A Dictatorship of no Alternative: ANC eThekwini Region Elections

ANC eThekwini Region Elections Hans Christian Andersen, drawing from Sufi wisdom, gave the world an epic folktale entitled “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. The fable is about an emperor who was deceived by two swindlers. The swindlers promised to tailor for the emperor a special garment, which only intelligent and special people would be able to see and admire. Upon completion of the garment, the emperor’s trusted ministers – more concerned to keep their jobs than broach the naked truth – were unwilling to admit its invisibility. And so the potentate, bedecked in his fine new regalia and trailed by his entourage of obsequious ministers, paraded pompously down the main street. All the townspeople wildly praised the emperor’s new clothes, afraid to admit that they could not see them, until a small child injected some reality: “But he has nothing on!” The townspeople in Andersen’s folktale suffered what Floyd Allport and Danile Katz in social psychology classify as pluralistic ignorance or mistaken belief. Where, “no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes.” 

To those politically conscious eThekwini Municipality citizens immune from pluralistic ignorance, the recent political spectacle of Zandile Gumede, James Nxumalo, Monica Jaca, Bheki Ntshangase and many others to be re-elected to the ANC eThekwini regional leadership is just another masquerade like so many others that preceded it. For more than ten years EThekwini Municipality citizens have witnessed these naked emperors parading their respective incapabilities. Meanwhile, ANC eThekwini Region (ANC R12) card carrying members seem to suffer from what Robert Mangabeira Unger terms “a dictatorship of no alternatives”. Herbert Marcuse elaborated further, contending that “self-development will be real to the extent to which the masses have been dissolved into individuals liberated from all propaganda, indoctrination, and manipulation, capable of knowing and comprehending the facts and of evaluating the alternatives.” It would be generous to say that the ANC eThekwini Region voting delegates lack the proper political tools of analysis and critical thinking that equip them to ‘comprehend the facts’ and ‘evaluate the alternatives’. A more cynical read of the situation is that there is a wilful ignorance on the part of these ANC members, one intended to serve their own interests rather than those of the people. For it is clear to anyone who has eyes to see that Zandile Gumede and James Nxumalo are of the same difference, their invisible clothes are cut from the same cloth. Campaigning to return those who failed to deliver on the political mandate which was given to them by the majority of the electorate in past local government elections surely proves that we are living under “a dictatorship of no alternatives”. Zandile Gumede, James Nxumalo, Monica Jaca, Bheki Ntshangase and others about to be re-elected (again) to the ANC eThekwini regional leadership have cheerfully maintained the apartheid-era socioeconomic status quo. Whether through lack of imagination or political will, then, their unremitting conscious act has been to keep Africans firmly on the periphery of the municipality’s socio-economic opportunities. This despite the fact that the ANC has a multifaceted ideology, specific policies, and a clearly articulated strategic objective to liberate those historically marginalized, chiefly the African population. The current discourse in the ANC is that we are now embarking on the second phase of the transition from apartheid to a national democratic society, marked by radical socio-economic transformation and guided by the National Development Plan, an overarching policy adopted by ANC delegates during the 53rd ANC National Conference held at Mangaung in 2012. Nevertheless, the basic contours of eThekwini Municipality’s socio-economic opportunities, spatial development, and interpersonal relations are still largely defined by apartheid-era modus operandi. The beneficiaries of the apartheid system – Whites, (handful of) Indians, and African members of the old IFP ruling elite – still enjoy the lion’s share of economic opportunities in the province today. Meanwhile, ANC R12 members are at each other’s throats, with the sole aim of strangulating implementation of radical socio-economic transformation policies guided by the National Development Plan. This is because these members themselves hope to reinforce and exploit cleavages within the ANC leadership so that they might feed on the scraps that fall from the table of the beneficiaries of a twisted and broken system. Subsequently, the hopes and aspirations of thousands of honest and ambitious South Africans are pushed to the limit.

It boggles the mind that regional leadership is comprised strictly of Africans, who have excessive political and administrative power, yet it is poor Africans who continue to suffer most from apartheid-era structures of inhuman socio-economic exclusion that have yet to be dismantled by their elected leaders. How long before voters say enough is enough and demand accountability? The devolution of the eThekwini Regional elective conference into chaos brings to mind what Niran Tolsi reported about the observations by other ANC members regarding those delegates from KZN: “Delegates from other parts of South Africa, who attended the ANC’s national policy conference in Johannesburg in June, also told the Mail and Guardian that they were taken aback by the KwaZulu Natal delegation’s lack of political intellectualism. They were derisively labelled ‘maskandis’ … that is, they were there to sing louder than any opposition because of their numbers, instead of dealing constructively with policy issues. In Mangaung, they were called ‘voting cattle’ – marked present to vote on a pro-Zuma slate, instead of taking the party forward.” On the importance of getting policy right in our metros, Nenril Lebebvre, Stefan Kipfer and others point out that “the deepest troubles of the planet today do not lie only with geopolitical conflicts and world economic ravages. They are brewing in the metropolitan centres,…” It is for this reason that perhaps now, more than ever before, cities have become core agencies for human development and social economic transformation. Indeed, the so-called Information Age in which we live, emphasises the burden placed on cities as hubs of digital and knowledge innovation. 

