State+of+Organisation,+Kgalema+Motlanthe,+ANC+Today

ANC Today, Volume 5, No. 26 • 1—7 July 2005
=State of organisation=


 * //Holding aloft the precious torch of freedom//**


 * Kgalema Motlanthe, ANC Secretary General**

Fifty years ago, our people gathered in Kliptown to articulate their aspirations to political and economic justice, freedom and equality. The Congress of the People was itself the culmination of a participatory process involving thousands of volunteers who literally traversed the length and breadth of this country canvassing and recording views of virtually all sections of our people.

Such a momentous event could not have taken place without the selfless dedication of the volunteers of the Congress movement, who fanned out across the country to mobilise and organise our people. These volunteers did not seek financial reward for their heroic endeavours. They were motivated by the quest for freedom and they were instigated by the determination to rise against and defeat all forms of injustice.

They were disciplined members of a united movement, animated by an abiding loyalty to the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, Coloured Peoples Congress, Congress of Democrats and the South African Congress of Trade Unions. The ruling bloc was also invited but did not attend and chose to send a posse of the police in their stead. We are pleased that, fifty years later, at this National General Council we have been joined by former members of the New National Party, who have now embraced the Freedom Charter and become active members of this glorious movement.

With this history and background comes the heavy responsibility of living up to the high standards set by our forebears, some of whom are still in our midst. We must admit that this is a hard act to follow. We gave it our best shot in the April 2004 elections campaign but still fell short of gaining three-thirds majority. Nevertheless, the election showed that the ANC remains the best organised movement in the country. The manner in which we conducted door-to-door work, and mobilised thousands of volunteers for direct engagement with the people showed that no organisation can rival the ANC in terms of the depth and breadth of its activist base. But it is against the awesome measure of the heroes that preceded us that we must evaluate our own performance.

The ANC came into existence before any of us. It will outlive all of us. Our historic task is to carry this precious torch through the brief time we are given on earth, and pass it on undiminished to the generations that will follow. That torch, whose flame keeps aloft the hopes of our people, burns on the fuel of our own selfless contributions, which rest upon our acceptance of the values and conduct of our forebears: courage, generosity, honesty, self-sacrifice, humility, truthfulness, integrity and temperance.


 * Membership of the ANC**

Over the last ten years the membership of the ANC has become increasingly diverse, embracing strata and national groups that were previously less prominent. Membership represented at the most recent provincial conferences amounted to 440,000. Provinces that have shown particularly strong growth in membership include KwaZulu Natal and Limpopo. Declines in the ANC's membership are apparent in the Eastern Cape, North West and Northern Cape. Membership levels, it should be noted, continue to reflect the cycle in which numbers grow in the run up to provincial and national conferences, and decline thereafter. The central question this raises is the extent to which the memberships are active participants in the political life of the movement.

Fundamentally, our strength as a movement must be assessed by the character and level of organisation of our basic unit, the ANC branch, which is strategically located in the midst of our communities. Our figures show the ANC has functioning branches in only 50% of the wards in the country.

The ANC's leadership of our society rests firmly on our presence in all communities. Our presence and outreach rests on branch structures and where these are non-existent it will be impossible for the ANC to play a meaningful role in the life of the community. It is therefore of great concern that in many regions less than half of the wards have branches in good standing. This will diminish our capacity to lead the nation and resolve the many problems that our people face in the struggle for a better life.

The picture of our branches is very uneven. In general, across all provinces, the best-organised branches are in the minority, with the vast majority functioning according to the basic minimum of constitutional requirements. In many of our branches there are no sustainable political programmes and community campaigns. Many are fraught with fights over leadership positions, selection and deployment of councillors, tendering and control of projects and recruitment of membership in order to serve factional or selfish interests.

In many cases, the reasons for division are not rooted in ideological differences. Rather, these problems rest primarily on the preoccupation on the part of local leadership and public representatives with securing access to and control over public resources. This in turn leads to tensions between cadres deployed in ANC structures and those in government and undermines the effectiveness of our public representatives.

In many areas, branches lack the coherence and initiative to implement their own programmes of action, which respond to the day-to-day challenges facing members of the communities in which they serve. This failure leads to the oft repeated perception that "ANC only comes at election time", a perception fuelled by the weaknesses of our structures on the ground. The recent protests over municipal service delivery have exposed these shortcomings in a most visible and worrying manner. In most, if not all of these protests, it has been members of the ANC that have played a leading role in establishing parallel structures outside the movement, including in the form of 'concerned residents' groups.

