By R.W. Johnson
The National Dialogue of 2025, it turns out, is modelled on the Congress of the People which drew up the Freedom Charter at Kliptown in 1955, not on Codesa, as many thought. There is a considerable ANC mythology about this: we are told that many thousands of people responded to the organisers’ invitation to send in their ideas for what needed to be included in the Charter, so there were thousands of pieces of paper submitted with suggestions for more jobs, redistribution of the land, and so on.
For many decades, both the Charter and the Congress of the People have enjoyed mythical status among ANC supporters — indeed, even today, its provisions are frequently quoted, usually in support of rights or aspirations yet to be achieved – for the Charter is full of sweeping and often unrealisable promises such as “The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people” or “All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose”. The Freedom Charter remains the ANC’s official programme, alongside the National Democratic Revolution (NDR).
In fact, the Congress of the People was a rather cynical exercise, the work of the (then banned) Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) which was secretly transforming itself into the underground SACP. For although some Communists had been served with banning orders of one sort or another, in those pre-armed struggle days virtually all of them were still at liberty and politically active. And in those days the top levels of the party still featured large numbers of white Communists, often Jewish intellectuals.
The prominent black intellectual Professor Z.K. Matthews had argued that such a meeting should be held and that the wishes of the people should be gathered and documented, but of course the question was, who would organise such a large enterprise? The ANC was quite incapable of such a feat, but the Communists were, as ever, both well organised and extremely determined, so inevitably they took the whole thing over.
When word went out that there was to be a Congress of the People (COP), many Liberals and other non-Communist democrats were initially very enthusiastic and keen to participate. However, when preparations for the Congress began, they discovered that all its organisers were Communists who, in time-honoured Communist fashion, ensured that nobody but Communists would have any influence over any aspect of the Congress. Alarmed, local Liberals informed their de facto leader, Margaret Ballinger MP, of this and the Liberal Party withdrew its support for the Congress.
According to the rules set by the organisers, the COP delegates had to be mandated by some popular organisation. In fact, what happened was that the SACP set up hundreds of entirely mythical organisations which existed purely to mandate a set of delegates. To be accepted, this had to pass muster with the SACP organisers who naturally used their administrative powers to ensure that only “progressives” (ANC and Communist supporters) were actually accepted for admission to the Congress.
Thus, for example, SACP organisers in Port Elizabeth would set up an Eastern Cape People’s Organisation or a National Union of Laundrywomen and pick maybe a dozen politically reliable activists who would then become delegates for these bogus organisations. (These organisations all disappeared like ghosts as soon as the Congress was over.)
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, other SACP activists had been detailed to draft the Freedom Charter. The story about the Charter being constructed from the thousands of pieces of paper submitted with popular suggestions of issues was, of course, misleading. Certainly, thousands of pieces of paper with suggestions were submitted, but whether anyone ever read them is unclear. Ben Turok later claimed that he was the principal author of the Charter’s economic section while Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein played a significant role in drafting the rest, with some input from Z.K. Matthews, though Matthews did not attend the Congress. At any rate, there is no dispute that the Charter was largely formulated by white Communists.
The organisers then made sure that the Charter’s main headings provided the agenda for the “discussion” at the Congress, for they were shrewd enough to realise that there had to be at least the illusion of popular participation. Sure enough, the delegates greatly enjoyed being able to talk about their grievances and complaints, illustrating their points with personal experiences.
Then at the end of the Congress the Freedom Charter was unveiled. Cleverly, all the demands had been phrased as simple statements of what would definitely happen in the future – e.g. “There shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave and sick leave for all workers, and maternity leave on full pay for all working mothers”; or “Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children; Higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit”.
This format enabled supporters of the Charter to feel that all these things had been decided, and that they could therefore look forward to all of htem being enacted one day. Moreover, since there was no attempt to imagine how the state was going to afford all these expensive promises, the drafters of the Charter felt able to make extremely extravagant and, indeed, impractical commitments – e.g. “All people shall have the right to live where they choose and be decently housed” and “Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no-one shall go hungry”. And, of course, by putting all these commitments into a single document, the illusion was created that they would all arrive at once. The end result was to provide a sort of picture of heaven for everyone to look forward to.
