The Policy Conference - let us arise and shine!
On Wednesday 27 June the ANC will begin its four-day Policy Conference. This important conference will assess all our major policy positions and make recommendations which will be finalised at our National Conference in December. The Policy Conference represents the culmination of extensive discussions in our branches and other structures of our movement, based on policy discussion documents prepared by our leadership.
Itself a gathering made up of delegates from all our branches and other organs of our movement, the Policy Conference provides the democratic space for our membership as a whole to help determine the vision and tasks of our movement. It therefore helps to reaffirm and entrench the democratic nature of the ANC, which in itself further contributes to the deepening of the critically important culture of democracy in our country.
Assuming that our movement will be re-elected to continue governing our country during the 2009 General Elections, it is clear that the recommendations that will be made by our Policy Conference will have a significant impact on the evolution of our country in the period up to 2012, the Centenary of the ANC.
Forward to 2012
In its 95th Anniversary Statement on January 8th this year, our National Executive Committee indicated the importance our movement attaches to the work we have to do in the years leading to 2012, in the following words:
"This year, 2007, we enter into the last five years at whose conclusion we will celebrate the Centenary of the birth of the African National Congress, an occasion whose significance will surely resonate across our land. We, who are today's custodians of the movement whose life will soon have spanned ten decades, have a deep and profound responsibility to ensure that the organisation that turns 100 years old on January 8th 2012 truly lives up to the noble ideals on which it was founded and continues to respond to the high expectations of the South African masses, while remaining loyal to its internationalist obligations to the peoples of Africa and the rest of the world.
"This means that as we gather to celebrate our 95th anniversary, we must identify those tasks that we must undertake, to realise our centennial vision. In this regard, we would like to emphasise right from the very beginning of this Annual Statement that as we identify these specific tasks, we must be informed by the two strategic considerations that:
- to discharge its responsibility as the leader of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), our movement must ensure that it remains united around its Strategy and Tactics, its culture and conventions, and the Programmes agreed by our constitutional structures and further elaborated by our government; and,
- in addition to our continuing task to defend our revolutionary gains, our central task during this phase of the National Democratic Revolution is to liberate our people from the scourge of poverty in all its manifestations, and eliminate all its offshoots."
The Policy Conference will have to ensure, as I am certain it will, that it approaches its work with all due seriousness and elaborate the policy proposals that will help us to achieve the outcomes indicated by our NEC as we celebrated the 95th Anniversary of our movement earlier this year. In this regard, it must draw inspiration from a long history of policy formulation that has been an integral part of the work and functioning of our movement from its very foundation.
From 1892 to 2002
In 1892, twenty years before the ANC was formed, our first President, Rev John Langalibalele Dube wrote: "Oh! how I long for that day, when the darkness and gloom shall have passed away, because the 'Sun of Righteousness has risen with healing in His hand'. This shall be the dawning of a brighter day for the people of Africa...Then shall Africa take her place as a nation among the nations: then shall her sons and daughters sing aloud: 'Let us arise and shine, for our light has come. The glory of the Lord has risen upon us'. May the day speedily come when 'Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God'."
In 2002, in a different century and a different millennium, 110 years after John Dube had made his extraordinary prediction of what was to come, and laid the basis for our movement's pan-Africanist outlook, the Preface to the document, Strategy and Tactics, adopted by the 51st National Conference of John Dube's ANC said:
"In the period since the (1997) 50th National Conference, the balance of forces has shifted in favour of the movement for fundamental change. This includes the ANC victory in the 1999 elections with an increased majority. Further, while opponents of change may still occupy strategic positions in a number of centres of power, they have failed to muster any significant force against the revolution.
"It is our task, in the coming period, further to shift this balance in the interest of faster transformation. In the words of the Strategy and Tactics document, 'We call on all South Africans to join us in this march to a better future. We are keenly aware that it will take time to realise the strategic objective of a united, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa. But the foundation has been laid, and the building has begun.'"
One of the unbroken red threads that link 1892 to 2002 is a continuous process of policy formation which has enabled our movement to evolve through many historical periods. Throughout these periods it has maintained its position as the repository of the hopes of the masses of our people, their leader in the difficult struggle they had to wage to transform into reality the dream expressed by John Langalibalele Dube when he said - then shall Africa take her place as a nation among the nations!
