The ANC will spend this year renewing and rebuilding itself while its deployees in government attend to pressing areas of service delivery failure before next year’s municipal elections.
The party will focus on dealing with discipline, ethics and the collapse of its structures — and with internal pushback over its governance arrangement with the Democratic Alliance (DA) and other parties.
The ANC will have to manage the fallout from last month’s decision by the South African Communist Party to contest next year’s elections alone, and its relations with its other alliance partners, labour federation Cosatu and the South African National Civic Organisation.
At the same time, it will try to ease dealings with its partners in the government of national unity (GNU) — in particular the DA — ahead of the election campaign, partially through participation in the national dialogue announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his first state of the nation address as head of the GNU in July.
At the weekend, Ramaphosa outlined the ANC’s pared-down, six-point programme for the year in his address to the January 8 commemoration rally in Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township, a venue chosen by the party to both showcase DA governance failures and reconnect with its Western Cape constituency.
The address was a frank assessment of the “existential crisis” the has ANC found itself in after losing its electoral majority and of the “depth of dysfunction in our structures and among our members and leadership”, forcing it to seek coalition partners “under conditions not of our choosing”.
It also reinforced the reality that the ANC does not govern alone, not just through the analysis of the situation it is in, but also in the significantly reduced number of priorities it outlined for the 12 months ahead — and their lack of controversy.
Ramaphosa committed the ANC to “decisive action” on three urgent and inter-related fronts to try to regain the confidence of the voters it had lost over the years through poor governance, corruption and the party’s “damaged brand”.
These were improving the ability of the economy to create jobs; improved service delivery and governance and “decisive and visible steps” to rebuild public trust in the governing party.
This meant fixing local government and ensuring water and energy security; dealing with crime and corruption; creating the conditions for improved job creation; holding the national dialogue and rebuilding the ANC.
Ramaphosa said they would approach solving the water crisis in a similar way to how the security of the energy supply had been restored during the course of last year.
“We are confident that drawing on the lessons learned from dealing successfully with the seemingly intractable challenge of load-shedding, we will be able to deal with this crisis,” Ramaphosa said.
He outlined a series of urgent measures including renewal of municipal infrastructure by ring-fencing water revenue; a crackdown on water tanker mafias and illegal connections as well as a financing framework to allow private sector involvement in municipal-owned water assets.
These would be accompanied by the creation of an indigent register across municipalities to ease the burden on poor households, Ramaphosa said.
The government would focus on assisting high growth industries, including agriculture, manufacturing, mining, tourism, the emerging green economy and digital technologies to help create jobs.
It would also help improve the competitiveness of local industries; regulate labour migration and promote universal connectivity to promote the digital economy, while building industrial capacity and the ability to leverage the mineral sector, he said.
Ramaphosa pointed to the recruitment of 10 000 new police officers, interventions such as Operation Shanela, the crackdown on illegal mining and the creation of the Border Management Authority as positives in dealing with crime but called for further collective effort.
The government would move urgently to build a united front against crime, finalise the establishment of a national council on gender-based violence and mobilise society against criminality.
It would also act decisively against the employment of illegal and undocumented migrants and regulate and monitor spaza shops and food outlets to prevent deaths from food-borne illnesses.
Ramaphosa called on ANC deployees in government to deliver and “move with speed and confidently build strategic momentum” in doing their work, saying that this was “not the time to be tentative or doubtful but rather to be decisive”.
The governance priorities outlined by the ANC are aimed at dealing with some of the most pressing issues facing voters — water, municipal services, crime and unemployment — in the year and a half it has before municipal elections.
The party knows that it needs to fix some of the worst problems voters face at municipal level — or at least be seen to be on its way to dealing with them — if it is to avoid a repeat of the fiasco of the May 2024 elections in next year’s municipal poll.
A further loss of ground at municipal level in the middle of Ramaphosa’s presidential term would weaken the ANC even further going into the 2029 national and provincial elections — along with its chances of staying in power, even at the head of a coalition government.
The ANC’s priorities for government are also in areas that are likely to spark little or no resistance from its coalition partners — or from its own constituents.
They all fall firmly within the areas of focus agreed to in the statement of intent adopted by the parties in the GNU during the negotiations leading up to its formation — that are in line with the priorities adopted by Ramaphosa’s cabinet during the first five months of its existence.
Initiatives to improve water security, help create jobs and economic growth and reduce crime are not likely to add to disputes with the DA — including the National Health Insurance (NHI) — and are already on the agenda of the cabinet clearing house, having been carried over from last year.
Ramaphosa made it clear in his address the ANC would not be backing down on implementation of the NHI, despite having taken the “tactical decision” of forming the GNU and remaining “committed to forge national consensus on fundamental issues that affect our diverse nation”.
“While being flexible on tactics, we maintain firmness of principle in our determination to implement transformative laws and policies adopted by parliament, such as the Bela [Basic Education Laws Amendment] Act, NHI and other pieces of legislation,” he said.
The DA vehemently opposes the NHI Act, which was signed by the president in May, and had threatened legal action to halt its implementation. A crisis was averted in October when the matter was referred to cabinet committees for further discussion ahead of the first cabinet lekgotla of the year.
Ramaphosa presented the national dialogue as a continuation of the consultative tradition of the Congress movement but it was another reminder of the ANC’s changed stature and its understanding of the need to close the distance between itself and the rest of society.
The party has identified closing this distance as central to its survival, along with reorganising itself while improving the quality of membership — and of the leadership it is set to elect at the regional conferences it will hold in a number of provinces this year.
Ramaphosa said they had introduced a screening process to “rid the ANC of criminals” as part of the renewal process and that the party would be “tightening and enforcing the leadership election processes” at these conferences.
The election of new leaders would also have a bearing on who is selected to represent the ANC as its councillor candidates next year, Ramaphosa said.
The ANC’s most immediate task is dealing with dysfunction in what were once its strongest provinces — KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng — to prevent further losses when South Africa votes again.
It has repeatedly deferred the decision on the fate of the provincial executive committees in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal after losing its majority in both provinces in May.
While there is a strong lobby for the outright disbandment of both provincial committees, the national executive committee is likely to endorse a decision to “augment” their leadership, which will leave the provincial committees in place while control of the province shifts to a team appointed by Luthuli House.
This decision is now set to be taken at the next national executive committee meeting.
It will also try to ease dealings with its partners in the government of national unity (GNU), in particular the DA, ahead of local government election campaigning
