Al-Qalam 
Source: The Elephant
By Imraan Buccus
In a great piece entitled ‘Durban decay -how crime and corruption are turning a world class city into a crumbling nightmare’ in last weeks Daily Maverick 168, Chris Makhaye reminded us that most of the R54 billion eThekwini budget is ‘distributed among leading comrades and associated businesses, resulting in the city failing to fund some of its core functions and providing services.’ Among other devastating failures in the city, Makhaye also reported that the city has a significant number of ghost employees who only pitch up to ‘pick up salaries at the end of the month.’
We used to think of the ANC as a leader in society, but its degeneration has reached the point where it poses a danger to the integrity of society.
We all remember the devastating years of Zuma. So, it may be true that the fish rots from the head, but it is essential that we understand that the degeneration of the ANC is not just a question of the increasing power of a predatory elite within the party. Empowerment used to be imagined as a collective project that could transform society from below. It is now understood, at all levels of the party, as a matter of personal incorporation into the minority that is able to profit from our increasingly unequal society.
Time and again officials, often trying to follow directives from senior politicians in good faith, find that their attempts to implement technocratic development are captured by local party elites and appropriated and redirected for their own purposes. Makhaye’s piece alludes to this too.
This is not always a case of simple plunder. Often the allocation of housing and services, as well as all the contracts that go with this process, is subsumed into the systems of clientelism and patronage by which the ANC often cements political support within the party at the local level.
In many cases, development projects justified in the name of meeting the needs of the people become projects that are primarily oriented towards cementing alliances within the micro-local structures of the party. In KZN, ward committees and local branch executive committees are often populated by a multitude of mini-Malemas.
The political philosopher, Frantz Fanon provides the explanation that there is, inevitably, an authoritarian underside that accompanies the degeneration of the party into a “means of private advancement”. He writes that the party “helps the government to hold the people down. It becomes more and more clearly anti-democratic, an implementation of coercion”.
A party that says and that must continue to say that it is for the people when in fact it has become a means of private advancement will inevitably collapse into paranoia and authoritarianism as it tries to square the circle by pretending, to itself as much as anyone else, that private enrichment is somehow the real fruit of national liberation.
In contemporary South Africa it is not at all unusual to find that people live in fear of local councillors and their ward committees and branch executive committees.
In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we have developed a two-tier political system with liberal political rights for the middle classes and increasingly severe curtailment of basic political rights for the poor.
Poor people’s movements have long been subject to unlawful and violent repression carried out with impunity by local political elites. But as these practices become normalised they are carried out ever more brazenly.
Right now, there doesn’t seem to be a political alternative. We are left with the option of the ANC reinventing itself, or a concrete, credible alternative emerging on the left.
Dr Buccus is editor of Al Qalam