The struggle for a better life does not end once 'delivery' has taken place. Once we have made progress in delivering something good like a house to a homeless family, we need to realise that this very delivery creates new needs amongst those that have benefited from it. Rather than boasting or gloating over our successful delivery, we must remain rooted in the midst of the community, ready to listen and understand the new needs and wants that emerge, so that we can continue to play an ongoing role in development and in the struggle for a better life. Where we do not have branches, this will be impossible.


 * The programme of the ANC**

The ultimate indicator of the state of organisation is the extent to which the movement is effectively implementing a programme of action which engages all structures and members, involves and mobilises broader society, and advances the strategic objectives of the movement. The challenge which the organisation has faced in this period - and indeed since 1994 - is the effective coordination of the various sites in which the programme needs to be implemented, and the provision of leadership and direction to all the cadres of the movement on their tasks and responsibilities. This has required, among other things, an understanding of the relationship in practice between constitutional structures of the ANC and the corresponding ANC structures.

Nevertheless, the ANC has been able to build on its achievements in pushing back the frontiers of poverty. Within all sectors of the social transformation cluster of government progress has been made in implementing the Stellenbosch resolutions and making a positive contribution to improving the lives of the country's poor and vulnerable.

Important as these advances are, a question that needs to be addressed is how to ensure that ANC branches are playing a meaningful role in the programme to push back the frontiers of poverty. How is the ANC, through its organisational programme, contributing to the process of social and economic transformation?

This question has been answered to some extent by campaigns taken up by ANC branches - like Letsema and 'Know your neighbourhood' - which have sought to mobilise and engage communities in the process of local development. One of the important achievements of the Letsema campaign was its capacity to draw together the voluntary efforts of community members and the resources and capacity of government in pursuit of a common development programme.

More recently, the ANC has - together with its Alliance partners - taken up the 'know your neighbourhood' campaign. Among the objectives of this campaign is the involvement of communities in identifying and addressing their developmental needs, and thereby contributing to the building of a people's contract to fight poverty.


 * Lead us not into temptation**

Our review of the functioning of branch, provincial and national structures of the ANC has identified a number of problems that need to be addressed. These problems point to an erosion of the revolutionary morality that has characterised our movement for decades, and which infused the volunteers of the Congress of the People campaign with a burning need to serve the people. The central challenge facing the ANC is to address the problems that arise from our cadres susceptibility to moral decay occasioned by the struggle for the control of and access to resources.

All the paralysis in our programmes, all the divisions in our structures, are in one way or another, a consequence of this cancer in our midst. The constitution of the country allows for all citizens to engage in legitimate business activity. But many of us appear only too quick to sacrifice the moral and ethical standards that have characterised our movement. Moral degeneration, linked to the accumulation and control over resources, is not a consequence we can accept, since it threatens to extinguish the torch of freedom that our people have carried for so long.

Because of their hopes and aspirations we are duty bound to act, as the ANC, in the vanguard of the struggle against moral decay and corruption. These problems are not confined to a particular sphere of government or geographic area. Their pernicious influence and unacceptable consequences are apparent at local, provincial and national level.

In many of our communities opportunities for employment are very limited, and especially in poorer provinces, government is the only employer of note. In this context the single-minded pursuit of control over public resources and ascendancy to authority to make appointments can lead to particularly acute consequences.

Our position as a ruling party makes us particularly susceptible to such influences. Professionals within the public service are chosen because of their particular skills and talents. When their time in public service has come to an end it is only natural that they seek to continue to work in the spheres of society with which they are most familiar and best equipped to contribute. But these are the circumstances that create fertile ground for corruption and graft. How can we act to ensure that those exiting from public service, either as professionals or public representatives are prevented from using government resources to invest in their personal fortunes in later life?

Those who engage in business within our ranks should do so openly and in a transparent manner. Insidious practices such as sleeping partners should be avoided. Leaving public service to conduct private business after having placed reliable partners in leadership positions still in the public service is a malpractice which is hard to prove but clearly prevalent.

When we marked the 90th Anniversary of our movement in 2002, we looked forward to the tasks we must accomplish during the critical decade that will take us to the Centenary of the ANC. The January 8th Statement of 2002 gave us a road map as we advance to the Year 2012. The guiding principle of this road map is the objective to move forward decisively to eradicate the legacy of racism, sexism, colonialism and apartheid. This is the central aim that must inform the detailed work done daily by the vanguard movement for the social transformation of our country and Continent as well as our democratic state. Our capacity to organise and mobilise our people, through the creation of strong ANC branches, rooted in all our communities, will ultimately determine whether we succeed in these objectives.


 * **Kgalema Motlanthe** is ANC Secretary General. This is an edited extract from the organisational report presented to the ANC National General Council at the University of Pretoria, 30 June 2005.

From: http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/2005/at26.htm