Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
This week’s much-awaited Western Cape ANC provincial conference is a crucial stepping stone for the party on what it hopes will be a path leading to the premier’s office and the majority seats in the provincial legislature next year.
Its leaders know they are at a critical juncture in their bid to oust the DA after many years in office, in circumstances that have left the ANC licking self-inflicted wounds.
Despite putting all the effort into branding and internal affairs reorganisation, many see the ANC as dull and wooden and that it has yet to make enough of an impact on the public.
Too few people know what it would do in power after failing as a credible opposition to the DA provincial government and several municipalities.
The strategic challenge recognised by the ANC team tasked with convening this conference is that voters perceive the party as corrupt and less caring than the DA, even as the debate over the relocation of Parliament to Gauteng rears its divisive head in the media.
In grappling with the challenge, the party is trying to argue that the DA has neglected the poor at the expense of the affluent, while arguing that it can transform everything and improve key human and economic development indicators.
Its leaders see a way through the conundrum by asking people to approach transformation and the fight against corruption stage by stage, while giving the party a breathing space to work on its organisational weaknesses.
A successful conference and a united leadership collective election appear to be critical targets for the party at this stage. The public is curious to see an exemplary party representative of the province’s racial groups and demographics.
But there are other impressions and images that the party appears keen to project, as benefits of not rushing the conference at the expense of a diminished influence at the party’s national conference that re-elected Cyril Ramaphosa as president.
One such impression is that old defeats in the previous elections haunt the Western Cape ANC, so much so that the party can barely look victory in the eye.
The DA in the province is more familiar with winning and is quicker to intercept political mood turning in favour of the opposition.
My take is that anyone shopping for the conviction, that after this long-awaited provincial conference, the ANC will emerge better prepared to march to the premier’s office after the 2024 national and provincial elections, must keep an eye on the progress of the current “moonshot pact” talks among opposition parties to mobilise voters to unseat the ANC in at least four provinces.
The ANC in the Western Cape trades in caveat and caution, even as the electorate assesses its performance differently from the rest of the party structures in the country as the official opposition to the DA government.
Despite improving prospects for territorial gains in several by-elections, the party has demonstrated muted confidence. As an example, take the by-election in Cape Town on February 8, when the ANC and the DA failed to field candidates for a ward in the metropole’s Kensington/Maitland/ Windermere area. The election was to fill a seat vacated by DA ward councillor Helen Jacobs at the end of 2022.
The DA won the seat, with 53.91% of the votes in the 2021 local government elections.
The by-election in Cape Town reflects the creeping provincial and national trend. In municipalities where no one expects the ANC to lose a seat, the party barely even turns up to contest it because of a combination of financial bankruptcy, faction fighting and the disorganisation of its machinery.
The DA’s recent fall in March, in places like Barrydale in Swellendam, where it lost a by-election to the ANC and the Patriotic Alliance, is so much more spectacular than the ANC’s rise with the support of smaller parties that observers tend to discount the latter in explaining the former.
Not long ago, there were defining moments in by-election campaigns.
DA’s Helen Zille bestrode the stage, hogging the limelight, while the ANC leaders in the province lurked in the wings, muttering lines for an audience that was not paying attention.
Now, several provincial black DA members are gone. Many local black leaders self-combusted. John Steinhuisen governs a divided, disoriented party that emerged unconvincing to the broader electorate from its April national congress.
The ANC in the province could probably have slept through February and woken up in the lead in several by-elections. Strokes of luck that big induce fear of fortune swinging back the other way.
But it would be unfair to cast the ANC as an empty vessel catching votes shed by the DA. Reviled oppositions can always bolster unloved governments, as the ANC demonstrated in its failure to address from the opposition benches the plight of the poor weighed down by rampant inflation, high unemployment and deepening poverty in a province that represents the widest gap in wealth distribution among citizens.
That lack of fixity of purpose has been hard to discern at first, partly because the coronavirus pandemic submerged everyday politics and somewhat because the ANC was learning the basics of political craft to extricate itself from the Zuma era and the spectacular incompetence of its former leadership in government.
Going into this provincial conference, the ANC must find consensus and techniques of denying the DA easy targets, position itself to face the enemy it wants to fight, with credible policies and leadership, and give voters more reasons why they should not give up on the party.
It should emerge with a single-minded focus on winning public confidence that it can do better than the DA, a realistic remedial action not perfumed with concerns about appeasing factions and a demonstration of potency.
What evidence might show that the provincial conference was worth the delays? How would politics in the province look if the party had a plan and the plan was working? It would look as it does.
Nyembezi is a policy analyst, researcher and human rights activist
Cape Times