Deployment: The ANC can't have its cake and eat it

Paul Trewhela responds to Malusi Gigaba's analysis of the state of local govt

THE SUBSTITUTIONISM OF THE ANC

Earlier this week, in 'The Professor and the Police Minister', I developed a grim argument that despotism is an old tradition in South Africa, and that the current administration appeared to be moving in that direction (see here)..

I neglected to add a rider to that proposition. The rider says: True, but South Africa is a very difficult country to govern despotically, without the consent of the governed.

Let the governors take a warning from the history of their predecessors.

Few countries in the world have such a rich tradition of resistance against unjust and arbitrary rule. In few countries is there such a deep and grounded assumption, with such a powerful lived experience among the present generations, that 'these truths we take to be self-evident': that government exists to serve the governed, and not the other way round.

It is not wise in South Africa for government to believe that it has a God-appointed, or History-appointed, right to rule. Unfortunately for government, the people have a very long experience of being instructed in the nonsense of that fable, which they learned the hard way not to believe, through many sacrifices. Their greatest heroes refused that argument, and stated instead: 'It's right to rebel.' At the age of 91, born in 1918, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela is living proof of that grand refusal. The fact that he stepped down voluntarily from the seat of power, after only one term in office, is also proof of it.

It is not wise for the governors in South Africa to exempt themselves from that model, provided so richly over so many years by a Mandela, a Biko, a Luthuli, a Sobukwe...the names go on and on.

Each and any despotic action by the government of South Africa will be held up for inspection in the mirror of that history, which is not dead: it is not even past (as the novelist William Faulkner liked to say about the past).

Few countries live so much in the present of such a history. If a people are instructed constantly in a historical tradition of defiance of unjust rule, as in South Africa, it would be unwise to assume that they will not continue to honour that teaching.

If the first article in the most honoured document of that tradition were to state that 'The people shall govern', and that 'All people are entitled to take part in the administration of the country', then it would be wise to expect that the people would in the course of time come to know if they were not, in fact, being permitted to govern themselves, or if some other agency had arrogated to itself the right to act as surrogate, or substitute, in their proper place.

No, ruling by fooling has only a limited chance of succeeding in a country with this kind of history. It can succeed for a while. But then, bit by bit, people catch on. About political dispossession, South Africans are a learned people. Their government should beware that kind of knowledge becoming widely established.

In this sense, the people are wiser than their government, and they live much longer - above all in their historical memory.

It is so easy to see who acts as Baas in this country.

This is the significance of the extraordinary statement by Malusi Gigaba, Deputy Minister of Housing and member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC, which appeared last week on the weekly online newsletter of the governing party, ANC Today 23 October (see here).

Gigaba's document is revelatory for two reasons. Firstly, he provides an astonishing insider's accountancy of cronyism and corruption by the governing party, and how it eviscerates local government across a huge area of the country. Secondly, despite all he shows of maladministration and corruption, he reveals an unshaken faith in the sacred right of his political party to continue to act as a substitute source of authority, in place of the voters.

Gigaba begins in his first sentence with an acknowledgement of a primary contemporary reality: "It is quite easy to hear such swiping statements as that - 'All Councillors are useless and corrupt'". The problem arises, he states, "when nothing is done about those that are corrupt, or arrogant, and/or lazy".

Some of the current service delivery protests, Gigaba continues, have been not so much about service delivery itself, but, rather, "service delivery issues have been raised to highlight a much deeper challenge in our municipalities which relates to the political leadership of the Councils." The recent Lekwa municipal protests had little to do with the issues of service delivery, he states. They were directed rather at "the arrogance of certain comrades deployed to positions of responsibility...." What the community is complaining about was basically that "their leadership had turned their backs on their mandate and had forgotten their leadership responsibility".

Councillors at the level of municipality, he goes on, sometimes "become big-headed and undermine and disrespect" ANC branches, so that "the only structure they interact with is their caucus".

In addition, there are "constant divisions between the ANC and its allies. There are many opportunists on the ground masquerading as SACP members, sowing divisions in the name of the SACP and even orchestrating violent riots against Councillors. In many instances, it is an open secret that these so-called SACP activists want to become Councillors themselves in 2011, and just use the SACP for that purpose. This is not helped by the ANC's own ample opportunists sowing divisions of their own between the ANC and SACP."

ANC branches, Gigaba continues, "regard themselves as representatives of the leadership in the community rather than as representatives of communities..." Branches feel that this "precludes the ANC from engaging in what are regarded as civic issues", thus "[refraining] from civic engagement about roads, electricity, water and housing, indeed about issues of municipal governance...".

