INSIGHT | Malala fails to prove pre-democracy ANC was ‘crooked’

In an article titled “ANC crookery predates our democracy” (Daily Dispatch, August16), Justice Malala attempts to send the message that the ANC has always been corrupt.

Author of numerous admirable pieces on the present situation in SA, Malala is, however, on unfamiliar ground in this article. ANC history is not “current affairs” and cannot be easily accessed from editions of newspapers.

Moreover, using Stephen Ellis as his guide on the ANC can only prove disastrous in his understanding of that history.

Malala’s opening statement is emphatic: “The ANC’s corruption did not start in 1994". Unfortunately the whole of his piece does not live up to its promise — that of providing proof the pre-democracy ANC was crooked.

He does raise a few points about the pre-democracy ANC in an attempt to defend his declaration; this constitutes only about one fifth of his article.

After this he goes completely off the topic, starting “with the arrival of democracy and freedom…”. He is on firmer ground talking about ANC wrongs, from the arms deal to rigged internal party contests, and so forth, but all this is in the post-apartheid period.

The author has deserted his own topic as most of the article deals with matters irrelevant to the subject and bold opening statement.

Malala mentions “comrade tsotsis” as one form of proof the pre-democracy ANC was crooked. “Comrade tsotsis” were an antisocial element within the national struggle in the 1980s. The ANC was banned then and so, if any blame is to be apportioned to anti-apartheid organisations for the phenomenon of “com tsotsis” in the country, this cannot honestly be blamed on the ANC alone; the UDF and its components must also surely shoulder some direct blame.

But even here he makes a major error — the “com tsotsis” were not a reflection of the principles or policies of the national liberation movement, but occasions where the criminal element exploited the situation and continued their antisocial activities.

It also escapes Malala that many of these elements were deployed by the apartheid security police to deliberately disgrace the ranks of the popular masses. “Com tsotsis” were a tiny minority and never bona-fide members of the organisations that fought for liberation.

To their credit, the UDF and its components embarked on “anti-crime” campaigns in efforts to rid the communities of such elements.

“People’s courts” were established and punishment such as the “Omo”, “Kwakwa” and the dreaded “necklace” meted out against such alleged offenders. This all occurred as part of rejecting apartheid rule and  fell under the effort of establishing Organs of People’s Power. A number of former political activists have noted how these campaigns succeeded in reducing crime within the communities.

In Rebellion, Tom Lodge records how, in one example, 25  lashes with a “Kwakwa” was prescribed by such a court for the crime of “robbery in the name of the struggle”.  It is not clear why Malala sees it fit to present the behaviour of scoundrels, which was clearly rejected by the struggling masses, as having characterised the ANC or the struggle for liberation.

Being no authority on either the pre-democracy ANC or the struggle for liberation, Malala is shy to openly state his sources of knowledge about the pre-democracy ANC, preferring to hide them under the blanket “enough books”, but it becomes clear he draws most of the arguments from Ellis's External Mission: The ANC in Exile.

How else could one explain their remarkably common presentation of ideas on the ANC? “Buying fancy shoes for ANC leaders inside apartheid-era SA and its leaders allegedly running criminal networks”, is straight from Ellis and appears on Page 168.

Presumably driven by his obviously intense dislike of the present ANC, and using Ellis as his chaperon, Malala claims that the pre-democracy ANC included criminal networks.

But if the ANC was an organisation of criminal networks, it surely had to base its activities on crime, and more importantly its leadership would have had to be people devoid of political conviction but driven by criminal intent? Oliver Tambo, Yusuf Dadoo, Joe Slovo and Chris Hani, among others, were — according to this narrative — criminal bosses.

Individual acts of criminality — car-theft rackets, Mandrax smuggling and dealing in illicit diamonds — are elevated to the level of policy and official activity of the ANC, and the scale of such acts is exaggerated to suit the narrative.

It does not matter to Ellis and Malala that some of these acts were punished by the ANC  — sometimes severely.

The point is not whether such criminal acts were carried out by individual members of the ANC at some time or another but that, as in the case of the com tsotsis of the 1980s, the ANC cannot be defined by such rogue acts.

There are “mountains” of books written on the ANC’s achievements as leaders of the struggle for liberation, and in all of these Ellis’s work is an exception in casting the ANC as a “mafia” organisation. In addition, SA’s people still hold the ANC in the role of leader of the liberation struggle in their collective memory.

Malala also seems to contradict himself when he mentions this in his reference to the ANC and its “noble freedom mission”. Such nobility and his narrative of the ANC as having been a “criminal network” organisation do not rhyme.  Both Malala and Ellis seem informed by the same operating principle — exaggerate the negative aberrations and understate the positive achievements.

Malala’s piece does nothing to prove “ANC crookery pre-democracy”, but is an echo of Ellis’s views on the organisation.

Patrick Mangashe is a researcher at the University of Fort Hare. He writes in his personal capacity.