Johannesburg- The losses incurred by the ANC during this week’s local government elections are perhaps one of the clearest indications of how voters have lost patience with the party’s ongoing internal squabbles that have for a long time been waged at the expense of service delivery.
While the voters have undoubtedly emerged as the biggest winners, the ANC came out as the largest losers. It is something that calls for serious introspection if what is called Africa’s oldest liberation movement still stands any chance of regaining voter confidence.
South Africans have for a long time been witness to the ANC at war with itself. The fight has mainly been over access to state resources. It has been a war that has not in any manner been directed at poverty, joblessness, and inequality. A closer look at these nasty internal battles reveals the existence of two ANCs that are ideologically at odds with each other.
These are battles that became more pronounced after the party’s Nasrec elective national conference. There is absolutely no chance that these two protagonists will ever co-exist. That some within the ANC leadership ranks were surreptitiously and secretly campaigning for independent candidates against their own party candidates in this week’s election is surely a clear indication that divisions have become so deep that a split is already happening.
As this newspaper has previously suggested, these two factions need to go their separate ways if the renewal of the ANC is to happen. Otherwise, it would be good for the ANC itself to lose the elections completely if it must be saved from itself, as one of its veteran leaders Kgalema Motlanthe has previously remarked.
Motlanthe was correct in his analysis that those elements who are in the ANC for the largesse will quit it when it loses the election, and only then would the possibility arise for salvaging whatever is left of it.
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