In a situation in which the "ordinary masses on the ground had enormous grievances and discontent about local issues", in Lekwa the recent protests had in fact been "led by ANC members in good standing". ANC branches in Lekwa had previously "raised these issues to senior organisational structures, but with no positive response." The result is "Social distance - a leadership disconnect[ed] with communities": a "yawning political, organisational and leadership hiatus on the ground", in which for years it had been "evident that the masses felt estranged and disengaged from the ANC and regarded its leadership as aloof."

This was "Deployment gone berserk". In Lekwa, Dipaleseng and other areas, the political leaders of the municipalities "disrespect the masses and have tended to regard themselves...as untouchable. What often compounds this is the fact that these comrades often have connections with senior leaders in the regions and provinces and belong to powerful factions that protect them and shield them from any criticism."

Mayors, Speakers and Chief Whips are often "clearly incompetent to occupy these positions. Yet they have been deployed to hold them...to serve factional ends. When they buckle and fail to perform, and when they become arrogant and big-headed, it is because they know they will be shielded by those that had deployed them".

There, without even having to read between the lines, and from the hand of the Deputy Housing Minister (who is also a former President of the ANC Youth League, and therefore knows the score backwards), is the rarest glimpse of truth from within the ruling apparatus. Gigaba describes a pervasive system in which councillors (though not all) are "corrupt, or arrogant, and/or lazy", who "turn their backs" on the people they are supposed to serve, who are "big-headed" and interact only with their caucus, among whom there are "ample opportunists" and in which there are "constant divisions" of a purely factional, self-serving nature.

What an indictment, and what a betrayal of the ANC's promise that 'The people shall govern'! It is an exposition of the systemic nature of South Africa's failure of governance.

Gigaba goes even further. In a dazzling illumination of the real nature of modern South Africa which deserves to be re-enacted in municipalities across the country as a form of political theatre, for the enlightenment and entertainment of the people, he displays the systemic machinery of corruption in government.

The "greatest injustice", he states, is committed "when patently incompetent and unqualified people are deployed into the administration as Municipal Managers, Chief Financial Officers, and Heads of certain services such as local economic development, technical services and others."

Then comes the clincher.

"It is generally known that Section 57 Employees are political deployees. The reasons for this are never explained except that this is so. This is so helplessly abused and perverted that it could seem that what is at fault here is the very notion of deployment. Anyone who is connected with the powerful blocs can end up occupying any of these positions.

"Often, RECs deploy people to these positions despite the fact that they have no deployment committees and have no power to deploy. And when they do so, they often deploy 'javelin throwers' who will ensure that all contracts are thrown in the right direction and then they run hard to receive the javelin on the other hand and share the spoils with those who 'deployed' them."

"Javelin throwers"! What a wonderful phrase! What is at fault here, Gigaba affirms, "is the very notion of deployment". He concludes by stating that "atrocities are committed in the name of deployment and municipalities undermined and decapitated!"

He could not be more damning.

Yet, contrary to Malusi Gigaba, "deployment" is the heart and soul of ANC government, its principle of life, its fundamental principle of rule. It is built into the very fabric of government by the Electoral Law enshrined in the Constitution of 1994, by which a party list system of unmediated proportional representation places a cabal of party managers in Luthuli House supreme over Parliament, the provinces, the municipalities, the civil service - and even the Presidency itself - with as little difference as if it were the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The "javellin throwers" are the living truth of South African despotism, built into the Constitution by the ANC in its Electoral Law under the benign aegis of Nelson Mandela, in a last-minute secret compact with the outgoing party of despotism, the National Party of FW de Klerk (and before him, of PW Botha, BJ Vorster, etc etc), in the early months of 1994.

It is the continuation of apartheid tyranny by other means, to the advantage of the ANC, as successor to the apartheid state.

Even a cursory reading of Gigaba's historic document makes it clear, however, that he sees no remedy to this systemic miscarriage of democracy in South Africa, apart from an appeal to the nobler sentiments of the party for whom this system was constructed as sole beneficiary. Gigaba is a prisoner too of the ANC's folie de grandeur, or arrogance (or foolishness) of power.

It is the besetting sin of substitutionism. This term, current within British leftwing groups in previous decades, was invented to describe those deluded groups or sects that believed that they could substitute their own energies (or arrogance) for the self-activity of the working class.

It applies perfectly to the arrogant delusion of the ANC, of whatever faction (and no less to the direct inheritor of the Stalinist tradition of the Soviet Union, the SACP, burrowed away within the ANC), that it is the God-created fount of the political right to rule in South Africa, and not the voters organised in constituencies, with the power to pull down any incumbent.

In this sense, the Constitution of 1994 through its Electoral Law established a tyranny dressed up as democracy, and this system urgently needs revision.

Discussion of this subject should be brought to every municipality in the country.