The perception that the high-profile ANC cadres deployed in state power are living a lavish lifestyle while ordinary members are trapped in the shackles of poverty and joblessness dealt a heavy blow for the party.
The admission was made on Tuesday evening during the memorial lecture of the late Oliver Tambo held in Durban. It was delivered by the ANC’s KwaZulu-Natal chairman, Siboniso Duma.
“When people see our lives as leaders changing and not theirs, they begin relegating themselves. They then reject us. We must be seen by the people and the branches that we have changed our behaviour. And we must do things better,” Duma implored his comrades.
Skilled tactician, one of the greatest thinkers
Tambo, who followed in the footsteps of Nobel laureate winner chief Albert Luthuli as party president, is credited for keeping the ANC together while in exile. He is also touted as a skilled tactician and one of the greatest thinkers who hatched the party’s strategy and tactics.
Among the ANC circles, he was called “Mdala”, an IsiNguni word meaning one who has seen it all, an elder. Tambo became ANC President in 1960.The lecture was attended by, among others, respected academics such as economist Professor Bantubonke Dumisa. Professor Musa Xulu, respected activist and revolutionary intellectual Dr Lwazi Lushaba were also in attendance.
ANC alliance partners, mayors, councillors, branch members were in the audience. So were members of the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC). The latter is the party’s highest decision-making body.
Lushaba bemoaned the failure of academia to capture Tambo’s astuteness.
“Scholarship has not done a good service on Tambo. Tambo’s importance is not to the ANC, but also to the country. At present, only one respected text has been written about Tambo.
“It is a biography written by Luli Callinicos,” said Lushaba.
Unwavering commitment to the revolution
He also explained that Tambo represented the generation of African leaders who went to missionary schools and acquired Western education.
Despite this, Tambo was resolute. He never allowed such an education to brainwash him into divorcing his commitment to the revolution.
“He imbibed Christianity and Western education. All of these did not kill a revolutionary in him,” he said.
Tambo’s lecture comes when the once governing party faces an electoral decline never seen since the dawn of democracy. In KwaZulu-Natal, one of the party’s biggest provinces in terms of branches, the ANC crashed to 17% electoral support. This was during the recent May general elections.
This represents a plunge of over 35%. In 2019, the party recorded 54%, making it the majority party. In the provincial legislature, the ANC shed over 30 seats. Its splinter party uMkhonto weSizwe (MKP), led by former president Jacob Zuma, engineered their downfall. The MK Party received 45% of the provincial vote.
