Crippled National Dialogue limps to the start line

By R.W. Johnson

Ordinary South Africans may be forgiven for finding current political developments in their country rather confusing. Other countries don’t organise anything called a “national dialogue”, and yet we are about to have one. The President has announced a list of Eminent Persons who will apparently lead this chatter. It includes such intellectual heavyweights as the national rugby captain and Miss South Africa plus a large number of semi-celebrities. There is a strong air of disbelief that they are any more than useful idiots.

In any case South Africa has a functioning parliament and an extremely talkative media plus, of course, a wide range of political parties. They are all permanently engaged in dialogue, so why the need to organise a national dialogue costing, apparently, hundreds of millions of rands? It is noticeable that the people who seem keenest on the national dialogue are the leaders of tiny parties (think: Mmusi Maimane), or people who have actually fallen off the political stage (think: Lindiwe Mazibuko) but are dying to get a bit more publicity.

In fact, a major clue came at the ANC’s recent NEC meeting where Andile Lungisa suggested that the NEC leadership should stand down because it was clear that they had run out of steam and ideas and were quite incapable of leading any move to renew the ANC, with the result that the party is continuing its downward drift – evident since the 2024 election. This intervention naturally created quite a sensation – Lungisa is a former deputy president of the ANC Youth League and something of a firebrand.

But nobody could deny that the NEC is now a very low-calibre body and that it has failed to respond in any creative way to the ANC’s major loss of support. Inevitably, Lungisa’s speech led to many of the NEC members expressing their own discontents – many of them saying they were unhappy that the ANC was now in coalition with the DA, and others saying that the party had been foolish to alienate Jacob Zuma, for which it has paid a heavy price.

Lungisa is from the Eastern Cape and has in the past been fiercely critical of both Oscar Mabuyane, the Eastern Cape’s ANC chairman, and Cyril Ramaphosa. Inevitably, his attack on the current leadership is also seen as a vote of no confidence in Ramaphosa, the party’s president, whose response to the ANC’s setback in 2024 has indeed been lack-lustre. Apart from a certain amount of empty rhetoric, there has been no attempt at ANC renewal, no development strategy to achieve faster economic growth, and no new vision for the future.

The impression that Lungisa was gunning for Ramaphosa was only strengthened when he suggested that the way ahead was to elect a new convenor for the ANC, Thabo Mbeki, with Kgalema Motlanthe (a former acting president of the ANC) as his deputy. Everyone knows that Mbeki is bitterly critical of Ramaphosa, and that Ramaphosa has never forgiven or forgotten Mbeki’s side-lining of Tokyo Sexwale, Mathews Phosa and himself. All three men were accused in 2002 of plotting an anti-presidential coup – a completely spurious accusation and a typical Mbeki tactic to dispose of his three most popular party rivals.

Mbeki had devoted his whole life to the ANC and was utterly humiliated when Jacob Zuma defeated him by almost 2:1 at the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference. Mbeki had been a competent administrator and his economic policies had been successful, but his paranoia and vindictiveness had made him many enemies within the party. He had attempted to centralise all power in his own hands, had been responsible for the massively crooked arms deal which had disfigured Mandela’s presidency, and his Aids denialism had ended up costing over 350,000 lives, almost all of them Africans.

By 2007, despite his intelligence and economic success, Mbeki was an isolated and greatly disliked, even hated, figure. Not a man of personal warmth – or, apparently, any close friends – Mbeki was extremely manipulative and, as his demented behaviour over Aids suggested, psychologically unstable.

That said, when the ANC asked Mbeki to stand down he did so immediately, without complaint, and retained his dignity. He had made it clear privately that he had an extremely low opinion of Zuma but made no public comment during the chaos and corruption of Zuma’s rule, though he must have been burning with indignation at seeing South Africa brought so low and his own work and that of Mandela, trashed.

However, as Zuma’s popularity declined and there were repeated attempts to bring a motion of no confidence in him before Parliament, Mbeki spoke out in 2016 for the idea of a national dialogue. Although Mbeki was careful not to criticise either Zuma or the ANC, the idea seemed to be that things were clearly not going well and there needed to be a public stock-taking and a new vision for the future.

Mbeki’s problem was that under both his and Mandela’s presidencies all real power belonged to the ANC. This gave the ANC president not just a central but an utterly dominating position in the nation’s life, and the ANC was a disciplined party which did not tolerate open dissension within its ranks. This meant that there was almost no political space allowing Mbeki to pose any sort of alternative to Zuma.

Mbeki’s proposal of a national dialogue was thus an attempt to create such a space and by dressing it up as a civil society-led initiative it could be depicted as non-political and therefore no threat to ANC discipline. 2016 saw the ANC fall to 53.9% of the vote in the municipal elections of that year – a huge drop in support – and the electorate was clearly minded to look for alternatives.

