South Africa’s waning ANC tumbles further

The once mighty African National Congress (ANC), South Africa's ruling party since the dawn of democracy in 1994, is about to have its assets seized, including its headquarters.

The much-vaunted 'oldest liberation movement in Africa' recently had a third attachment order issued against it for non-payment of debts incurred in the party's 2019 national elections, even as it fought desperately in court to stave off a similar previous order.

Behind the latest court action lies the story of the rise of one of Africa's great and iconic anti-colonial movements, which organically and ultimately successfully challenged the injustices of systemic racial injustice, land dispossession and oppression - but also, over the past decade and a half, the story of its steady decline. 

The ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, whose name may well outlive that of the party to which he dedicated his life, is broke and in serious trouble on almost every front. 

Read: Hope to impasse: South Africans find unfulfilled promises at end of rainbow

Not only does it now owe some $7.7 million to the small company, Ezulweni Investments, which it hired to produce election paraphernalia in 2019, according to the order issued late last week, but it also owes its own employees, as the party has failed to pay ANC officials and staff three times in recent months.

In each case, the ANC has found someone to bail it out, but raising funds under a law of its own making, signed into law by the ANC and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in April 2021, makes it almost impossible for the ANC to stay afloat financially.

The new Political Parties Financing Act not only prohibits foreign powers or their agents from funding domestic parties in South Africa, but also requires parties to disclose their major funders for public scrutiny.

Given the tsunami of corruption revelations that began to emerge even as Ramaphosa signed this bill into law, the consequences for the ANC were severe: no major private organisation wanted to be seen to be in the good graces of corrupt ANC officials, and the party's funding literally dried up overnight.

Long accustomed to handouts from international supporters during its time in exile, and from internal supporters since the early 1990s, the ANC had become entirely dependent on regular, but previously undisclosed, millions of dollars in donations, some from private entities later found to have been involved in corruption. 

Read: In S. Africa, it’s full-scale battle for heart and soul of ANC

The ANC's now publicly available funding has been limping along since early 2021, leaving the party - which has some income from its investment arm, but far less than it needs to run the party - on the verge of destitution.

With membership down from 1.4 million a decade ago to just 600,000 at the end of 2022, not even all of whom are fully paid up, the party is on the verge of being declared insolvent, just as its youth league was in 2018. 

Since its heyday under Mandela in the mid- to late-1990s, the ANC has seen a steady loss of political support at the polls and an internal disintegration as individual greed and lust for power have replaced a genuine desire for freedom and service to the people.

The first of Africa's famous liberation movements - later emulated by other former greats of their time, such as Kanu in Kenya, CCM in Tanzania or Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe - the ANC appears to be on the same post-liberation path to political irrelevance that most of the continent's anti-colonial movements eventually experienced. 

That this organisation was so influential in galvanising, focusing and giving voice to the struggle of indigenous peoples for freedom from colonial and racist oppression across the continent is not surprising given the quality of its founders. 

Read: Gloves come off in fight for future of Mandela’s ANC

Sol Plaatje, to take but one prominent example, was a key figure in the founding of the ANC on 8 January 1912 in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Free State, which until shortly before the founding of the ANC had been a Boer republic formed by white Afrikaner descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who had arrived in South Africa in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

An intellectual, journalist, linguist, politician and writer, Plaatje also translated the works of Shakespeare into his native Tswana, just one of seven languages in which he was fluent.

Along with other intellectuals and luminaries, he inspired an Africanist and humanist resistance to the inhumane treatment of Africa's indigenous peoples by colonialists and their successors.

Plaatje and the nascent ANC offered not only a moral critique of the inadequacies of the systematic abuses suffered by Africans, but also a reasoned basis for a pan-African view that was far ahead of its time in seeing all human beings as essentially equal, in a manner similar to, and in part inspired by, the founding fathers of the US, who espoused universal, inalienable rights of being for every human being.

Both America, which is arguably still far from achieving this lofty ideal in practice, and the ANC took many decades to work through the implications of their founding principles.

It was not until the 1980s, for example, that the ANC reformed itself to allow whites and other 'non-Africans' to join the party's national executive on the basis of their ethnicity.

