The Road That Starts in Midrand Ends in Mangaung: The 2012 ANC Policy Conference

The power brokers of the African National Congress are holding their 2012 National Policy Conference in Midrand this week. This could prove to be a vital few days in the life of the Zuma administration as this week’s gathering is fraught with text and subtexts and sub-subtexts.

Putatively the goal of the week is simply to establish both continuities and new directions in ANC policy moving forward. Zuma’s party is likely to continue to dominate South African politics for the foreseeable future, and so party policy is in most meaningful ways national policy, full stop.

And yet policy-qua-policy really is not the biggest point of contention in South African politics. Sure, there are issues to be hammered out — where does the ANC stand on nationalization of the mines? If the willing-buyer, willing-seller approach to land reform is out (and it appears to be) and Zim-style farm invasions are out (as we hope they are), and the party remains committed to land reform and redistribution, how will such reform take place? How is the party adjusting to the backlash from reforms clearly aimed at the media in the last year?

There are also big picture items that the ANC is tackling at Gallagher Estates, namely something called the “Second Transition.” Essentially, the premise behind the Second Transition is that South Africa is entering a new phase in its post-Apartheid life and that the first phase of transformation is complete with a new vision needed going forward. While it is hard to blame the ANC for trying to develop a larger framework for the future, it seems to me that the concept of a first or second transition is largely meaningless. Was there really a secret eighteen-year plan that has finally, and without anyone noticing, come to fruition? Of course not. Transition, which is to say the ongoing process of transformation, is really a process more than a destination. The “Second Transition” is largely a rhetorical political template and not a blueprint for coherent policy planning, even as it serves to reveal the intersecting fault lines of class and especially race that still divide and haunt South Africa.

But beyond policy formulation and the big picture items that are the luxury of a party firmly ensconced in power, much more is at play in Midrand. And to understand what is at play it is vital to understand that South African politics are about far more than ideology and policy. Indeed, relatively little about politics in South Africa is explicitly about debates over policy and ideology. The defining differences between the ANC and its chief opposition, the Democratic Alliance, are certainly not ideological. Within the ANC alliance is a stew ranging from far left to center (and on some issues even right) views that overlap with many of the left, center, and on some issues right views of those within the DA. The biggest difference between the DA and ANC, beyond some regional political variations, tie to questions over delivery of services and concerns over corruption and inefficiency in government, to how government works as much as what it does when it is working.

As a result of these realities, and of the fact that some of the most crucial (and very real) arguments in South African civic life take place within the ANC, South African politics so often break down on the lines of personality. For a party that so cherishes party unity, loyalty, and discipline, the members of the ANC oftentimes do not seem to like one another very much. Make no mistake about it — the ANC may be dominant relative to other parties in South Africa, but intense political differences are still a characteristic of the country’s politics. Those differences just tend to manifest first and foremost within the ANC.

Think back to the 2007 Polokwane conference that saw Thabo Mbeki supplanted by Jacob Zuma as the head of the ANC, a moment that led nearly inevitably to Mbeki’s resignation a few months earlier and Zuma’s ascension to the nation’s presidency. Not two South Africans in ten could have elucidated three policy differences between Zuma and Mbeki in December 2007. And not two South Africans in ten in 2012 can elucidate three policy differences between Zuma and, say, Kgalema Motlanthe, the caretaker president after Mbeki resigned who has proven more resilient and Machiavellian than I ever thought he would and who has positioned himself to take advantage if Jacob Zuma succumbs to some of the same forces in Mangaung this December that took down Mbeki five years ago. And in perhaps the ultimate irony, in some circles Mbeki’s reputation even seems to have been rehabilitated, with some going so far as to fantasize that Mbeki will somehow return to power, a fever dream that nonetheless says a great deal about the importance of personalities and shifting loyalties in contemporary South African life.

So this week’s National Policy Conference is less about policy than it is about the ANC positioning itself rhetorically and strategically. But it is also very much about individual members of the ANC and the alliances they have forged positioning themselves within party and thus national politics. Thus far Jacob Zuma appears to be stepping up to the crease and using all of his populist wiles to remind his comrades of why he can be so formidable. But do not think for one moment that the anti-Zuma forces are not themselves vying for position and waiting to strike.