I have no guides to ask how you are, given the enormity of the challenges confronting the ANC. Nonetheless I thought it appropriate to write to you on the occasion of your centenary celebrations.
Commemorating your life and times requires that we walk in your footsteps across the sands of time, and imagine what moulded your convictions and deep values that were to shape your leadership. At the break of dawn, the warm sun breathes life across the rolling hills and valleys of Pondoland, revealing the Engeli mountains that shaped you as a boy.
Enduring the morning frost under bare feet as you shepherded your father’s livestock became a life lesson for marshalling the revolutionary forces of the liberation struggle.
I am but a child of the revolution, whose consciousness was moulded by your legacy and the values you personified. While we continue to draw inspiration from your life and values, the hour is nigh for us to draw courage and wisdom from your struggles and sacrifices to do the honourable thing.
Comrade President, your dedication to freedom and selfless commitment to the ANC will remain an inspiration for future generations. The people of South Africa, joined by millions around the world pay homage to a colossus who became a beacon of hope and inspiration for oppressed peoples all the way from Palestine to the Sahrawi Republic to Burma. The ANC became your life. You gave it your all, sacrificing family and placing your life at the service of our glorious movement.
When restrictions were served by the apartheid state on Chief Albert Luthuli, then president of the ANC, the leadership mandated you, as the deputy, to provide leadership and to continue to build the movement in exile.
Despite the personal cost, you neither faltered nor complained. When the ANC president died unexpectedly and under questionable circumstances, you embraced the responsibilities at hand diligently.
Your election as president at Morogoro in 1969 was a natural consequence of your sterling leadership at a time when leading a banned organisation was neither fashionable nor a luxury. Your presidency spanned three decades through the most trying period in our history, inspiring the revolution both at home and abroad. Your January 8th statement smuggled into the country through various channels, principally Radio Freedom, was a rallying call that did not fail to mobilise the masses in townships and in trenches alike.
Your leadership glowed like a lone candle on a moonless night, a beacon not only for our struggle but all who suffered extreme repression, incarceration and killings.
In your opening remarks at the 48th national conference in Durban in 1991 – the first of its kind on home soil – you shared a challenge faced by your leadership when confronted by a brutal state: “… the fundamental question we then had to resolve was how to transform our movement to meet the new situation in South Africa”.
As the generations who followed, we are indebted to your great wisdom in choosing to fight to secure a future where all would be free and equal before the law. Your choice was never driven by personal ambition or personality cults, but by what was best for the people. Your love for the people was far greater than personal gain.
The question posed and which you had to answer those years ago, again requires an answer from the current ANC membership. The challenge confronting the movement today is not a vicious apartheid state, but vultures within, those who have no qualms in obliterating your legacy or sacrificing the values our movement has embodied on the alter of greed and personality cults.
I am ashamed to report, Cde President, that we have to confront that historic question, not in relation to external enemies, but to those within the ranks – those who are our own.
This year thee ANC January 8 statement declared 2017 “The Year of OR Tambo, Deepening Unity”. This was a clarion call to the rank and file and a reminder of how we, the living, should acknowledge and honour the way in which you became a living embodiment of the values, principles and traditions of an entire movement.
You led the movement at home and in the diaspora with unequalled distinction, with no expectation of material gain, guided by a singular commitment – serving the PEOPLE.
Comrade President, in delivering your political report at the 48th National conference in 1991, you spoke frankly of the challenges our movement had to contend with during your presidency. As you prepared to hand the baton to Nelson Mandela you made a passionate plea for unity: “… we did not tear ourselves apart because of lack of progress at times. We were always ready to accept our mistakes and to correct them. Above all we succeeded to foster and defend the unity of the ANC and unity of our people in general. Even in bleak moments, we were never in doubt regarding the winning of freedom. We’ve never been in doubt that the peoples’ cause shall triumph.”
Cde President, it’s not my intention to be a bearer of grave news, yet somehow in 2017, I am saddened to report that your glorious movement is more divided than ever, with some elevating personality cults above the unity and cohesion of the ANC. It saddens me that our revolutionary alliance relations are at an all-time low, with the SACP contemplating going it alone in the next election. This will have dire consequences for the alliance and undermine our march to realising the objectives of the national democratic revolution, the glue binding the alliance together for decades.
However, most devastating and dangerous is a phenomenon which can destroy your movement – a growing trust deficit of the ANC leadership.
Comrade President, you taught us the ANC must, at all times, be one with the people, trust is the umbilical cord binding leaders with the people. They must never doubt the commitment of leadership to realising their aspirations, even at the worst of times. Yet in power we have lost our way and have become arrogant.
Consequently, in the 2016 local government elections, the ANC and our agenda to build a truly non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous SA, suffered a major setback, when we lost key metros to the opposition.
Your movement, Comrade President, is crying for leadership. Your country cries for leaders who can restore confidence and inspire hope. Unity needs a figurehead to champion it in action, word and conduct.
