Road to decline is paved with too many missed opportunities

The road to a precipitous decline is usually paved with many missed opportunities. There were many opportunities for the ANC to negotiate some kind of exit with President Jacob Zuma, if only to save itself.

People have known for years that the Guptas have been at the centre of a powerful network commandeering state resources through political influence.

Perhaps it was the belief that no crisis could undo an institution as resilient as the ANC, but the leaders forgot that an institution is only as strong as the collective integrity of its members.

As much as President Zuma has been the leading enabler of the Gupta family, there were moments when he himself seemed to be willing to submit to the collective will of the ANC and yet, the ANC itself never took the opportunity to ask him to step down in a manner that could have saved the party all this pain.

After the Constitutional Court’s Nkandla judgment, Zuma was willing to offer an apology to maintain the stature of his office and the dignity of the party, if only for appearances.

Admittedly, I am looking from the outside in, and so I cannot tell precisely what is going on. But one does get a sense that there was a moment when appearances did matter, and then we suddenly found ourselves in this moment when the image of the ANC suddenly does not matter as much anymore.

There was that moment when Advocate Thuli Madonsela’s reports were enough to shock the nation.

Yet the sense that we get from the recent massive leaks of Gupta

e-mails is that so much damage has been done to the ANC already, that there cannot even be a coordinated party response to tackle them, there is no longer a united position in the movement on the matter of what is good for its public image.

The lesson here is that it is best to tackle organisation crises as early as possible in a sustained effort and that the efforts to fix the problem must outpace the rate of deterioration.

The remedy must also make sense not only in light of the the institutions past but also in relation to where it sees itself in the future.

Can the ANC really see its future in clear detail?

What does political education in the ANC mean for the next 20 years?

Can the ANC outlive its crises?

When thinking about systems in crisis, I always find myself returning to the multiple crises growing within the South African higher education sector.

The funding and curriculum crises finally hit the public sphere when the Fallist movements brought these out into the open.

Fallism was a kind of “Waterkloof moment” for our higher education sector – the emptiness of our intellectual claims were laid bare.

Given the intensity of the protests, one would think by now something urgent would have happened across the sector. And yet, we still sit with piecemeal efforts to re-think what our university curriculums should be.

I am exhausted with empty summits and conventions that change nothing while we graduate thousands of students into the uncertainty of Africa in the 21st century.

You’d think by now there would have been high-level interventions to rescue the system. But ever since the petrol bombs died down, it is pretty much back to normal in our universities where the rate of change has slowed down.

Just like the ANC, the higher education sector has missed opportunities to effect deep and meaningful sustained change.

Like the ANC there is this unstated belief that our institutions will survive, so long as we cut costs here and there.

In a way I write this article, as many before, as a plea to the power holders in higher education; change will not come from good intentions discussed at endless conventions but from strategic decisions and implementable action.