Zuma naturally ignored the call for a national dialogue – which Mbeki would also certainly have done when he was president – but Mbeki persevered with the idea, using his Thabo Mbeki Foundation (“dedicated to the African Renaissance”) as a “civil society” cover. When Ramaphosa succeeded Zuma as president, Mbeki remained restrained in his criticism, though it was clear that he had a low opinion of Ramaphosa, that he felt the president had not been open or truthful about the Phala Phala affair, that he was scornful of the lack of any proper development plan, and of Ramaphosa’s hesitations and dithering.

Mbeki, as a former president, was an ex officio member of the NEC, but had not attended the NEC under Zuma. Now, significantly, he began to attend again – a clear sign to those who knew him that, although now 83 years old, he was still not without political ambition.

Thereafter, Mbeki pushed and prodded Ramaphosa along, shepherding the other “legacy foundations” before him. The plan was, of course, that Mbeki would play the starring role at the dialogue, using his superior intelligence and eloquence to provide a new vision for the ANC, implicitly criticising Ramaphosa for his hopeless leadership. And then, who knows ? – the ANC might rally to Mbeki as the only man capable of leading them up and away from their current nadir.

The trouble was that Ramaphosa could see trouble coming and has acted in just the way that Mbeki would have, were he still president: he has intervened to ensure that the dialogue will be firmly under ANC and presidential control, even bringing back his old patsy, Roelf Meyer, to assist in that.

So Mbeki has cried foul and led away the legacy foundations. Ramaphosa says he will persevere with the dialogue, but it’s already a shambles, and he has neither the intelligence, the eloquence nor the boldness to provide the new vision required. Just to ensure that no one misses the point, Lungisa has now made quite clear, at the NEC, nogal, just how deficient the present leadership is – and reminded everybody that Mbeki is still the Glittering Alternative.

Meanwhile, over the past few years, Mbeki has courted a number of Afrikaans groups (there’s never any shortage of naive Afrikaners keen to be hoodwinked by Mbeki) and this has now borne fruit in the withdrawal from the national dialogue of Afriforum and Solidarity. The whole situation looks very much as if it was a man-trap for Ramaphosa devised by the cunning Mbeki.

There is a basic ambiguity about the dialogue. It has been sold as a way of involving citizens to help chart a new course for the country. But Ramaphosa, far more narrowly, now says its objective is to achieve “a compact for transformation”, which basically means it is supposed to help re-launch the ANC.

All the talk about “ANC renewal” ignores the fact that no national liberation movement in Africa has yet managed such a renewal. It is worth remembering that when Gorbachev embarked on perestroika and glasnost, he warned all the Communist leaders of Eastern Europe that it would be sensible for them to embark on reform movements of their own. But all of them proved incapable of such a renewal.

The fact was that despite all their talk about representing the working class, every single one of their Communist Parties had come to power because they had been installed in power by the Red Army or, in the Yugoslav case, by Tito’s partisans. So when Gorbachev’s reforms made them nervous, all the Communist rulers looked for help from their own soldiers or the Red Army – and didn’t get it.

Africa’s national liberation movements are much the same. They all came to power essentially through the use of armed force, and almost all of them have stayed in power by subverting free elections by every means possible. In effect, they depend on armed force to stay where they are, so their governments become more and more obviously military regimes over time.

The whole notion of democratic renewal is foreign to them. In effect they have always assumed that once they have conquered power they are there for keeps. Like the Communists they have never had any thought of “what comes after us”, because in their minds their defeat would mean the victory of the counter-revolution – which is unthinkable. Mbeki, it should be said, very much shares this perspective.

The situation is grotesque. Ramaphosa will soon be 73 and is nearing the end of his term. Both Mbeki and Zuma are 83, Motlanthe is 76 and Gwede Mantashe is 70. This collection of old men is fighting over “renewal”, and yet the very fact that the scene is still dominated by all these old folk is living proof that the ANC can’t renew itself.

Meanwhile, there is excitement that the DA’s great white hope, Helen Zille (74) may run for Jo’burg mayor. Imagine the headline: ‘Cape Town pensioner offers to run Jo’burg. Will move out of retirement village to run. Is even willing to live in Jo’burg for a while if elected’.

If the ANC now turned to Mbeki, it would mean it was turning to the only one of their members who has committed genocide against their own people. If that is indeed being considered, the situation is even more desperate then we thought.

This veterans’ parade rather reminds one of the Soviet quip heard in Chernenko’s time: why does the Politburo have so many octogenarians in it ? Answer: because the nonagenarians keep dying off.

Still, the national dialogue is limping to the starting line, and Ramaphosa probably has to go through with it. although he is probably regretting that decision already. We should probably ready ourselves for a parade of banalities. “I’m really against gender-based violence, aren’t you?” … “The answer to all today’s problems lies with Africa’s youth” … “The greatest problem is corruption. And where has the R700 million for our dialogue gone ?” I can hardly wait.

FEATURED IMAGE:  President Cyril Ramaphosa, Deputy President Paul Mashatile, cabinet ministers, and members of the National Dialogue Eminent Persons Group during the first inaugural meeting with the group held at the Union Buildings, 11 July. (The Presidency on X). The meeting was said the provide an opportunity for the president to outline the expectations and mandate of the Eminent Persons Group, and for members to share their views on the role and organisation of the National Dialogue.