A+new+power+behind+the+throne,+Anthony+Butler,+Business+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 30 March 2007
=A new power behind the throne?=


 * Anthony Butler**

THE African National Congress (ANC) recently circulated 13 discussion documents to stimulate debate ahead of its winter policy conference. Positions will be adopted in June that may decisively influence the succession struggle at the ANC’s 52nd national conference, to be held in Limpopo in December. The most fascinating of the documents is modestly titled “Discussion document on the organisational review”. It is 50 pages long, 90% of which seems to be deliberate obfuscation. Behind the verbiage, however, lies a disturbing set of proposals for the future of the ANC. The Sunday Times greeted the document as an attempt to “clip Mbeki’s wings”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, it seems to imply that the ANC must make it possible for Mbeki’s inner circle in the state presidency to continue to rule SA after 2009. If this interpretation is correct, the document signals one of the most audacious factional drives for power in the history of the modern ANC.

The genius of the paper is that it endorses familiar leftist criticisms of Mbeki’s first decade in power. Too much power has been vested in one man. The movement’s presidency has usurped powers rightfully belonging to its secretary-general. Government ministers have become distant from the people. The ANC has lost the capacity to make policy and to monitor its implementation.

The remedy for a decade of centralisation in President Thabo Mbeki’s conjoined state and ANC presidencies, the document suggests, is the creation of two centres of power. Rather than being subordinated to the state, the ANC must become more than its match. Indeed, the “integration” between state and party “should be based on the principle that the ANC is the ultimate strategic centre of power”.

Five key institutional changes are recommended. First, the authors observe that the party is currently unable to “track and monitor policy implementation”. It proposes the creation of a substantial new “policy institute”. At the same time, the national executive committee’s (NEC’s) policy subcommittees, its traditional mechanisms for policy innovation and oversight, will have to report to the institute.

Second, a new “political school” is proposed to train cadres in important matters such as “the theory of revolution” and “statecraft”. All officials and cadres “deployed to the state, the economy, the arena for the battle of ideas and civil society” will be obliged to attend classes “to introduce them to the ANC’s thinking and key objectives”. NEC members, cabinet ministers and premiers are not exempt.

Third, new ANC departments controlling political communications and cadre deployment will be set up. No longer will the state president appoint cabinet ministers or provincial executives.

Fourth, the document proposes to downgrade the NEC, hitherto the ANC’s senior decision-making body. In comments that will leave many NEC veterans aghast, the document proposes to dilute election of members with secondments, to render the NEC ineffectual by hugely increasing its size, and to subordinate its policy subcommittees to the policy institute and secretary-general’s office.

With unprecedented disrespect towards the movement’s most venerated institution, the document also ridicules NEC members by insisting they complete “appropriate” classes at the political school and undertake “mass work” allocated by party functionaries. “Currently, most NEC members are too content merely to attend regional and provincial meetings and thereafter go home!”

Finally, and most importantly, the document proposes a vastly expanded secretary-general’s office that will have “the requisite capacity to co-ordinate and manage the work of all the departments or units”.

It may seem curious that such an important discussion document proposes in such convoluted language to rob the state presidency of the powers Mbeki has accumulated for it, and to rebuild the secretary-general’s office he has been content to see wither. Why is a new ANC policy institute needed? Surely the ANC already controls policy making, through the deployment of senior ANC officials to existing state institutions?

The new secretary-general, it is proposed, will head a machine curiously reminiscent of Mbeki’s state presidency. Is the real plan that Joel Netshitenzhe, the Presidency’s key policy strategist, will emerge as a candidate for the office of secretary-general? Will presidency director-general Frank Chikane step down from government to take up new responsibilities in ANC head office?

Scepticism about the motivations behind the plan will be redoubled by the collateral damage its implementation would cause to the state. A transformation of the national headquarters would require skilled personnel, most of whom today work in Mbeki’s state presidency. The new national office would have to employ much of the current presidency’s policy co-ordination and communications expertise, as well as senior legal and political advisers. Given the evident disjuncture of salary levels between the party and government, the document proposes “a framework of broad salary bands that cut across the entire public sector, and that also have articulation with the salaries within the movement. This will facilitate the deployment and redeployment of cadres.”

Sceptics will observe that the ANC is currently quite incapable of funding such plans. Even if, assuming the worst outcome, the new head office was to become a flourishing trading site, where procurement and policy influence could be exchanged for party funds, a massive financial shortfall would persist. Perhaps for this reason, the discussion document piously observes that the viability of parties is “a matter of public interest”, and proposes as a matter of urgency “a comprehensive system of public funding of representative political parties”. Government’s critics should beware, however, because a further proposal is for an “effective regulatory architecture for private funding of political parties and civil society groups to enhance accountability and transparency to the citizenry”.

The notion that Mbeki should remain ANC president, more or less in perpetuity, certainly seems to be gaining ground. So too does the idea that the control by his inner circle of government policy and appointments must be sustained after 2009. On one view, this represents a prudent safeguard against a potentially “populist” successor. For those who discount the likely success of the Zuma candidacy, however, the rebuilt ANC machine is more likely to be the power behind the throne of a new state president, such as Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, possessed of no distinctive policy agenda or political constituency of her own.


 * Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A425306**

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