ANC+grants+old+demon+new+life,+Karima+Brown,+Business+Day



=ANC’s jaded vision grants old demon new life=


 * Karima Brown, Business Day, 20 November 2007**

Since its founding in 1912, the African National Congress (ANC) has appreciated the centrality of ethnic and even racial unity and the dangers of tribal mobilisation. This set the movement apart from many of its African counterparts, and greatly influenced the type of struggle that South Africans waged for their freedom.

However, this determination of the ANC’s founders and their successors to transcend the politics of ethnicity did not eradicate it within the movement. This is nowhere more clear than in the run-up to the ANC presidential succession dogfight, which has seen campaigners resort to one of Africa’s oldest and most shameful chasms — ethnicity — to cobble together support for their candidates. The cruel irony of democracy is the past 13 years have created fertile conditions for the re-emergence of ethnic politics, even inside the ANC itself.

We are now enjoined to be tolerant of ethnic exclusivity by no less an authority than our constitution. Whereas the ANC has historically dismissed ethnicists, it now goes out of its way to be sensitive to the merchants of separatism. The ruling party is now in danger of imploding, partly because of its failure to manage the re-emergence of ethnicity in its ranks.

In its discussion document on The National Question circulated at the National General Council in 2005, the ANC said: “The call on the part of the founding fathers of the ANC to bury the demon of tribalism has not lost its validity. Some, like the IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party), engage in this practice brazenly. Others engage in low- intensity tribal mobilisation, in order to lobby support for positions in the ANC and in government. During the debate about provincial boundaries, tribal mobilisation took place among supporters of all parties, including the ANC. It was a rude reminder when even some of the most seasoned cadres of the liberation movement took positions on provincial boundaries based on tribal affiliation.”

The salience of ethnicity in the ANC and in SA can be expressed in no clearer form than the succession battle in the party, and the Jacob Zuma saga that is one of its main sideshows. It is very easy to explain the rise of ethnic feeling in the ruling party through Zuma’s supposed mobilisation of his KwaZulu-Natal “base”. However, to castigate Zuma as the ANC’s tribalist lone rangerwould be grabbing the tail-end of the beast. Zuma is only the crudest symptom of a much deeper abscess in the party.

In fact, Zuma’s main opponents in the senior ranks of the party are known tribalists themselves. It is this crowd that goes around invoking the “historical” role of the Mfengu, who dominate the ANC’s educated black African elite, as “natural” leaders of the liberation movement. In fact, today’s ANC has all but split into power factions that in the main can be ethnically identified, with the added dynamic that many of these ethnic factions have access to financial resources from business people.

Whether it is true or not, there is open talk in the ANC about ethnically defined “succession combos”. Almost all have a Zulu speaker either as deputy or as the main candidate. This is because of the “sensitivity” of the “Zulu issue”, say many senior leaders, who ordinarily would not speak this way. This is not Zuma’s doing. Since 1994, the ANC has been unable to deal with the demon of ethnic mobilisation within its ranks, at best chastising it gently as one would an errant child. At worst, it panders to elites who deploy the power of ethnicity for their own goal, be they in the IFP, the Afrikaner fringe or within its own ranks.

In part, this development is the result of the Africanist revisionism of the ANC’s Thabo Mbeki era. The party’s ideological outlook on race has been stripped of all the progressive content infused into the party by its alliance with the communist and labour movements. Under Mbeki, the ANC has all but completed its transformation into a purely narrow nationalist movement, lacking any understanding of the complexity and nuance of identity. It was always going to be easy for its new brand of racial nationalism to degenerate into a brazen ethnic free-for-all. This is a sorry state of affairs for an ANC that was founded a century ago to “bury the demon of tribalism”.


 * Brown is political editor


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=3062467**

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