Cancer of ill-discipline feeding on the ANC

Crooner Michael Franks’ classic Monkey See Monkey Do sounds like a perfect description for the cancer of ill-discipline that is so pervasive among the general membership and pockets of leadership within in the ruling party these days.

The Monkey See Monkey Do Syndrome is an interesting one. Those who have paid a cursory visit to the zoo will know this very well. Usually monkeys do their best to imitate whatever human beings visiting them do. This includes facial expressions and gestures. Children learning to speak and walk also suffer the Monkey See Monkey Do Syndrome. They also copy the behaviour and mannerism of their parents and older sibling without question. The problem with the Monkey See Monkey Do Syndrome is that people or monkeys as it were repeat the conduct they see irrespective of whether such conduct is good or bad.

The ANC is neither a zoo nor a kindergarten. It is a revolutionary organisation whose members must be guided by revolutionary theory and practice. It does not need members of members. It needs committed members who understand their revolutionary duty of ensuring that the ruling party achieves its national democratic revolution mandate guided by critical documents such as its constitution, the Freedom Charter and the Strategy and Tactics.

The behaviour of some members and leaders of the ANC since the ruling party took over power in 1994 has been shameful to say the least. It has become a common occurrence for ANC members to disrespect organisational forums (i.e. conferences and meetings) manifested through intolerance for debates; heckling, howling, indecent behaviour at meetings; resolving disagreements through violence and the disrupting or walking out of meetings and conferences.

The 2005 National General Council also warned against the “allegations of the use of state resources and agencies to fight battles in the ANC; elective conferences characterised by lobbying lists, block voting and winner take all scenarios, followed by purges or perceptions of purges and the marginalisation of sections of the movement, till the next conference when the next group takes over and does exactly the same.

These were prophetic words indeed. Six years after the 2005 NGC warning, the situation has deteriorated. The bizarre is at its most bizarre to borrow from prolific Nigerian journalists and academic Adebayo Williams. The question of course is why did the great movement of Luthuli and Tambo reach this state of organisational paralysis? The rot began at what the ANC constitution describes as the nucleus or fibre of the ruling party – the branch and by extension the general membership.

The ANC leadership must shoulder the blame for its contribution to the mushrooming of opportunistic and lumpen behaviour within its ranks. After the 1994 election, the leadership was preoccupied with the euphoria of controlling the levers of state power and forgot to continue its potent tradition of political education that had sustained it for decades in the face of unrelenting onslaught from the apartheid regime. In the face of declining political and intellectual stewardship, the general ANC membership was found wanting and vulnerable to political vultures and power hungry leaders who pounced on our people and used them as “voting cows” and hired guns to lobby on their behalf.

The naïve members are also used to intimidate, harass, and cajole those who do not agree with them. They follow their leaders blindly, hence Monkey See Monkey Do, because such loyalty is rewarded with bags of money, promises of jobs and tenders as well as leading lavish lifestyles.

The discussion document on leadership renewal at the Durban NGC was blunt about the behaviour of such members. It bemoaned the tendency by such members to disrupt conference when disgruntled, use violence against each other prompting police intervention and when defeated within internal ANC processes resorting to the courts to seek relief.

More poignantly, the document argues that this new tendency represents a “shadow culture and subcultures” which co-exist alongside what the movement always stood for.

“It draws on ANC history and symbolism and like a parasite, uses the membership, and the very democratic structure and processes of the movement, to its own end. Furthermore, both ‘old’ and ‘new’ members and leadership echelons at all levels are involved, increasingly leaving no able voice in our ranks to provide guidance.”

ANC members need to reclaim their organisation and return it to its true history, traditions and practices. They must ensure the ANC “retains its value system, its revolutionary morality, the comradeship among its members, its deep-seated respect for the truth; its determined opposition to deceit and double-dealing; and its readiness to openly account to the masses of our people for everything it says and does”.

Ill discipline undermines internal democracy, cohesion and culture of debate within the ANC. It fuels perceptions of a party at war with itself and makes the ANC look like an organisation that is preoccupied with elective conferences and not the interest of the poor and the marginalised in our society.

ANC members can learn from Martin Luther King Jnr’s understanding of revolutionary duty. He advised: “Human progress is neither automatic nor investable … Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the tireless and passion concern of dedicated individuals.”

The ANC belongs to its members. Its leaders serve at their behest. It is time they reclaim movement from careerists, tendepreneurs, opportunists and self-serving members and leaders and return the people’s movement to the masses who has it owned for the past 99 years.

The parting shot has to go to Lenin who remarked in his classic The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913): “People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.”