on redistribution leading to greater demand, leading to
growth; or on the idea that greater growth will lead to wider
redistribution of wealth.
“These debates were briefly buried with the
publication of the government’s macroeconomic plan, GEAR. Although not so
blatantly pro-business as Growth for All, it also placed the stress on growth.
As such, it fell into the category of trickle-down economics.
“The unions were unhappy but, in those
still euphoric years, they were unwilling to challenge the new government. As
the years have gone by, however, there has been a sense among trade unionists,
and certainly in the SA Communist Party, that the government may not be
neutral; that the battle may need be fought outside, rather than inside, the
alliance. But it is the same fight, the one that began when Vella Pillay’s
inclusions in Nelson Mandela’s 1991 speech at Davos were rewritten.”
This is the key background to what is
presented in the media as some sort of personality clash between Jacob Zuma and
Thabo Mbeki.
In a December 2007 interview with the Financial
Times, Comrade Zwelinzima Vavi, the head of COSATU, said:
“We think that this flirtation with
neo-liberal policies in 1996…has been absolutely disastrous for our
development. We think that it is scandalous that we are only having a proposed
industrial policy in 2007, in the thirteenth year of democracy, meaning that
all along we were walking in a big, big dangerous zone of globalisation without
a map.
“We allowed the marketers to take charge of
important departments and all they knew was that South Africa had to be exposed
to the chilly winds of competition. They cut tariffs even faster than was
required by the World Trade Organisation. In the process they undermined the
engine of growth itself, the manufacturing sector. We are a developing country.
We ought to develop our industries first. We are now reaping the fruits of
that…
“We should have deliberately shifted the
economy away from capital-intensive sectors to labour intensive sectors. We
should have looked at more processing, food. We should have looked at issues of
infrastructure, at beneficiation of mineral resources. We should have looked at
many things of that kind. We didn’t and I think we will pay.”
Besides drawing lessons from their own
experience, the South African liberation movement is also now emboldened to
speak out against neo-liberal globalisation by developments in the
international situation.
Objectively, the most important has been the
rise of China, which provides an alternative example for all developing nations
and which reduces, but does not yet remove, the ability of imperialism to
impose its will on other nations. China and South Africa have increasingly
built a special relationship in both the political and economic fields. As
Thabo Mbeki noted in his opening address to the ANC Conference, China’s largest single foreign investment is the twenty per cent stake in South Africa’s Standard
Bank, recently purchased by the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of
China (ICBC).
Subjectively, the emergence of a series of new
left wing governments in Latin America, and especially the deepening of the
Venezuelan revolution, has served to inspire the left in South Africa.
Speaking at an SACP rally last October to
celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution,
Comrade Vavi stated:
“When many have declared socialism dead, it
is appropriate to mark the 90th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution and
reinstil confidence in the future of socialism. This rally takes place amid
rising working class confidence in South Africa and the world, especially in Latin America…
“Neo-liberalism has been challenged
throughout the world and more forcefully in Latin America. In this context we
salute the wave of left wing-parties coming to power in Latin America, part of
that wave of global challenge to neo-liberalism. The South African working
class has also forcefully challenged the neo liberal dogma…
“What are the implications for the South
African revolution? We must see our struggles as interlinked with the global
struggle against neo-liberal globalisation. Our challenge is to radicalise the
current path of the national democratic revolution. This means building the
power and the confidence of the working class to challenge the hegemony of
capital. That requires a reversal of the flirtation with the neo-liberal dogma
by the democratic government.”
Concluding his speech, Vavi called on the
members of the ANC to mobilise to elect Zuma as their president.
In his organisational report to the ANC
Conference, outgoing Secretary General Kgalema Motlanthe reported that in
2006-7 the ANC had sent important study delegations to Cuba and China at the invitation of their communist parties, and had also joined a joint delegation
with the SACP and COSATU to Bolivia:
“The objectives of the study tours were to
draw lessons on party building, mass mobilisation and challenges of
development. The varied insights gained included:
·
The functioning of the Communist Parties of Cuba and the PRC [People’s
Republic of China].
·
The importance of cadre development and the institutions of
political education, including party schools.
·
The role of the party and its organs in strategic thinking and
providing guidance to the state and society.
·
Roles of and relationship between the National, Provincial and
Local organisational and government structures in the respective countries.
·
Challenges confronted by parties in Cuba and the PRC and the
mechanisms utilised to overcome them.
·
Lessons from China’s sustained economic growth path.”
In resolutions adopted at the conference, the
ANC not only committed itself to reinvigorating its alliance with its old
liberation movement partners in Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Guinea
Bissau, Tanzania and Sudan, as well as Palestine and Western Sahara, it
resolved to embark on “a programme to strengthen the progressive movement in
Africa and formalise relations with the global progressive movement, in particular
Latin America and East Asia”.
It further tasked the incoming NEC to “commit
resources and space for the holding of a first meeting of the progressive
parties/movements in Africa, with a view to holding an international meeting of
all progressive parties/movements in the world before the next conference of
the ANC”.