Like many other national economies, South Africa is largely dependent on the proper management and performance of a handful of municipalities. For this reason, one must tread with extra care when lobbying for a candidate to head its day to day operations and strategic planning. In most countries, urbanites tend to demand more of their mayoral candidates than they do of their national leaders, and raw pragmatism and results outweigh rhetoric and ideology every time. Urban citizens search for a mayor in possession of the following characters: educated, innovative, futuristic, experienced in public administration (this surely can be applicable to South African now more than twenty years into democracy), confident with no inferiority complex, and well informed about the regional socio-economic and global development trends. Do Zandile Gumede and James Nxumalo possess the qualities of Jaime Lerner, a three-term mayor of Curitiba, Brazil in the 1970s and 80s? Lerner’s book, Urban Acupuncture: Celebrating Pinpricks of Change That Enrich City Life, details how his administration ‘pioneered a low-cost, low–impact approach to solving the city’s problems’, which included ‘implementing the world’s first bus rapid transit system’ and ‘giving different parts of the city their own unique public lighting schemes’. This is a man who ‘turned down the World Bank, with its offer of millions in loans, to find sustainable, home grown solutions. With his smart alternatives, he showed other cities how to do it right, themselves.’ Are we confident that either Zandile Gumede or James Nxumalo will match or surpass the innovative acumen of Jaime Lerner? Is either candidate even capable of simply doing no harm and living by the preamble to the City Mayors’ Code of Ethics, which states that “honest local government is the foundation of any nation that strives to provide its citizens with happiness, security and prosperity”? It continues to say that corruption and misconduct by local government officials threaten fundamental decency in a society. The failure, fragility, and dysfunction across the municipality are mostly the result of choices made by ANC R12 card carrying members who are poorly-educated, ill-informed, and easily-influenced. This is part of the messy nature of democratic systems – majority decisions are not always beneficial. 

This begets another pivotal question, however: what lies beneath these choices? There was nothing to prevent Zandile, James, Bheki, Monica and the others from exercising their liberty to decline the nomination to contend the eThekwini ANC Regional leadership. And what does this say about the current state of leadership in our province and in our country? Are these leaders the embodiment of the ANC’s historical ethos and high standard of ethics? Is their political and personal behaviour able to squeeze through the eye of the needle? Do they reflect the perfect ambassadorship of the finest minds that exist within the African population? Remember, the ANC is to be the people’s movement, and ANC leaders have a social contract with the people. The ANC leadership are to serve as the point of reference, and in turn be role models to the next generation of leadership. When our leaders lament that today’s youth are unruly and ill-disciplined, they might first look in the mirror. Contrary to the ANC’s lobbying campaigns focused on socio-economic discourse, in real life we are constantly confronted by reports of butchered branch delegates, while others are lucky enough to dodge the bullets. The exchange of harsh words barbed with razor-sharp edges has become an acceptable way of communication. Shockingly, Zandile Gumede is shielded by a regiment of body guards. Why? Who would want to kill her? For what reasons? The most important question to be asked: who pays the regiment? What is his/her expectations? When these expectations are not met what are the consequences? The same questions can be put to James Nxumalo’s campaign. The commonality between James’ and Zandile’s campaigns is the flow of illicit funds sourced from the same invisible hands. Therefore the invisible hands are winners, regardless of the winner between James and Zandile. I shudder to entertain a thought that might be a reality, which is that James and Zandile are mere Trojan Horses for those wanting to get their hands in the R36 billion budget of the eThekwini municipality. Politically conscious citizens of eThekwini municipality must be able to identify with Friedrich Nietzsche’s saying: ‘We were the first to discover the truth by being the first to find out that a lie is a lie – we could smell it’. The naked truth is that James, Zandile, Monica, Bheki and the rest of the to-be-re-elected lot are cut from the same cloth. Again there shall be no elections in the eThekwini ANC region. Elections, transparency, democratic centralism and any other political concept remain abstract until the ANC R12 card carrying members fully comprehend and apply them in practice. The 52nd National Conference of the African National Congress adopted a motion raised by Gauteng Province which declared that the ANC is the centre, not an individual occupying an office. Does the provincial ANC leadership still subscribe to this adopted motion: ANC is the centre! In the process of osmosis the result is diffusion. The ANC must understand that in its attempt to amass the whole of society to its rank all and sundry scoundrels find their way into the organisation. 

The ANC as an organic entity shall never be the same. Moreover, evolution does not always signify progress. The ANC in Kwazulu-Natal, especially the eThekwini region, must remember the words of a man who suffered a tremendous humiliation from his organization when he said “this is the practice that again is entirely foreign to our movement – the practice of using untruths, of resort to dishonest means and deceit to achieve particular goals.” He asked a question that was never answered, even today: “If we are divided, what should we do to address this challenge, given the naked truth that a divided ANC can never discharge its historic responsibilities to the masses of our people?” The question still stands: What divides the ANC? And who are those that are dividing it? Perhaps most importantly, what is their end game?

 By Benedict Xolani Dube 0823524277