Of the many things coming out of the ANC’s fifth national general council (NGC), the most troubling was the party’s response tothe hoisting, by workers, of placardsoutside the Birchwood Hotel. It was a protest rich in meaning. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone that a party trying, or so we must believe, to come up with solutions for our country’s myriad challenges couldn’t care enough for its workers, the people helping it succeed.
As leaders drove past the workers in their shimmering German-made machines, going into a hotel where the NGC is being held, an event ANC secretary-generalFikile Mbalulatold the media the day before did not come “cheap”, many would have wondered where the ANC’s beautiful soul had disappeared to. If liberation movements had hearts, the ANC’s was bigger. It is the party of Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani and Walter Sisulu that forgave apartheid architects and enforcers; that told us accessing the truth was, in and of itself, worth reconciling with theverkrampte.
It would have taken people with big hearts to not institute Nuremberg-style trials. Those who gifted us the ANC cared enough to create a congress of the people to spearhead solutions to society’s ills. This week, the ANC’s leading lights in the persons of Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe, Cyril Ramaphosa, Gwede Mantashe and others, who frequently remind us of the priests, teachers and nurses who were moved by human suffering to form the ANC in 1912, drove into the Birchwood Hotel & OR Tambo Conference Centre without their hearts skipping a beat.
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As the ANC wrestled with the complexities of waning support, intensifying battles for leadership positions, stubborn patronage networks, leading in a geopolitical world where facts don’t matter, the ANC’s relationship with its own employees should have been on the agenda. After all, these are the people who will implement much of what the leaders agree on. As ANC leaders met, a perennial ill within the party spilled, not for the first time, into the public.
The question for many, including the ANC’s detractors, was: how is the ANC going to solve society’s challenges when it couldn’t move an inch to solve a simple internal salary issue? Put differently, how will the ANC help strangers (the so-called motive forces) when it couldn’t help those from whom the ANC gets something/labour in return? Is it any wonder service delivery is at its lowest ebb, regardless of it being the most talked about at ANC events?
Shortly after the dawn of democracy, the ANC government led by Mandela came up withBatho Pele, which means “People First” in Setswana/Sepedi, in 1997. Its purpose was to improve the quality of services to people regardless of colour and to inculcate a culture of caring and responsiveness in a government that previously demeaned, dehumanised and drew perverse pleasure in deepening inequality.
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