The other vital question for the South African
national democratic revolution, to which the conference at last directed
significant attention, was that of the land. The liberation movement long ago
defined South Africa as a state of settler colonialism, that is colonialism of
a special type, in which the coloniser and the colonised inhabit the same
national territory.
Since liberation in 1994, South Africa’s progress in land reform has been pitifully slow. On 6 November 2007, the Financial
Times reported:
“Concern over the slow progress in land
reform comes against the backdrop of mounting tensions within the ANC ahead of
leadership elections next month…
“Land is arguably the most sensitive, complex
and important issue for post-colonial African governments. This is particularly
true in countries where under colonial rule large white settler populations
controlled the prime agricultural land…
“In South Africa, the history of land
ownership is just as poisoned as Zimbabwe’s was at independence in 1980. The
Natives’ Land Act in 1913 set aside more than 80 per cent of South Africa’s land for the whites who made up less than 20 per cent of the population.
Between then and the last years of white rule, an estimated six million black
South Africans were forced into remote rural ‘homelands’…
“The ANC has a target of redistributing 30
per cent of agricultural land to black farmers by 2014 but the statistics
showed that less than five per cent has so far been redistributed…
“Simultaneously, the pressure from the
black landless for swifter redistribution intensifies. Their drive is fuelled
by a recent wave of evictions of tenants from farms, which has gathered
momentum since the introduction of a minimum wage.
“According to Nkuzi, a land rights
non-governmental organisation, one million have been forced off white-owned
farms since 1994. This would mean more people had lost land than gained it
since the end of white rule.”
The article goes on to quote an activist in
the Landless Movement:
“He and his family are tenants on a small
plot in Kwa-Zulu-Natal where he, his father and grandfather were born. His
great- and great-great-grandfathers were also there ‘long before the
demarcation of the land by whites’, he thinks.
“‘But we don’t have any rights,’ he says.
‘Even now a farmer is telling us to move our cattle. We have ancestral graves
all over the land. We lodged a claim as land tenants. But there is a separate
restitution claim on the same land. Land reform is going nowhere. People are
being patient but they are being fooled. Market-led reform has failed in many
countries. Land invasions are the only way.’”
Indeed, the only country in the region to have
tackled this problem in a fundamental and revolutionary way is Zimbabwe, which is a key reason why Comrade Robert Mugabe is without doubt the most popular
leader in the entire region.
In the face of government inaction on
meaningful land reform in South Africa, the explosive nature of this
contradiction has found expression in hundreds of killings of white farmers in
remote rural areas. Besides the settling of individual scores, the military
character of the organisation and execution of many of these assaults has led
many to speculate on the involvement of former members of the three liberation
armies that battled white minority rule. [1]
The ANC has now resolved that about one in
three farms must be redistributed over the next five years, with foreigners
facing property restrictions with immediate effect.
“We should discard the market-driven land
reform and immediately review the principle of ‘willing seller-willing buyer’
so as to accelerate the equitable distribution of land.”
Conference noted that only four per cent of
agricultural land has been redistributed since 1994, while more than 80 per
cent remains in the hands of fewer than 50,000 white farmers and
agri-businesses.
“Current approaches to land reform are not
achieving the scale or outcomes required for the realisation of a better life
for rural South Africans…
“The lack of popular participation in land
reform has limited its impact and undermined our efforts to accelerate
redistribution. Our approach has been overly reliant on officials and
consultants, and has not succeeded in empowering the poor through
people-centred approaches to planning and implementation.”
Conference therefore resolved to “expropriate
property in the public interest or for public purpose in accordance with the
Constitution to achieve equity, redress, social justice and sustainable development”.
It also paid
attention to the logistics of transferring land ownership, placing emphasis on
the organisation of women into cooperatives, introducing comprehensive support
programmes for small farmers, building a “stronger state capacity” and spending
more on rural development, land reform and agrarian transformation.
In the Declaration
adopted at the close of Conference, the ANC declared that the movement had “emerged
the winner, as a disciplined force of the left committed to constructing a better
life for all… We are also united around a common strategic objective, the
creation of a national democratic society.”
In his closing
address as newly elected President, Comrade Zuma struck a conciliatory but
principled note:
“A lesson we have
learnt from this conference, is that if the leadership fails to resolve issues,
or to grasp the feelings of the membership on issues that concern the movement
and instead appears to perpetuate the problems, the membership takes over and
asserts its authority in ways that we may not be comfortable with. However, we
must endeavour to always relate to each other in a comradely manner, regardless
of how strongly we feel about issues.”
We wish Comrade Jacob
Zuma, the ANC, SACP and the working people and popular masses of South Africa every success in their difficult and complex struggle to continue and deepen
the national democratic revolution, which must inevitably open the way to a
socialist transformation of the whole of the economy and society.
Just as we were
side-by-side with the ANC and the entire liberation movement during the long
night of apartheid, we will continue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them in
their continuing struggles.
NOTE
[1] Besides Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK),
these were the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA, previously known as Poqo
[‘Ourselves’]), the armed wing of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC);
and the Azanian National Liberation Army (AZANLA), the armed wing of the Black
Consciousness Movement of Azania/Azanian People’s Organisation (BCM/AZAPO).