The first housing that you see driving into Cape Town from the airport is what are now called ‘informal settlements” in South Africa. In most other places they’d be called shanty towns and the average English garden shed looks like it would provide warmer, drier accommodation for a family than many of them. But, as is the way of these things, it is now possible to take a guided tour as part of the tourism industry.

The city has been left with a massive new football stadium which can look forward to a future of hosting Bon Jovi concerts. Setting aside prejudices against both soccer and stadium rock you do have to wonder if, in a city where an estimated 500 000 people don’t have access to toilets or running water in their homes that was the number one priority. The lead story in the local paper a couple of days ago was about people in the settlements being charged about a quid to use neighbours’ toilets and others having to use a grass verge by a main road as their facility. An inside story was about the construction of new homes without ceilings, a fairly obvious oversight.

What is absolutely apparent is that the African National Congress is a party with a straightforwardly bourgeois programme. It’s wrapped up in the language of national liberation, black empowerment and the rainbow nation and the party’s roots in struggle it to retain utter hegemony. Nevertheless while creating a small black middle class it is not offering even the most modest reformist benefits to its own base. As an example, the local press reports that infant mortality is higher than it was twenty years ago and the increase is attributable to diseases caused through inadequate sanitation.

Let’s take one example of the party’s evolution. Cyril Ramaphosa used to be a leading trade union militant and was secretary general of the ANC. He is now described as a business magnate and has just joined the board of platinum mining company Lonmin as a nonexecutive director. He’s also involved in a multi-billion dollar deal in the Congo which seems to have the smell of fish. Ramaphosa is typical of a lot of the ANC’s senior cadre. Don’t take my word for it. What follows is a local press report based on an internal document which sets out how pervasive the corruption has become. The document’s weakness is that it is not able to disentangle the problem of corruption from the party’s bourgeois programme. It still makes for interesting reading.

By a bit of a fluke a pre-prepared post on Leninism and the degeneration of parties in the Marxist tradition will be popping up next week. The ANC’s experience is a contemporary illustration of the issue.

“The ANC has just released a brutally frank appraisal of leadership within the movement, saying some members have lost their way since the party came into power in 1994.

In discussion documents released ahead of the party’s national general council in Durban in September, the ANC describes a new winner-takes-all culture and a lack of dialogue and debate among rival factions.

The conference will be the first opportunity to thoroughly review the impact of party chief Jacob Zuma’s leadership, which outsiders have called weak and uninspired.

The discussion document on leadership calls for a comprehensive campaign of renewal to lead the ANC back from opportunism, exploitation and corruption towards its roots.
“The many challenges of discipline and leadership since 1994 have begun to erode (the) unique character (of the ANC),” the party warns.

“At each national conference since the moment of entry into government, leadership transitions became increasingly problematic. Each conference highlighted new tendencies and practices, progressively worsening and infecting all aspects of our organisational pillars and work,” the National Executive Committee says.

In a possible criticism of the factionalism in the party’s Western Cape division and in the ANC Youth League, the document mentions this as a handicap to progress: “NEC interventions in provinces, dissolving PECs because the organisation and governance became paralysed by divisions, establishing interim leaderships and having to organise early conferences.

“The practice of dissolving elected leadership, which initially was regarded as a last resort, has indeed become a norm across our movement,” it says.

The document renews concern first raised by former party leader Thabo Mbeki about members who join to advance their personal and business interests and not to work for the poor and disadvantaged.

“Disturbing trends of ‘careerism, corruption and opportunism’, alien to a revolutionary movement (are) taking root at various levels, eating at our soul and with potential to denude our society of an agent of real change,” it says.

Looking for a way forward, the document poses this challenge:
“In pursuit of this central objective of using state power for the greater good of society and to transform power relations, progressive movements and parties had to find ways of dealing with the following issues:

Patronage and neo-patrimonialism: including how to ensure deployment to governance based on competency and commitment to the vision of transformation, instead of deployment based on factional interests or for accessing resources; how to prevent the channeling of public resources to party structures, leaders or members; avoid the shaping of political and economic institutions to benefit narrow interest groups and preventing undue influence of those with money, connections and resources to influence elections, lobbying and access, in the process seeking to shape the national agenda.

Bureaucratisation of political movements: blurred distinctions between movement and state; social distance between leaders, members and mass base; arrogance of power and bureaucratic indifference; demobilisation of members and mass base;domination by technocratic elites and the professionalisation of politics and a decline of activism.

Statist approaches to social transformation: the people and citizens as passive recipients of government delivery and development; challenges to approaches of government seen as challenges to the legitimacy of government or transformation; movement and civil society structures seen mainly to suppor government; a paradigm of ‘good governance’ vs democracy.

Corruption: theft of public resources; abuse of position to extort bribes or kickbacks; services in exchange for bribes; business and public office conflicts of interests.

Erosion of progressive values and organisational culture: hegemony of greed and consumption or ‘we did not struggle to be poor’; the nature of social change and growth of inequality; undermining internal democracy by limiting or seeking to discredit debates on alternatives; changing organisational culture and discipline,with enforcement of rules, increasingly for expediency rather than principle.”

The document calls for a more reflective future.

“The drive for the organisational renewal of the ANC should help pave the way for critical reflection and debate, creating an atmosphere where we can collectively find la
sting solutions to these very difficult problems. This requires leadership to lead honestly, humbly and decisively, and for membership and cadres to ensure that we take responsibility for the health of our movement.”