The ANC has a Bigger Problem than Zuma

South African politics is like a slow-moving car accident, difficult to ignore, painful to watch, with a predictable outcome. This may seem contrary to the recent fast-paced rollercoaster of political news which finds the country awash in political drama. Let’s recap just the last couple weeks.

First, President Jacob Zuma refuses to resign following a closed-door meeting with African National Congress leaders including the newly elected ANC President Cyril Ramaphosa. Then, the State of the Nation Address is unprecedentedly postponed. The federal police raids and makes arrests at the estate of a wealthy Zuma allied family who has been accused of corruption, influence peddling, and so-called ‘State capture’. Next, President Zuma is formerly ‘recalled’ (aka fired) by the ANC (ironically the same term used by the Zuma faction within the ANC to remove former President Mbeki), publicly refuses to step down as President, and gives an interview where he remained defiant. And then, just hours before a parliamentary vote to remove him from office, Zuma resigns, "effective immediately" and Ramaphosa is sworn in as South Africa's 5th President. Whew, my head is spinning!

These events, while dramatic, hide the slow tectonic shift that has been happening both within the ruling ANC and throughout all South African politics since 1994. An inevitable shift that the organization continues to futilely resist and which seems obvious to many South Africans and most people outside the country.

The African National Congress is a governing political party and no longer a revolutionary resistance movement.

This ignored reality is a negative assertion only to those that retain romantic notions of the ANC's organizational unity and prescriptive policy cohesion during the awful Apartheid decades. It seems obvious to those that realize that one cannot revolt against that which one controls or simultaneously be in power and resistant to that same power. Some in the ANC might deftly argue that what it continues to resist and revolt against is so-called 'white monopoly capital' or global elite exploitation of Africa. Admittedly. these things are both real things which contribute to structural inequity both in South Africa and across the continent. Even revolting and resisting against these forces requires specific policy directions and legislative solutions.

Liberation movements, by their nature, have a common focus and thus do not require ideological uniformity or adherence to rigid public policy preferences from its members. It is true that political parties, and even in some cases political coalitions, often can be a 'big tent', containing various interest groups with differing policy priorities and prescriptions. However, they cannot sustain themselves while containing groups with diametrically opposed policy prescriptions or fundamental disagreements in the basic role of government.

The ANC's problem is more fundamental than normal intra-party interest group tensions or policy preferences which exist within all political parties. The current ANC, and the larger crumbling 'Tripartite Alliance' contains groups and individuals which differ drastically on the very role of government, preferable economic systems, and even preferred international relationships and foreign policy directions. A resistance movement need not be ideologically constant. It need only been coordinately opposed to whatever hegemonic status quo exists. However, a political party like the current ANC which contains capitalists, neoliberals, socialists, democratic socialists, communists, unionists, nationalists, xenophobes, globalists, ethno-nationalists, protectionists, kleptocrats, and oligarchs is no more a party than Walmart is a simple shoe store.

The ANC's identity problem is more erosive and problematic than its current corruption, nepotism, or influence peddling scandals combined. For a governing political party to consist of conflicting political ideologies and policy directions is the same as it, and the whole country, having absolutely no direction at all. So even now, after Zuma, the so-called 'laughing President' is gone the ANC must decide both its identity and its future.

Michael Jackson is a political analyst/researcher and freelance writer/editor living in New York City. He holds a B.A. in political science with a concentration in American Politics & Urban Studies from California State University, East Bay and was formerly graduate fellow at the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences' Ph.D program