admin
Udo Froese
South Africa’s ruling ANC party seems to have lost its ground as champion of the poor majority.
The liberation movement enshrined national participation in and ownership of land and economy by all living in the country, more particularly by the poor majority, in its Freedom Charter.
The torch-bearers of the ANC — Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Duma Nokwe, Albert Luthuli, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Anton Lembede and Chris Hani — defended the defenceless and thus, kept the hopes of the poor masses high.
By 1994, however, the ANC was totally disarmed. Negotiated and manipulated to become an organisation of patronage, the Freedom Charter was dropped and replaced by among others, the secret “Sunset Clauses” brought by whites as preconditions to Independence.
Negotiations with the criminal colonial-apartheid powers and their imperialist Western backers ensured that the ANC accommodated the former Bantustan administrations as well as the racist regime’s national overt and covert structures in the “Rainbow Nation”.
Stratcom agents, murderers, spooks, money launderers, downright criminals (like the Selous Scouts from the former Rhodesia and Koevoet and 32 Battalion from former Southwest Africa), hit squads of the apartheid military intelligence’s Civil Co-operation Bureau (trained in Argentina and Israel in urban warfare, assassination and sabotage), as well as a host of other groups were legitimised by the “Sunset Clauses”.
Today, many of them are card-carrying members of the ANC: a frightening scenario indeed!
This would explain the continuous low-key sabotage of many government activities, tender rigging, bribery and corruption; all of which are steadily undermining the ruling party and badly affecting the poor majority.
Instead of employing and deploying real cadres, new, unknown, corrupt, untested and untried people build their careers in the ANC and its government.
This causes degeneration and eventual decay of the broad church of the ANC.
The national debate and dialogue with the masses has been stifled. Instead, corrupt and compromised praise-singers have moved into senior state positions.
An elite group in the ANC thus participates in right-wing actions. And we consequently get certain “technocrats” within the ANC elite adopting imperialist neo-liberal policies through GEAR, the Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy. GEAR sparked the downward spiral.
It was never debated, nor dialogued. “Technocrats” took over and decided that this was how the country would go without any consensus or debate. A senior member of the ANC told this writer that, “Most of the real ANC members are kept uninformed and in the dark. The question often raised is, who is leading whom?
Those misguided decisions entrap the ruling party and create a vacuum for new, small and opportunistic political groups such as Agang SA, COPE, EFF, AMCU and new political alliances to be formed after the forthcoming elections in 2014. Another respected ANC stalwart states: “For the ANC to get out of those traps (from the ‘Sunset Clauses’), it would have to abolish the ‘proportional representation system’ and replace it with a ‘constituent assembly system’, based on ‘one person, one vote’.
“It is most important that communities will be able to directly elect their representatives into Parliament.
This is the system the ANC fought for.”
The senior cadres I spoke to express their concern about the leaders’ fear of undoing what has been done already.
However, the ANC has no choice and will have to move fast, even at the expense of the “technocrats” and their supporters. The broad majority of the population has to participate directly in re-shaping its democracy and in the process re-build their lives and reclaim their country.
The present situation of keeping the broad masses uninformed and, therefore, marginalised makes the general population vulnerable to right-wing propaganda which is hard at work misleading and destabilising the country.
Udo W Froese is a political and socio-economic analyst based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Online Reporter