The surest discussion of every ANC gathering is the ANC’s renewal – a seemingly superfluous term whose true meaning only exists in the heads of ANC elite, or more appropriately, in their many verbose documents.
The ANC elite are out in full force this month, from Fikile Mbalula, David Makhura to Nomvula Mokonyane trying to convince us all that the ANC’s vaunted renewal is just around the corner, and its loss at the 2024 national and provincial polls was the catalyst the party always needed.
I do not believe this.
Let’s say I were to play along and such a scenario were possible, how are you going to revive the party at this eleventh hour, when you failed to do during the time of plenty? Very odd for the ANC to have waited for such a precarious moment in its existence to “renew” itself.
Also, renewal cannot be a never-ending and open-ended process. It has to have a start date and an end date.
You cannot be renewing yourself since the Morogoro Conference in 1960s to today. The process has to come to its inevitable end and the now “renewed” formation should finally take shape and deliver – if indeed renewal was what was hindering delivery in the first place.
Anyway, more than renewal, the ANC should start being technocrats, with clear KPIs (not as found in the rhetoric of ANC conference resolutions, and definitely not laden with Marxist Leninist nonsense), but dispassionate, focused, efficient and corruption-free service delivery in its dwindling government role.
This the only way the ANC could see it cross the 51% barrier again, anything else, will be the same fruitless internal discussion on ANC renewal that was always dead on arrival.
