The ANC’s mid-term report presented this week by party secretary-general Fikile Mbalula is remarkable work. For once, the language is not shrouded in the usual fog of revolutionary poetry and bureaucratic euphemism. It speaks plainly of rot, of trust evaporating like water in a drought, of a machine grinding itself to dust. It is the ANC holding up a mirror, and for a fleeting moment, refusing to blink.
There is a tragic clarity here that commands respect.
The diagnosis is brutally coherent: a party hollowed out from within, its structures pulsating not with political debate but with the cold calculus of
access and accumulation, while outside its gates, a generation weighs its glorious past against a bleak present and finds the legacy wanting.
One can almost sense the collective exhale from Luthuli House: There. We have named the demons. The prescription follows, laid out with the clean precision of a technical manual—strict discipline, consequence management, professional governance, a return to service.
It is a logical plan. And therein lies the profound, almost Shakespearean, dilemma. For the plan requires a surgeon, but the patient is the surgery itself.
Consider the core instruction: to purge factionalism and gatekeeping. This demands a central authority of unquestioned will and power.
But in today’s ANC, authority is not wielded from a throne; it is negotiated in a perpetual backroom bazaar.
Any leader, including the president, is less a commander and more a holder of fragile coalitional shares.
To ask this networked system to dismantle its own networks is like asking a river to cut its own course while insisting it flow uphill.
The very act of renewal would trigger a war of survival for those whose political existence depends on the sickness.
The second pillar—regaining public trust through delivery—runs into the same concrete wall of reality. The plan calls for a state that delivers, professionally and efficiently.
But the tool for building that state remains the ANC’s own deployment committee, the same mechanism that for years has placed loyalty over competence, turning municipalities into the ATMs of factions. You cannot use the master key of patronage to unlock the door to meritocracy.
Perhaps the most telling misstep is the suggested return to history as a balm.
The drafters see a people estranged from a proud past. But walk through the streets of Soweto or the campuses of Cape Town, and you hear a different truth.
The past is not forgotten; it is audited.
And for millions, particularly the young, the balance sheet shows a devastating deficit. The moral capital of liberation has been spent.
Offering history lessons cannot answer the question of why the lights are off today. The past is a foundation, not a roof, and the people are getting wet.
So we are left with a strange and sobering spectacle: a correct diagnosis, a rational plan, and a patient whose every instinct is to reject the cure.
The ANC is no longer a single organism seeking health. It is an ecosystem of interests—some ideological, many purely material—where the reformist and the rent-seeker share the same shell. The document asks for unity and discipline from a body in a state of quiet civil war.
This is not a failure of analysis, but a collision of logic with political DNA.
The party can see the promised land from a distance, but its feet are locked in the concrete of its own making.
The real question is no longer about the plan’s design, but about the impossible, Herculean task of convincing the whole organism to take a single, coherent step back from the precipice.
The tragedy, and the fascination, lies in watching a giant try to perform a delicate surgery on itself with its own trembling hands. The blueprint is sound. The builder, however, may no longer exist.
