
By Imraan Buccus
The sight of an ANC T-shirt on the streets of Durban is getting rarer by the day. Ten years ago young grassroots organisers had to be careful not to be too confrontational with the ANC at meetings and rallies as the older people found it uncomfortable. These days the new slogan ‘Phansei nge-ANC!’ brings forth the loudest cheers.
But the intra-ANC battles are full of passion, often descending into violence, even murder. The attempts to dress this up in the language of ideology is little more than a mask for battles over access to resources.
At the recent provincial conference the Zuma faction, now known, bizarrely, as the Taliban, swept to power paving the way for Nomusa Dube as the premier in KZN.
The Freedom Charter with its democratic vision of a future in which a social democratic state would provide homes, land and good schools for the people is long gone. The democratic popular politics of the 1980s is also a distance memory. Now the Taliban, frequently engaging in violence and political repression outside of formal political structures, wants nothing but money and power leaving collapsing cities and infrastructure in its wake.
The former premier and ANC chairperson Sihle Zikalala cut his teeth in the youth structures of the mass democratic movement during the most violent period in the run up to the first democratic elections counted zilch.
The vote at the Olive Convention Centre raised a very large middle figure to the poor, to all of us battling crumbling infrastructure, shocking school and hospitals and more. It will certainly mark a big step towards the party’s eventual loss of power in the province. People will only tolerate the rot for so long. People will only be fooled by the language of ethnicity for so long.
But with no mass based party on the left the province will face the same problems as we have seen in metros across the country. Rickety coalitions will have to be brought together, coalitions of right-wing forces.
In KwaZulu-Natal this inevitably means that the IFP will have to make common cause with the DA , the authoritarian populism and sometimes proto-fascism of the EFF and Herman Mashaba’s increasingly frightening hard right-wing xenophobic outfit ActionSA.
In the 1980s we looked forward to the future with hope. Today that is not possible until a progressive force is built that can effectively contest elections. As I have noted before the obvious way forward for the unions, and in particular NUMSA which is by far the largest, to ally with Abahlali base Mjondolo, which is a real force in KwaZulu-Natal and the SACP. Hopefully now that Blade Nzimande long and stultifying reign over the party has come to an end the party will finally summon the courage to leave the ANC where the rot runs irredeemably deep.
It used to matter to the ANC that it was seen as a leader of society and a broad church encompassing a wide range of opinion. Not so any longer in KwaZulu-Natal. This fact is now patently clear. The absence of ANC T-shirts on the street is a potent indicator that the inclusive ANC of the Mandela generation has been usurped by a tendency that can only see as far as their personal ambitions.
Dr Buccus is editor of Al Qalam