The ANC’s envisaged government of national unity is not new. The same was done post the 1994 national elections, where political parties in opposing ends of the spectrum came together in a marriage of convenience.
This unlikely union saw the ANC, National Party and the IFP forming a government with FW de Klerk installed as deputy president and Mangosuthu Buthelezi as minister of home affairs.
In such a government, ideological posture and identity takes a back seat and common interests take precedence.
But the government of national unity this time around will happen under starkly different circumstances to those of 1994 when there were fears that leaving others out would have led to endless chaos. This because the right-wingers at the time had disrupted the Codesa negotiations leading up to the elections, while the IFP had stoked fires of civil war in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. This had led to the ANC having had to go to bed with the right-wing National Party, which was still loyal to its apartheid racist policies.
Also, the narrow Zulu nationalist in the IFP, who entered those elections kicking and screaming in the last minute after threatening violence, had to be accommodated.
However, De Klerk quit that marriage of convenience mid-term, which proves how bad it is for diametrically opposed political formations to go into bed in an attempt to please each other. This time around, the ANC goes into a GNU having lost power meaning it is weaker than in 1994 when it had won outright majority but had to make political considerations.
The ANC now has to definitively deal with elephant in the room: Has the oldest liberation movement in Africa reached an ideological cul-de-sac?
That is the question ANC members and leadership have to ponder after its worst electoral performance since 1994.
The ANC has always distinguished itself with its confusing “broad church movement” stance in the terrain of political ideologies. And for many years it has survived on this despite sharpening ideological contradictions from within.
These elections have sharpened those contradictions like never before as the organisation finds itself in a position to pick a side. And whichever side it picks, there will be dire consequences.
The ideological predicament is not new and every time the ANC has had to distinguish itself and take an unambiguous posture, it chooses to pontificate on this question and deal with those who are not on the side of whichever is the dominant faction at any given time.
A case in point would be the ANC of Thabo Mbeki, a staunch opponent of unionists and communists who at the height of his power were branded “ultra-lefts”. The likes of now ANC national chairperson Gwede Mantashe were victims of that era when they were blocked from ascending into the higher echelons of ANC leadership to whip them into line.
They would form an alliance with Jacob Zuma to topple Mbeki at the ANC conference in Polokwane in 2007.
But the same leftists would disintegrate from within thereafter, thanks to factional purging during the Jacob Zuma years and they would unite under the umbrella of the centrists/moderates at the Nasrec 2017 national conference and again at Nasrec in 2022.
The ANC continued pretending to be the melting pot of contradictory political ideologies and schools of thoughts.
It is water and oil comrades, it will never work.
This is best demonstrated by the countless socialist resolutions the ANC takes at its national conferences that never get implemented because of internal ideological wars.
Among those resolutions is the nationalization of the SA Reserve Bank, the establishment of a state pharmaceutical company and expropriation of land without compensation, among others. Failure to move on these policies contributed immensely on the electoral fortunes plummeting.
As such, the liberals from outside in the form of the DA have realized that the ANC can be influenced because of its weak ideological grounding. That is why the GNU, if the DA ends up being part of it, which is most likely, the liberalization of the ANC will take full effect. In that government, neo-liberal policies will be the order of the day.
Already, in the sixth administration, many DA political moves were aided by the ideologically confused ANC.
The fall of former public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane and ex-Western Cape judge president John Hlophe, both of which motions were sponsored by the DA and supported by the ANC, was the litmus test of how far the ANC had gone in its ideological degeneracy. The DA is highly emboldened.
What is now clear is that whichever direction the ANC goes into this might be the end of the ANC as we know it.
The broad church approach was always unsustainable from inception. It might have reached its sell-by date this time around.