This complete lack of concern for practicality reflected the fact that the Charter was really meant just to provide the ANC and SACP with a propaganda tool in order to mobilise the masses towards this Nirvana. This was indeed successful: the Charter inspired great hopes, which helped inflate the ANC’s following. And by holding a Congress, the movement could claim that the Charter had the authority of having been decided by the popular masses themselves, although in fact there had been little real popular input.
And, of course, potentially controversial terms like “the nationalisation of industry” could be avoided by formulations such as “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole”. (Interestingly, since no one had then thought of affirmative action or BEE, the Charter insisted on merit as a criterion and said there must be no discrimination by race, which would presumably have forbidden both of these things.)
The National Dialogue takes place at a different time and in a different context, but the similarities are striking. As with the COP, despite the name “national dialogue”, it is anything but national. The so-called legacy foundations have pulled out because they feel civil society, let alone the general public, have been excluded and that the ANC is essentially in charge. The liberals (the DA and ActionSA) have again refused to participate because they see it as under the control of the Left. Yacoob Abba Omar rather wishfully writes that the dialogue is a vast protest movement against poverty, inequality and lack of services and that it “puts huge pressure on the government and business to respond to people’s demands”.
This is actually not the case at all. No doubt, the ANC would like to deflect pressure onto business – or indeed, onto anyone else but themselves – but the government’s whole problem is that the ANC has been in power for 31 years, and most people rightly hold it responsible for what has gone wrong. Moreover, as was true of the COP, merely parading one’s grievances does not in any way cause those in power to behave differently.
The government is, of course, hoping it can deflect blame onto others. This is why Ramaphosa asked soulfully, why was it that some had got very rich but others were poorer than ever? The truthful answer to this is that inequality has greatly increased under ANC rule, and that a prime culprit is BEE, which has made people like Ramaphosa himself enormously rich, but worsened unemployment. But we all know that the reason Ramaphosa has couched his question thus is (a) to make it sound as if he is really concerned about inequality and (b) to enable him to waffle on dishonestly about inequality being entirely due to the legacy of apartheid.
The conference organisers have identified the following themes for discussion: a dynamic, inclusive economy; jobs, poverty and inequality; crime and corruption; improving education and a healthy nation; fixing the state and making the constitution work; building SA values, culture and strengthening the social fabric; gender and gender-based violence; dealing with intergenerational trauma and healing; and land, spatial equality and environmental justice. In other words, the National Dialogue is about everything.
These themes will then become the framework around which a People’s Compact is structured (as with the Freedom Charter, this will actually allow it to be written in advance by partisan politicians). This Compact will be “an aspirational document” – meaning that, like the Freedom Charter, there will be no provision for implementation or any expectation that anything it says will actually be carried out. As with the Charter the government hopes people will be inspired simply by reading all these large promises and will be naive enough to believe that the ANC will actually carry them out. Indeed, to foster such hopes the party says that the Compact will then be used to generate a programme of action — in the shape of a new National Development Plan.
With that we understand fully that this is all just hot air. The first such Plan was full of high-sounding commitments and promises, but there was no provision for their implementation. Accordingly, the Plan has been comprehensively ignored from the day it was issued. One remembers that when that Plan went before Parliament, Terror Lekota asked: “Who exactly will be responsible for implementing this plan?” The whole House roared with laughter, for it was already realised that it was an empty, pointless document and that no one would make any effort to carry it out. And thus it has been.
So, the Social Compact and National Plan that stem from the National Dialogue will be empty promises from Day One. The only real questions are, how successful will the ANC be in trying to deflect blame for its appalling record onto others? And how far will this political ploy be successful in mobilising opinion behind the ANC before the local government elections?
No one should hold their breath. People are not fools, and their naivete in such matters has been worn thin by 31 years of empty promises. It is already clear that the ANC will try to dodge discussions about corruption, and it will doubtless not want a discussion about why poverty and inequality have grown so much under ANC rule.
These and many other subjects carry a heavy load of political embarrassment. And the polls suggest that ANC support is still slipping. The problem is that corruption is corrosive. Once it has been established in people’s minds that the ANC is irreversibly corrupt, it is very difficult for it to get people to take seriously anything it says. Watching the ANC dodge and weave in order to avoid all responsibility for what has gone wrong may produce some amusing moments, and we may as well enjoy those. They will, after all, be the only positive results of this large, expensive but empty exercise.
FEATURED IMAGE: The Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication in Kliptown, Soweto, where, on 26 June 1955, the Congress of the People met to draw up the Freedom Charter. (Wikimedia Commons)