EDITORIAL: ANC’s morbid symptoms
‘Jacob Zuma supporters not only don’t want to accept failure, they cannot believe failure exists’
The most well-known quote of Italian left-wing political theorist Antonio Gramsci goes, "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." The words have been applied and misapplied to many situations and periods of history. But it remains an interesting insight, rooted in the idea that there is a kind of twilight period in the process of social or political change during which the normal rules and conventions seem to bounce around without logic. The chaotic ANC Eastern Cape conference falls squarely into this bracket. In some senses, the conference constitutes an important test for the organisation in which two major related questions were being asked: first, can the ANC bridge the gap between its different factions, and second, if it cannot, does that mean increasing factionalism within the party or worse, a split. The issues are crucial for the obvious reason that they are ...
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