ANC dinosaur lurches towards 21st-century technology

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After extending the deadline twice, the ANC’s nomination process for December’s elective conference finally closed on 7 November. Nominations officially opened on 11 September and were initially set to conclude on 2 October. The extension was more than a month long.

Considering the number of branches involved, a staggering 3 979 across the country,

perhaps the delay can be forgiven. A closer look at the actual causes of the delay, however, shows a party that is still battling to modernise itself.

The ANC has been painfully slow to adopt new technology in its operation. If you have forgotten what a fax machine looks like, a visit to a party branch office will serve as a good reminder. It’s only in recent years that local office bearers started using email correspondence. Before they discovered cyberspace, documents had to be photo-copied and hand-delivered at local offices. This often made it difficult to locate important paperwork on time, as copies would get lost, and one would have to spend an inordinate amount of time looking for the only person who still had a copy. 

It took a conference resolution, back in 2007, to get members thinking about joining the technological revolution in the 21st century: “The movement should take full advantage of ICT to modernise its operations … and learn from best practices of other parties and movements in the world. In this regard, we need to review current ICT infrastructure and develop a comprehensive medium-to-long-term ICT strategy that will cover areas of organisational work such as political education, organising and campaigns, membership and administration and management.”

And, the Polokwane conference was itself the surprise birthplace of the technology movement. It was there that the idea of counting ballots electronically was first mooted. But, delegates disagreed about innovation. Some insisted on manual counting. Distrustful of machines, they wanted to see the actual ballot papers being counted manually. Those who were opposed to machines won the day. For an organisation as big as the ANC, with numerous activities, resistance to technology was never going to work. It also made no sense that the organisation should be resistant to technology when most of its leaders used technological gadgets in some areas of their lives.

It soon emerged that the refusal to make the technological leap was not so much the result of ignorance but to enable shenanigans. Registering members was one of the areas most vulnerable to manipulation. Office bearers didn’t want to just recruit anyone or process applications from anybody. They preferred applicants who they knew supported them. If an applicant wasn’t on their side, then their application would not be processed. A number of applications ended up in the boots of cars. 

It was only when manual application became a serious problem, through manipulation to advantage some leaders over others, that the organisation decided to digitise its membership list. Now, an applicant applies online and the applications are processed at a central point at the party’s national headquarters. 

This means all interested people have an equal chance of their application being processed. Gatekeeping has been eliminated. And, the new rule on the size of branch delegations is likely to discourage wily office bearers from going out to recruit members in large numbers. Previously, office bearers were incentivised to grow the party’s membership with additional delegates to the conference. A normal branch in good standing, with 100 or more members, could send one delegate to a conference. An extra 150 members, on top of the minimum 100, earned a branch another delegate and so it went. 

Eager to influence the electoral outcome of the conference, cunning politicians engaged in bulk membership-subscription. Unsuspecting individuals attached their signatures to forms they never even read in exchange for some form of reward. Now each branch, regardless of size, can only send one delegate. 

Admittedly, the importance of membership size hasn’t quite vanished, as office bearers still want to pack branches with their own supporters to pick a delegate of their choice to send to the conference. But, the enthusiasm for mega branches has been deflated somewhat, which introduces the possibility of reducing the quantity of deadwood among the rank-and-file.

The introduction of scanners, in this round of nominations, is the culmination of a long, slow process to modernise the organisation. Again, even here, the innovation was forced by the need to stamp out the participation of bogus members and inflation of attendance at branch general meetings. Such shenanigans are commonplace in the organisation. 

Scanners now are used to authenticate membership. As with any innovation, staff should be properly trained, with trial runs before the actual application of the

new practice. This doesn’t seem to have happened. Sometimes the scanners did not work. In other instances, scanning would happen successfully, and a branch be allowed to sit, only to be told later on that the meeting actually did not quorate, that some of the attendants were not legitimate. 

This means the results from the scanner were not instant, which defeats the purpose of screening in the first place. Branches were then forced to re-run their meetings. This explains the repeated extension of the deadline for completion of the nominations.

The new rules, overseen by the newly established electoral committee, promise to have a positive impact on the ANC. They essentially formalise what has actually been happening

in the organisation. Individuals, for instance, have always campaigned for positions but did so clandestinely for fear of a put-down for being ambitious,”ondikhetheni” – elect me. 

This is partly what encouraged the burgeoning of slates, as aspirant leaders became part of a group, making it easier for them to escape being ridiculed. Individuals were reluctant to rear their heads, shouting, “Ndikhetheni!” but would simply get elected as part of a faction. The result was that individuals were barely evaluated to determine their suitability for a position, which led to incompetent individuals being elected.

Now, individuals are encouraged to campaign and slates are banned. And, impressively, there don’t seem to be any slates making the rounds. Kgalema Motlanthe, the head of the electoral committee, has even lambasted provincial executive committees for announcing their preferred candidates. Instead, Motlanthe insists that branches should be allowed to make their own choices, without any influence from provincial leaders. 

This insistence on being elected on individual merit, instead as part of a faction, might actually gain traction in the ANC. It happened in the recent Gauteng provincial conference in the contest between Panyaza Lesufi and Lebogang Maile. Although he enjoyed more support at the conference, Maile was not elected chairperson of the province. Maile’s supporters added to Lesufi’s victory instead, while making sure they had a majority in the provincial executive committee. 

This precedent augurs well for the flourishing of the principle of electing the best individuals, independent of factional slates. A possible weakness in the new rule allowing for individual campaigns, however, is the failure to officially register them. Since candidates are going to be held accountable for how their campaigns are conducted, it makes sense to have the person in charge of that campaign formally designated. This would make it easy for the electoral committee, for instance, to hold a particular person accountable, should there be anything untoward. Where the campaign manager is not formally designated, it is easy for someone to deny being one and thus escape culpability. 

One suspects that this weakness has to do with lingering resistance to the mushrooming of nkhetheni. But, this is something that can still be remedied, especially if the electoral committee is to succeed in holding individual campaigns accountable.

Notwithstanding the hiccups, the ANC is clearly on a modernising path. From here it can only improve. The real test, however, lies ahead. That is the identity of nominees and whether they’re exemplars of the new moral code the party wants to instil in the ranks.

Indications are that some of the nominees might just embody the opposite of moral integrity. Will Motlanthe’s electoral committee have the courage to nullify their candidature?