EDITORIAL: Split ANC enables ministers to duck riots accountability

“The leadership that has been chosen is a unity leadership. It’s a leadership that combines different views and approaches that were prevalent in the conference before the election.” 

So said President Cyril Ramaphosa in December 2017 shortly after beating Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in a close-run ANC internal leadership election that laid bare the deep dividing lines in the governing party.  

It sounded like what the ANC should be striving for: a group of people with diverse ideas in pursuit of the party’s laudable ambition to transform the world’s most unequal society.

We know, however, that the outcome of the elective conference was not a constructive contestation of ideas to revitalise the party’s governing mission, but rather one in which the top six party leaders were split straight down the middle, between the Ramaphosa and Dlamini-Zuma camps.

Ramaphosa inherited a broken party in which a faction hiding behind vague, so-called radical economic transformation policies that strike a responsive chord among millions of unemployed young people has been fighting to regain the power to influence the distribution of patronage. 

No-one can dispute that the ANC’s factional battles have harmed SA’s fragile economic prospects and its ability to push ahead with much-needed reforms. But what was frightening about this week’s report of the expert panel on the July unrest was its conclusion that the party’s internal strife was one of the key drivers of the violence, in which thousands of people ran amok, burning commercial buildings and looting shopping malls.  

Defying order

“Perhaps the most significant input made, which we heard several times, was that what appears to be factional battles in the ANC have become a serious source of instability in the country,” said the panel led by Sandy Africa. “This is a matter of great concern.”

The unrest, in which key infrastructure such as the N3 and medicine warehouses were set alight, was triggered by the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma for defying a court order to testify at the state-capture commission. It morphed into a wider outpouring of anger over the poverty and inequality that have widened in the almost three decades since the ANC came to power after apartheid ended.

It took the deployment of soldiers to restore order, but only after more than R50bn in damage was inflicted on the economy, more than 300 people lost their lives and SA’s already tarnished image as a safe, investor-friendly emerging market took a huge pounding. The poor, the very people the ANC claims to be representing, bore the brunt of the violence that has its roots in the battle for the soul of the party. 

In addition to castigating the ANC as the biggest threat to national security, the panel broadly confirmed what most of us have long suspected: the significant intelligence failure to anticipate and avert the planned violence, and also the combination of poorly equipped police stations and inadequately trained personnel resulting in the police being overwhelmed.

Unravel travesty

The panel also laid the blame at the door of cabinet ministers, rightly recommending that office bearers — think minister of police Bheki Cele, former intelligence minister Ayanda Dlodlo and former defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula — who failed in their responsibilities must be held to account. 

Ramaphosa is expected to announce what action the government will take in response to the report. But he is unlikely to unravel the travesty of keeping Cele in office or rewarding Nqakula’s ineptitude with a promotion to speaker of the National Assembly. He also had an opportunity to show Dlodlo the door when he reshuffled the cabinet after the unrest, but instead moved her to public service & administration. 

The lack of accountability (consequence management in political parlance) for the lapses in leadership during the unrest speaks to Ramaphosa’s weak position, disguised as a noble pursuit of unity, in the party lest he be thrown into the uncharted territory of overtly taking on one faction.   

As the report outlines, these factional battles have intensified ahead of the ANC leadership contest in December. So too have unemployment and poverty levels. To put it bluntly, we are no safer than we were in July 2021.