The ANC is formed
The policy we needed to translate John Dube's dream into a practical programme of action was enunciated by that other great patriot and founder of our movement, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, when he addressed the founding conference of our movement in Bloemfontein/Mangaung on January 8th 1912. On that historic occasion, securing the agreement of the conference, he said:
"Chiefs of royal blood and gentlemen of our race, we have gathered here to consider and discuss a scheme which my colleagues and I have decided to place before you. We have discovered that in the land of their birth, Africans are treated as hewers of wood and drawers of water. The white people of this country have formed what is known as the Union of South Africa - a union in which we have no voice in the making of laws and no part in their administration. We have called you, therefore, to this conference, so that we can together devise ways and means of forming our national union for the purpose of creating national unity and defending our rights and privileges."
Thus was the policy decided that the ANC, as a national union ('the parliament') of the African people, would be formed to:
- create national unity among the African people; and,
- fight for the rights and privileges of the oppressed indigenous majority.
Already in 1911, as he and his fellow patriots prepared for the formal launch of the ANC, Pixley Seme had written: "The South African Native Congress is the voice in the wilderness bidding all the dark races of this sub-continent to come together once or twice a year in order to review the past and reject therein all those things which have retarded our progress, the things which poison the springs of our national life and virtue; to label and distinguish the sins of civilisation, and as members of one house-hold to talk and think loudly on our home problems and the solution of them...
"The demon of racialism, the aberrations of the Xosa-Fingo feud, the animosity that exists between the Zulus and the Tongaas, between the Basutos and every other Native must be buried and forgotten; it has shed among us sufficient blood! We are one people. These divisions, these jealousies, are the cause of all our woes and of all our backwardness and ignorance to-day."
ANC the liberator
These policy positions have informed the activities of our movement and the masses of our people for over nine decades already. Our movement reaffirmed them in the Constitution we adopted at our National Conference in 1991, 80 years Pixley Seme described the ANC as "a voice in the wilderness bidding all the dark races of this sub-continent to come together", saying:
"The ANC was founded in 1912 to defend and advance the rights of the African people after the violent destruction of their independence and the creation of the white supremacist Union of South Africa...In the course of fulfilling this historic aim, the ANC has emerged to lead the struggle of all democratic and patriotic forces to destroy the apartheid state and replace it with the united, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa in which the people as a whole shall govern and all shall enjoy equal rights...Through the struggles and sacrifices of its members over the generations, the ANC has come to be recognised as the central organiser and inspirer of a vast popular upsurge against apartheid, involving a great array of social, cultural, religious, trade union, professional and political organisations."
Speaking at the 1919 National Conference of the ANC, our then President, SM Makgatho, said: "We ask for no special favours from the Government. This is the land of our fathers, and, in it, we wish to be treated at least as well as the foreigners (white South Africans) and with the same consideration extended to foreigners..."
Consistent with this view, the 1958 Constitution of the ANC, and true to what Pixley Seme explained in 1912, said one of the objectives of the ANC was "to unite the African people in a powerful and effective instrument to secure their own complete liberation from all forms of discrimination and national oppression".
The strategic aim
This found expression in the document on ANC Strategy and Tactics adopted by the important 1969 ANC Morogoro Conference, which said: "The main content of the present stage of the South African revolution is the national liberation of the largest and most oppressed group - the African people. This strategic aim must govern every aspect of the conduct of our struggle whether it be the formulation of policy or the creation of structures. Amongst other things, it demands in the first place the maximum mobilisation of the African people as a dispossessed and racially oppressed nation. This is the mainspring and it must not be weakened. It involves a stimulation and deepening of national confidence, national pride and national assertiveness."
This policy position has been restated in all other ANC Strategy and Tactics since then and was stated in the 1994 document, for instance, as follows: "The main contradiction of this phase is the yawning political, economic and social disparities based on race and ethnicity which were created and consolidated by apartheid rule over the years. It is for this reason that the main content of this phase continues to be the all-round political, economic and social emancipation of the black majority in general and the African people in particular."
