Johannesburg - In the final session of the adjourned ANC national conference starting on Thursday, it will be key for the party to come up with a solid plan to turn around its electoral fortunes in 2024.
The meeting started in December but it was abruptly brought to a close before branch delegates adopted any updated policy resolutions for the governing party.
By now, the delegates would have begun to grapple with finding answers to the party's acute decline in electoral performance.
The conference has to choose between two schools of thought, one pointing at the malfeasance of corruption in government as the source of the ANC’s downfall and another at the party’s failure to address bread-and-butter issues forpoor and marginalised voters.
Notably, the former argument was previously championed by the opposition DA but it has since been endorsed by President Cyril Ramaphosa and his faction.
Many other voices on the conference floor would hold a different view.
Electoral trends in recent years suggest the possibility that the 2024 elections could deliver SA’s first coalition government at national level. This is on the back of predictions that the ANC will fall below 50% of voter support for the first time since South Africa’s democratic breakthrough in 1994.
The municipal elections last year marked a significant setback for the ANC as its share of the national vote dropped below 50%. The elections also recorded a substantial decline in the proportion of young people eligible to vote.
“In the 1999 election, 41% of people aged 18-19 were registered. By 2021, that number had fallen to 9%. Unless this trend is reversed, fewer and fewer adults will be registered to vote and the strength of our democracy will steadily decline,” Ramaphosa said in his opening address to the conference.
At the start of the national conference, the ANC in Gauteng’s Johannesburg region had highlighted that it was paramount for the party to properly diagnose the source of this electoral decline "if we are to prescribe appropriate remedies".
"The dominant thinking in the movement especially since the 2016 local government elections has been that real and perceived corruption is the main cause of the electoral decline. By all accounts the assembly unanimously agreed that this has been a huge misdiagnosis of the ailment of our movement," the Johannesburg ANC members argued.
In support of this conclusion, the region noted that “despite all the efforts the movement has made since the Nasrec 2017 conference to demonstrate its seriousness about fighting corruption, the electoral decline has not been successfully arrested”.
“Despite the enthusiastic fight against those who were alleged to have been involved in state capture including the application of the step aside rule and Political Party Funding Act, our electoral performance has not improved.
“This is despite the prevalent perception that we are led, at the highest echelons of the movement, by ethically upright men and women. We, therefore, have to ask ourselves whether the idea that corruption is the primary grievance among our people is true.”
The region observed that during their door-to-door campaigns in and around Johannesburg, the ANC’s core constituency complained about a “lack of jobs, houses, water, electricity, land, roads, security, etc”.
“If ever, corruption features only after these many bread and butter issues. In short, our people’s primary grievance is their socio-economic conditions rather than the real and perceived corruption in the ANC government.
“We are therefore of an objectified view that the upcoming watershed conference of the ANC should place primacy over jobs, houses, water, electricity, land, security and organisational renewal".
The region’s submission could have been borrowed from the political report of the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal in July, where former party provincial chairperson Sihle Zikalala insisted that ANC support was being eroded by bread-and-butter issues.
As much as corruption is a concern, it does not outweigh issues such as unemployment for voters, according to Zikalala.
According to him, some of the issues that have led to the decline in voter turnout include poverty, a distressed economy, Covid-19, the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma and distrust in an ANC-led government.
And yet Ramaphosa seemed to sing from a different hymn book in his opening address, saying that “amid the many challenges facing the ANC, the persistence of corruption within our ranks stands out as one of the greatest threats to the continued existence of our movement as an effective force for fundamental social change”.
“We need to address corruption within our ranks in a systematic and principled manner. We must enhance political education and training for ANC members and equip branch members to advance the programme of social change.
“Branches must work to broaden the membership base, partner with a range of civil, community and progressive groupings and be grounded in communities. They must lead campaigns that make peoples’ lives better,” said Ramaphosa.
The opposition DA should be credited for painstakingly infusing corruption as a major feature of the country’s political transition since 1994.
Academic Jonathan Hyslop said in an article titled: "Political Corruption: Before and After Apartheid," that the largely white opposition DA leapt on corruption issues to argue that the ANC government was riddled with malpractice and systematically covered up for supporters who got caught with their hands in the till.
Hyslop noted that the ANC then countered that these criticisms were motivated by racism and resentment of social and political change and that isolated incidents are being blown out of proportion.
He quoted former president Thabo Mbeki and other ANC leaders contending that the government was dedicated to uprooting corruption, but that malpractice was far less prevalent than the opposition claimed.
In contrast, Ramaphosa's administration in 2020 singled out the ANC as the accused no 1 for corruption.