OPINION: Ruling party has no silver bullet

I am concerned that many comrades will go to the ANC’s elective conference in December with clouded imaginary thinking rather than having observed and thought analytically. And this will be potentially damaging.

Comrades need to first understand the importance of rebuilding the ANC into all it claims to be. The organisation has suffered many crises as a result of inconsistency in applying principle and it’s inevitable that it shall soon overplay its hand.

For the reason that the ANC owes its very being to the working class and the rural poor, one would assume that when confronted with challenges it would go back to its constituency and do its best to reclaim their confidence.

I personally struggle to see how either of the groupings around the contenders for the presidency can be committed to the working class struggle.

The #CR17 is a well-known confidante of white monopoly capital and #NDZ is a stooge for a thuggish group of aspiring black monopolists.

The danger of both these group leaders is that they have come to be opportunistic intermediaries and of late are using politics and the ANC to window dress for resource manipulation either through maintaining the old structures of capital or by fostering a new Mafia monopoly.

I have further observed through the respective campaigns that there has not been a convincing attempt from either of these leaders to deny, downplay or distance themselves from this concern.

Of the frontrunners for the top job I personally support comrade Cyril Ramaphosa but I do not want to reduce myself to blind loyalty. My mind simply does not allow me to believe that #CR17 can genuinely rebuild and unite the ANC.

Both camps are structurally weak and at the forefront are the very creators of this delinquent president called Jacob Zuma and therefore they are co-creators of the situation we find ourselves in.

Since the 2007 Polokwane congress the ANC has suffered greatly from an inconsistent application of principle.

As a result the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) shall deliver at the Midrand congress an organisation that is in tatters, one that leads not only a weaker alliance but weaker mass democratic movement structures.

I raise these issues because I want to warn against the view that changing leadership and forgetting to be truthful to politics will unite and rebuild us.

#NDZ will fumble in the name of transformation whilst delivering us into the hands of opportunistic thugs while #CR17, from observation and analysis, will never dismantle the apartheid structured economy.

#CR17 however, can at the very least stabilise and grow the economy and that, coupled with the prospect of better management of the state, is my basis for supporting him.

The ANC’s continued system of advancing capitalism while leftists policies are drafted into election manifestos and party policy yet right wing policies are implemented in government may have secured working class loyalty through tangible rewards, but the reality is that class antagonism has become noticeable as a technocratic consciousness has failed to depoliticise the people.

Through this we are beginning to witness the emergence of class conflict.

We therefore need a president and NEC that is wholly committed to addressing the racial and class inequalities, opening the debate on the land issue and determined to find innovative ways of growing our economy – whist radically transforming it.

Failure to quickly act in these areas might increase the militancy of the working class and the rural poor who will in turn direct their anger towards the ANC as the organisation that has proclaimed itself as their vanguard.

Having said all of that I fully understand that a president will not be some special type of saint immune to societal contradictions or able to operate beyond the determinations of the economic base.

I merely argue that a president must satisfy the condition of acting in the interest of the dominant class.

Sadly the intellectual level of congress has been reduced to mere sensationalism and personality cults. This means we are without a lot of people who could have been introduced to form part of the leadership debate; such as Kgalema Motlanthe, Joel Netshitenzhe, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi and many other heavyweights of a similar calibre for the purposes of preserving organisational memory and reinforcing the intellectual base.

Ada Tshiki is a member of the ANC and ANCYL and an activist for radical economic transformation