I report this to you Cde President, not to suggest the challenges are insurmountable. I talk of them frankly so that, as you convene a BGM in heaven to prepare for the 54th national conference, you will see the desperate situation of the movement you nurtured for most of your adult life.
Please comrade president, whoever you decide to delegate to preside over this conference, they need to bring us wisdom, love, honesty, selflessness, hard work and guide us into recommitting ourselves to time-tested values that inspired the world.
One the most profound values you infused into the ANC was its moral leadership of society. It was grounded in your deep Christian values. At times these seem to evade us. To reconnect with the values that defined unity and cohesion, we must dig deep within and allow the words of Lizalis’idinga Lakho penned by Rev Tiyo Soga to guide us in our quest for salvation: Bona izwelakowethu, uxolel’ izonozalo, Ungathob’ ingqumboyakho, Luzeluf’ usapholwalo. Yala, Nkosi, singadel’imfundisozezwi lakho, Uze usivuselele, Sive inyaniso yakho.
Comrade President, we have erred and allowed your glorious movement to falter on our watch. But we are determined that the 54th national conference will be a turning point, not dissimilar to Morogoro. ANC branches will engage robustly and honestly and craft a new path to return the glory of our movement as a leader of society and a powerful vehicle towards realising our people’s dreams and hopes.
Sadly, Cde President, contestation for leadership is do or die due to materialism and patronage. The winner takes all approach, grounded in slate politics, inevitably leads to relegating skilled and experience cadres to the political wilderness and is a permanent loss for the leadership collective.
Despite your teachings, we never imagined the extent of the challenges that come with state power, what some might refer to as “the sins of incumbency”, and the misery and disunity brought to the entire movement when leadership fails.
We failed to heed your wise counsel and forgot your words of 40 years ago: “Comrades, you might think it is very difficult to wage a liberation struggle. Wait until you are in power. By then, you will realise it is actually more difficult to keep the power than to wage a liberation war.”
Your prophetic words have come to pass. We are at a defining moment, grasping that the path to realising a better life for all is characterised by deep gorges and almost impassable valleys – ones requiring total commitment to the plight of the people.
On behalf of millions of ANC supporters and members, I sincerely apologise to you for the lapses in judgment that have brought us to this precipitous point. The ANC nonetheless remains the only weapon people have to change their lives and their only hope for a better life.
The commitment has never been greater of those of us who believe the salvation of the movement lies in its ability to reconnect with time-honoured values you personified.
Zizi Goodenough Kodwa, ANC spokesman
OPINION: Dear OR, we deeply regret ANC losing plot
Commemorating your life and times requires that we walk in your footsteps across the sands of time, and imagine what moulded your convictions and deep values that were to shape your leadership. At the break of dawn, the warm sun breathes life across the rolling hills and valleys of Pondoland, revealing the Engeli mountains that shaped you as a boy.
Enduring the morning frost under bare feet as you shepherded your father’s livestock became a life lesson for marshalling the revolutionary forces of the liberation struggle.
I am but a child of the revolution, whose consciousness was moulded by your legacy and the values you personified. While we continue to draw inspiration from your life and values, the hour is nigh for us to draw courage and wisdom from your struggles and sacrifices to do the honourable thing.
Comrade President, your dedication to freedom and selfless commitment to the ANC will remain an inspiration for future generations. The people of South Africa, joined by millions around the world pay homage to a colossus who became a beacon of hope and inspiration for oppressed peoples all the way from Palestine to the Sahrawi Republic to Burma. The ANC became your life. You gave it your all, sacrificing family and placing your life at the service of our glorious movement.
When restrictions were served by the apartheid state on Chief Albert Luthuli, then president of the ANC, the leadership mandated you, as the deputy, to provide leadership and to continue to build the movement in exile.
Despite the personal cost, you neither faltered nor complained. When the ANC president died unexpectedly and under questionable circumstances, you embraced the responsibilities at hand diligently.
Your election as president at Morogoro in 1969 was a natural consequence of your sterling leadership at a time when leading a banned organisation was neither fashionable nor a luxury. Your presidency spanned three decades through the most trying period in our history, inspiring the revolution both at home and abroad. Your January 8th statement smuggled into the country through various channels, principally Radio Freedom, was a rallying call that did not fail to mobilise the masses in townships and in trenches alike.
Your leadership glowed like a lone candle on a moonless night, a beacon not only for our struggle but all who suffered extreme repression, incarceration and killings.
In your opening remarks at the 48th national conference in Durban in 1991 – the first of its kind on home soil – you shared a challenge faced by your leadership when confronted by a brutal state: “… the fundamental question we then had to resolve was how to transform our movement to meet the new situation in South Africa”.
As the generations who followed, we are indebted to your great wisdom in choosing to fight to secure a future where all would be free and equal before the law. Your choice was never driven by personal ambition or personality cults, but by what was best for the people. Your love for the people was far greater than personal gain.
