Editorial: The ANC’s year of reckoning

Read More

New year, and a clean slate for all in the ANC — or so it seems. 

The party has made it clear in the first few days of 2023 that there will be little appetite to deal with their internal issues and tainted members. The rumbustious new secretary general, Fikile Mbalula, declared that the report on Phala Phala would be dealt with “as and when there is a need to do so”. 

But, if the party has no appetite to deal with the Phala Phala saga, the mounting corruption inside the ANC will also fall into the area of when and if it arises. 

When politicians talk about the government’s failures over this past decade and a bit, which has left South Africans with crumbling infrastructure, abysmal service delivery and an economy on its knees, corruption is always part of the discussion.

Using the ANC’s own logic, it means little how robust and well meaning its policies are as long as those in charge are too self-interested to implement them to the benefit of society. Change is just as much about getting the right people in to do the job than it is about reform.

For this reason, allegations of corruption against the governing party’s leaders cannot be left on the shelf. 

As much as we are told that we are far better off than we were during the rot of state capture, many people feel the exact opposite. Looking around us, there is little evidence that the rot has been wiped away.

When Cyril Ramaphosa was re-elected the ANC’s president, many felt relief — not because he is the leader our country deserves, but because he is perceived as the lesser of two evils, tainted, but not rotten.

Many are still holding on to the hope that the party’s leader will have the gumption to really clean up shop.

Ramaphosa has good reason to do so, because this will be the year of reckoning for the ANC.

Not only does the party have to prove that it is capable of changing the course of the economy and our social conditions, it also has to demonstrate that it isn’t devoid of the people with the political will to do so.

This week, ANC members will meet to celebrate the party’s vaunted legacy in an ANC-run municipality that, by its own account, is coming apart at the seams. This is as the municipality has battled its own governance problems, with what seems to be a revolving door of compromised leaders.

If the party can somehow ignore this state of affairs, and also brush over the fact that so many of its leaders are tainted by corruption allegations, then we are in trouble.

But the party is in trouble. Because as much as the ANC can wipe its slate clean, so many voters have a far too intimate memory of what it is like to be caked in dirt. 

And like so many in this country have done these last years — in their own sewage-filled backyards or in municipalities that have more potholes than road — they will take things into their own hands.