Something of import in speech’s unimportance by Steven Friedman, 14 January 2015, 06:37 THE important aspect of this year’s African National Congress (ANC) January 8 statement was how unimportant it was. Not that long ago commentators and journalists would pore over every line of the annual ANC policy statement to see where the country was headed. Media would line up teams of analysts to debate the nuance of the governing party’s message. No longer — this year’s January 8 statement was a routine, low-key event. Part of this may be about the statement itself: it is a while since it seemed to have anything new or dramatic to say. This year’s contained nothing that had not been said before — it even criticised the willing seller, willing buyer approach to land reform which seems to feature in every ANC policy statement. (How many times can you scrap the same policy?) About the only new angle was an attempt to show that the ANC is implementing the Freedom Charter, a risky move because drawing attention to the charter, which was written 60 years ago in very different circumstances, might give ammunition to the ANC’s opponents on the left. But it is not only the content of the statement that explains why it is nowhere near the event it used to be. The more important reason may be that, although much of the national debate paints the ANC as an immensely powerful force (usually for bad), deep down, those who shape the debate are beginning to realise that the governing party’s words and deeds are not nearly as important as we are led to believe. The first reason is that the statements tend to remind us (by default) that the ANC remains in some ways beyond the control of its own leaders. This year we were again told that factionalism will not be tolerated and that ANC representatives must not place their own concerns ahead of those of voters. And yet nothing changes — the internal divisions persist, sometimes beyond public view, and representatives accused of wrongdoing are elected to ANC committees. There is no sense among grassroots citizens that the party for whom many vote is more willing to serve or listen to them. The problem is not that the leaders who draft the statements say one thing but believe another. It is that they may want to fix the problems but cannot because they fear the ANC may come apart if they act against everyone who ignores the statements. The second is that the ANC’s control over the society is not nearly as great as we are often told. It may have taken over the political system in 1994 but power over the economy and the society did not come with office and so it has had to contend with the reality that it cannot simply order the society to change — it must bargain with those who hold power outside formal politics. Nor is it in full control of the society it governs: in the suburbs and business districts it is often only a bit player. And even in the townships which continue to vote for it local power holders use the ANC when this suits them and ignore it when it doesn’t. When ANC leaders blame apartheid for today’s ills they may be finding excuses — but they are also acknowledging how much they have been unable to change. All this limits the ANC’s room to introduce dramatic new policies, which is why the statements often simply repeat what has been said before. And it means that what they do promise seems less important because it may never happen. Not all of this is the ANC’s doing — it could have done much more to change the society’s direction. It has not developed a clear strategy for negotiating social and economic change — it talked about this a year ago but this year ignored the issue. Yet nothing it could have done would have changed the reality that governments do not have nearly as much power as both the ANC and its opponents think and that no democratic government has unlimited scope to do what it wants. Given this, the fact that so much store was once placed on ANC statements may reflect how much both the ANC’s sympathisers and critics exaggerated its power. They still do — ANC documents overrate its role in change and much public comment still sees it as a huge force for bad. But declining interest in ANC statements may show that the truth is finally sinking in: that the ANC created few if any of our problems and that its ability to solve them on its own is very limited. If that is what is happening, our debate may become real for the first time in a while — it will no longer wish away problems by blaming the ANC for all of them and demanding that it fix them alone. If the declining importance of ANC statements signals that we are able to stare our problems squarely in the face rather than using the ANC as an excuse not to deal with them, they may be an important sign that we are making progress. • Friedman is director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy. Read this next
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 06:07:31 +0000
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