By the time the ANC came to power in 1994, it and its world beloved leader Mandela were the darlings of both the West and the East, and South Africa, the rainbow nation, was a shining global example of what Africa could become.

This all too brief 'dawn of democracy' was followed by the steady, if uninspiring - and Aids denying - hand of Thabo Mbeki into the first decade of the 2000s, as the 'dividends of democracy' and the end of the anti-apartheid struggle manifested themselves in steady economic growth, with South Africa then by far the continent's leader in terms of economic size and sophistication.

Mbeki's tenure was interrupted by the Zuma 'takeover' in 2007, organised at the grassroots through corrupt means such as bogus or 'ghost' members and branches, leading to the so-called 'nine lost years' of the hyper-corrupt Zuma era.

With widespread looting of public funds, known as 'state capture', allegedly from the top down - Zuma is currently facing numerous charges including corruption, fraud and money laundering - the ANC's public image was deeply tarnished.

But the ANC failed to see the writing on the wall, despite mass marches calling for Zuma's removal and several parliamentary votes of no confidence in him that were brushed aside by a somewhat arrogant ruling party that sees itself as above reproach for its historic role in ending apartheid. 

The people, however, have not seen it quite that way, and so-called 'service delivery protests', which can consist of half a dozen people standing on the side of the road with placards complaining about open sewers in their streets, but could just as easily involve running street battles between protesters and the police, have become routine.

Up to a dozen such protests a day were taking place across the country at the time of the Covid pandemic.

The Zuma years, growing international disillusionment with the ruling ANC and, above all, the failures of incompetent and corrupt rule had taken a drastic toll on South Africa's once-thriving economy by the time Ramaphosa took over from Zuma - who was forced to resign by his own party in early 2018.

Covid exacerbated high unemployment, giving South Africa the highest formal unemployment rate in the world at around the mid-30s, not counting another 10 per cent or so who have simply given up looking for work.

With youth unemployment at around 65 per cent, poverty on the rise, hopelessness in abundance and political grievances to be aired, the country was thrown into turmoil in mid-2021 when Zuma was jailed for contempt of the Constitutional Court.

The ensuing 'failed uprising' resulted in more than 350 deaths and many billions in damage to infrastructure, shopping centres and other targets of the most violent rioting in the post-apartheid era.

Since Ramaphosa took control of the ANC, its popular support has also plummeted, both in terms of membership and as measured by the polls.

In the last two national elections, in 2019 and 2021, the party's overall support has fallen dramatically.

The ANC, which once had more than a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, managed to win a reduced majority of 57.5 per cent in 2019, which is alarmingly low for the party compared to the 62.2 per cent it won in 2014.

This result was the ANC's lowest share of the vote since the introduction of multiracial democratic elections in 1994, when it came to power.

But worse was to come.

In 2021, for the first time, a national election for local government structures produced a sub-majority of just 45.6 per cent support for the 'party of Mandela'.

Another election is due in less than a year.

Meanwhile, the ANC is again grappling with local service delivery protests across the country after the Zondo Commission of Inquiry found, after four years of investigation, that it was the ANC itself that was the main actor in the corruption and incompetence of its 'appointed' officials that characterised the Zuma years and continues to adversely affect the country.

Daily blackouts have now escalated from a mere nuisance and expense to a direct threat to the continued functioning of the state.

It is not widely considered likely that the ANC will be 'swept away' when voters next have their say in May or April 2024, but it is widely considered likely that it will lose absolute control of both houses of parliament and be forced to govern with an unstable coalition.

The majority of opposition groups have signed a collective determination to oust the ANC and replace it with something like a 'government of national unity', except that it will not include the ANC or the noisy and fiery breakaway grouping to its left, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).

With so few likely co-governing parties to choose from, the ANC may well, and deeply ironically, be kept in power at the whim of EFF leader Julius Malema, whose star is rising as the ANC's sets.

Where the ANC goes from here, once these conditions are in place, remains to be seen.

But however the cards are dealt, it seems that the ANC that once was is no longer.

Nor does it seem able to 'rediscover itself', as one party policy paper put it, post-Zuma, or risk 'disappearing' from the realms of governance.

This may indeed be the fate of this once great organisation and its hopes for a united, free and prosperous Africa.