The question posed and which you had to answer those years ago, again requires an answer from the current ANC membership. The challenge confronting the movement today is not a vicious apartheid state, but vultures within, those who have no qualms in obliterating your legacy or sacrificing the values our movement has embodied on the alter of greed and personality cults.
I am ashamed to report, Cde President, that we have to confront that historic question, not in relation to external enemies, but to those within the ranks – those who are our own.
This year thee ANC January 8 statement declared 2017 “The Year of OR Tambo, Deepening Unity”. This was a clarion call to the rank and file and a reminder of how we, the living, should acknowledge and honour the way in which you became a living embodiment of the values, principles and traditions of an entire movement.
You led the movement at home and in the diaspora with unequalled distinction, with no expectation of material gain, guided by a singular commitment – serving the PEOPLE.
Comrade President, in delivering your political report at the 48th National conference in 1991, you spoke frankly of the challenges our movement had to contend with during your presidency. As you prepared to hand the baton to Nelson Mandela you made a passionate plea for unity: “… we did not tear ourselves apart because of lack of progress at times. We were always ready to accept our mistakes and to correct them. Above all we succeeded to foster and defend the unity of the ANC and unity of our people in general. Even in bleak moments, we were never in doubt regarding the winning of freedom. We’ve never been in doubt that the peoples’ cause shall triumph.”
Cde President, it’s not my intention to be a bearer of grave news, yet somehow in 2017, I am saddened to report that your glorious movement is more divided than ever, with some elevating personality cults above the unity and cohesion of the ANC. It saddens me that our revolutionary alliance relations are at an all-time low, with the SACP contemplating going it alone in the next election. This will have dire consequences for the alliance and undermine our march to realising the objectives of the national democratic revolution, the glue binding the alliance together for decades.
However, most devastating and dangerous is a phenomenon which can destroy your movement – a growing trust deficit of the ANC leadership.
Comrade President, you taught us the ANC must, at all times, be one with the people, trust is the umbilical cord binding leaders with the people. They must never doubt the commitment of leadership to realising their aspirations, even at the worst of times. Yet in power we have lost our way and have become arrogant.
Consequently, in the 2016 local government elections, the ANC and our agenda to build a truly non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous SA, suffered a major setback, when we lost key metros to the opposition.
Your movement, Comrade President, is crying for leadership. Your country cries for leaders who can restore confidence and inspire hope. Unity needs a figurehead to champion it in action, word and conduct.
I report this to you Cde President, not to suggest the challenges are insurmountable. I talk of them frankly so that, as you convene a BGM in heaven to prepare for the 54th national conference, you will see the desperate situation of the movement you nurtured for most of your adult life.
Please comrade president, whoever you decide to delegate to preside over this conference, they need to bring us wisdom, love, honesty, selflessness, hard work and guide us into recommitting ourselves to time-tested values that inspired the world.
One the most profound values you infused into the ANC was its moral leadership of society. It was grounded in your deep Christian values. At times these seem to evade us. To reconnect with the values that defined unity and cohesion, we must dig deep within and allow the words of Lizalis’idinga Lakho penned by Rev Tiyo Soga to guide us in our quest for salvation: Bona izwelakowethu, uxolel’ izonozalo, Ungathob’ ingqumboyakho, Luzeluf’ usapholwalo. Yala, Nkosi, singadel’imfundisozezwi lakho, Uze usivuselele, Sive inyaniso yakho.
Comrade President, we have erred and allowed your glorious movement to falter on our watch. But we are determined that the 54th national conference will be a turning point, not dissimilar to Morogoro. ANC branches will engage robustly and honestly and craft a new path to return the glory of our movement as a leader of society and a powerful vehicle towards realising our people’s dreams and hopes.
Sadly, Cde President, contestation for leadership is do or die due to materialism and patronage. The winner takes all approach, grounded in slate politics, inevitably leads to relegating skilled and experience cadres to the political wilderness and is a permanent loss for the leadership collective.
Despite your teachings, we never imagined the extent of the challenges that come with state power, what some might refer to as “the sins of incumbency”, and the misery and disunity brought to the entire movement when leadership fails.
We failed to heed your wise counsel and forgot your words of 40 years ago: “Comrades, you might think it is very difficult to wage a liberation struggle. Wait until you are in power. By then, you will realise it is actually more difficult to keep the power than to wage a liberation war.”
Your prophetic words have come to pass. We are at a defining moment, grasping that the path to realising a better life for all is characterised by deep gorges and almost impassable valleys – ones requiring total commitment to the plight of the people.
On behalf of millions of ANC supporters and members, I sincerely apologise to you for the lapses in judgment that have brought us to this precipitous point. The ANC nonetheless remains the only weapon people have to change their lives and their only hope for a better life.
The commitment has never been greater of those of us who believe the salvation of the movement lies in its ability to reconnect with time-honoured values you personified.
Zizi Goodenough Kodwa, ANC spokesman
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