It will be convenient but also very disingenuous for some factions in the ANC to use the sizeable decline in its share of the vote in the local elections to lash President Jacob Zuma.
Obviously we don’t know the logic and motive of voters with complete accuracy.
Nevertheless, I would be shocked if Zuma’s ruinous leadership isn’t partly, or massively, responsible for the hammering the ANC has taken across the country. The elections were surely in part a referendum on Zuma’s leadership.
But here’s the snag. The ANC prides itself on being bigger than any one individual member of the party, including the leader. That was why, as we know all too well, former president Thabo Mbeki was recalled. He got too big for his small boots.
The party even has a weird tendency of speaking as if it exists like a human being that’s omniscient, omnipotent and watching over the tiny human beings who are its loyal children waiting for instructions from it.
But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t anthropomorphise the party, and ascribe to it agency and authority that no one can subvert, and at the same time want to lash out at Zuma as if he is the omniscient, omnipotent one.
The implication is that the party itself, including the leadership at all levels, as well as ordinary ANC members and supporters, are jointly responsible for the erosion of the brand of this once great liberation movement.
The election wasn’t merely a referendum on Zuma’s leadership. It was that, and much more. It was also an election that reveals what the electorate thinks about the state of the state, especially at local government level, but also in respect of the other spheres of government (because, let’s be honest, we all conflate local and national governance questions, and maybe that’s not the end of world).
The election is also feedback for the governing ANC about what the electorate makes of the quality, or lack thereof, of its leadership. The local elections were a referendum on the ANC more than they were a referendum on Zuma.
Any factions that use the election results as a basis to form slates that they can start lobbying for as jostling for positions at the elective conference in 2017 begins must be careful about the strategies they use to replace the current lot.
Honesty and politics make for awkward bedfellows. But I wish more politicians would take a chance on honesty and see how it works out for them politically. I reckon that an ANC leader who is prepared to narrate a post-mortem analysis that indicts the entire party, including themselves, and not just Zuma, for these election results will be a leader who gains enormous respect across the party base.
There is no space here for lying. Sure, a party president has to be held accountable for how he or she exercises their enormous constitutional powers. But ultimately the party itself has to exercise an accountability role too.
So, the smartest factionalist strategy, as counter-intuitive as it might seem, would be, in the first instance, to take the rhetoric of collective accountability seriously, and role-model it.
Even if, as has been the case with the ANC in Gauteng, you have slowly cultivated a brand that’s almost distinct from the national brand of the party, don’t be arrogant about that communicative feat.
Own your role in not holding Zuma accountable. Own your errors for how you failed to provide effective political oversight in ministries or departments that you are in charge of. Don’t scapegoat Zuma. Acknowledge openly that the ANC has not taken seriously the Mangaung resolution on organisational renewal.
It would be far easier to take the moral high ground, and try to get elected onto a leadership position in the ANC next year, if an aspirant leader rehearses a new kind of leadership that’s sorely lacking in the party.
Ministers who are members of both the ANC and the SACP, for example, should avoid the temptation of ditching Zuma in the dying days of his political career. You helped to get the man into the position where he did the damage that he has done, and might still do in the remaining years in the Presidency.
You can’t pretend that Zuma elected himself. He didn’t. He is a product of the processes of the party, and therefore the party itself should be embarrassed by what transpired in the elections.
Would we better off without Zuma, including getting rid of him before 2019? Absolutely. Would that be the end of the ANC’s challenges? Absolutely not. But it would be the beginning of organisational renewal.