ENEMY OF ANC IS ANC ITSELF

Former African National Congress (ANC) President Oliver Reginald Tambo once said: “The only enemy of the ANC is the ANC itself.”

The ANC’s 55th National Elective Conference has come and gone, done and dusted. The victory of President Cyril Ramaphosa is very good news for SADC and the capitalists, as it represents financial stability and continuity. However, the party’s decline in recent years has proven one of its strongest leaders, Tambo, right. Most political analysts agree that the ANC is in decline. We have seen it lose very strong leaders at every elective conference from when President Nelson Mandela stepped down. We have also seen it lose voters over the years. At the end of President Thabo Mbeki’s term of office, the ANC lost several powerful members to a new political party, The Congress of the People (COPE). This political party was founded in 2008 by Mbhazima Shilowa, Mluleki George and Mosiuoa Terra Lekota, all former high-ranking ANC members, claiming they disagreed with the direction of that organisation. The new party positioned itself as ‘progressive’ and diverse, pledging to reach out to minorities and women.

It promised to tackle several issues confronting South Africans, including high crime rates, poverty and unemployment. Ironically, they were known to be strong supporters of Mbeki, who somehow sought a third term but had lost to President Jacob Zuma with the intense lobbying from the youth wing led by Julius Malema. COPE would later self-destruct in a bitter war between its two prominent founding leaders, Shilowa and Lekota; great political minds and leadership lost. The idea that if one disagreed with the policies of the ANC, one could leave the movement was familiar to the 96-year-old ANC. In April 1959, an escalation of longstanding ideological tensions from a group of young Africanists broke away from the ANC to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) under the leadership of the charismatic Robert Sobukwe.

The Africanist bloc had generally opposed the Freedom Charter and the broader Congress Alliance, feeling that the influence of the latter had steered the ANC away from the African nationalism asserted in the 1949 Programme of Action in favour of a new de facto policy of accommodating whites and communists. It is worth noting that the PAC never impacted South African politics, mainly because they refused Mandela’s invitation to join the ANC Coalition to form the government after the 1994 election victory. Great political minds and leadership were lost along with South Africa’s actual non-colonial name, the People’s Republic of Azania.

EFF split

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a left-wing to far-left pan-Africanist and Marxist–Leninist political party, would later split from the ANC. It was founded by expelled former African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) President Julius Malema and his allies in 2013. It is broadly accepted that the EFF took most of the vibrant youth who were the future leaders of the ANC. It is currently the third-largest party in both houses of the South African Parliament. Their ideology was taken from the Freedom Charter, which proclaims that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’ and that ‘all shall be equal before the law’. The ANC has slowly seized to be a people-driven movement based on the Freedom Charter, but an individually driven (strongman) power-hungry political party seeking individual political power more than the liberation of the collective. Capitalist forces driven by former colonialists have gained the upper hand at the expense of the radical economic transformation needed to achieve the aspirations of the Freedom Charter.  The oldest political movement on the continent of Africa is slowly breaking up and giving rise to political parties controlled by strongmen.

Capitalist imperialist takeover   

It is in the interest of the capitalist former colonialists to have a weak ANC in the name of having greater democracy. They have sold Africa the dummy that the more political parties you have, the more democratic you are and the more prosperous you will be. They tell us that the more political parties we have, the greater there are represented views and ideologies.
This is far from the truth. For example, if one starts an LGBTQI+ political party in Africa, one will get very little support naturally, given African sentiment. However, if there are two strong parties, a strong progressive political party, and a strong conservative political party, just like in the US and UK, the LGBTQI+ views can be accommodated well within the progressive political party.

The Western-style political parties ensure that Africans remain weak and divided as the capitalists are able to buy the political parties to further their ends. They fund their campaigns and sponsor their projects in return for lucrative businesses worth billions. Africans will continuously fight each other, slip, and open new political parties as they scramble for power and wealth. This they call democracy at its best. When Africans try to rebel, they use their media, Judiciary and their vast resources to crash that rebellion in the name of fighting corruption.  The ANC was too big and too strong to be allowed to rule indefinitely. The capitalist agenda is to break it down into smaller units and then control each one, just like the South African Airways and later Eskom. The plan was in the making from 1994 after the first election victory, including the financial empowerment of President Ramaphosa into billionaire status.

Properties

Many top officials in the ANC now own R20 to R40 million properties, while the ANC Headquarters, Luthuli House cannot pay its staff salaries. The dominos have been falling just as planned to kill the ANC. The final piece of the puzzle will be the breaking away of the radical economic transformation group, led by former President Zuma. Another strongman phenomenon is where one man feels empowered enough to disrupt a speech by a sitting president. Africans are their own enemy, just as a strong Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) embrangled through the chairwoman Zanele Magwaza-Msibi forming her own National Freedom Party and reportedly leaving with a sizeable chunk of IFP councilors and supporters. The strongwoman since passed away and left her party in disarray, just like all the one-man political parties. Mission accomplished, the Zulu nation cannot be allowed to be strong and united.
Comment septembereswatini@gmail.com

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