Over the decades, to date, these policy positions have informed the activities of our movement and the masses of our people, confirming the critical importance of the policy formulation process which our Policy Conference will engage when it convened from 27 June.
As John Dube had indicated when he said, 'Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God', our liberation movement has always been conscious of the historic fact that it is part of the broader movement for the liberation of Africa. Pixley Seme also spoke clearly of the fact that we are also an integral part of the world community of nations.
Already in 1906 he had said: "The regeneration of Africa means that a new and unique civilisation is soon to be added to the world. The African is not a proletarian in the world of science and art. He has precious creations of his own, of ivory, of copper and of gold, fine, plated willow-ware and weapons of superior workmanship...The most essential departure of this new civilisation is that it shall be thoroughly spiritual and humanistic - indeed a regeneration moral and eternal!"
South Africa and the world
It was therefore no accident that the adoption of the Atlantic Charter in 1941, the forerunner of the UN Charter, by US President Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Churchill during the Second World War led to the adoption of a major policy document by the ANC. This was "The Africans' Claims" drafted by an eminent group of South African patriots, and adopted by the ANC at its National Conference in 1943.
The Atlantic Charter said the victorious Allies would "respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and...see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them." In response to this, which represented a major step forward in the policies of the ANC, "The Africans' Claims" said:
"We believe that the acid test of this third article of the Charter is its application to the African continent. In certain parts of Africa it should be possible to accord Africans sovereign rights and to establish administrations of their own choosing. But in other parts of Africa where there are the peculiar circumstances of a political entrenched European minority ruling a majority European population the demands of the Africans for full citizenship rights and direct participation in all the councils of the state should be recognised. This is most urgent in the Union of South Africa."
From this policy position decided in 1943 derived the fundamental perspective of our movement expressed in the 1955 Freedom Charter that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it; and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people", which then found its place in our 1996, and current, National Constitution.
"The Africans' Claims" also drew attention to another demand in the Atlantic Charter. This particular article said the Allies would "endeavour, with due regard for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment of all states, great and small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity."
"The Africans' Claims" said: "There is envisaged by this article an Open Door Policy in regard to trade and the distribution of the world's resources. Africa has figured prominently in the discussions on the better distribution of the world resources and of free international trade because of her rich raw materials most of which have not as yet been fully tapped. The exploitation that is suggested by the above article, judging by past experiences and present economic evils, raises in our minds considerable misgivings as likely to bring about a continuation of the exploitation of African resources to the detriment of her indigenous inhabitants and the enrichment of foreigners...
"We are, however, in agreement with the necessity for the technical and economic utilisation of a country's resources wit due regard for the human welfare and the economic improvement of the indigenous inhabitants. The primary obligation of any government is to promote the economic advancement of the peoples under its charge and any obligation, agreement, contract of treaty in conflict with this primary obligation should not be countenanced."
This 1943 policy position again led directly to the positions our movement enunciated in the Freedom Charter which, for instance said: "The People Shall Share in the Country's Wealth! The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people; the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole."
But because the policies we adopt have always informed what we do, our movement had to assess these important policy positions within the context of our then impending access to power, bearing in mind the international situation created by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other European socialist countries and the end of the Cold War.
The world balance of forces
With regard to this latter issue, and recognising its strategic importance, the "Guidelines on Strategy and Tactics of the African National Congress", published in February 1991, said: "The collapse of a number of governments in Eastern Europe, and the crisis facing the socialist system has somewhat weakened the camp of forces opposed to apartheid. The fact that these countries have been among the closest allies of the ANC and the struggling people of South Africa on its own warrants that the national democratic movement should draw relevant lessons from these experiences."
Explaining the policy implications of this development, the document on ANC Strategy and Tactics adopted at the 1997 50th National Conference said:
"The liberation of South Africa was both a local expression of a changing world and part of the catalyst to renewed efforts aimed at attaining international consensus on the most urgent questions facing humanity. Our transition was an element of a dynamic political process of a world redefining itself with the end of the Cold War. To the extent that the new global situation has not resolved the contradictions within and among nations between poverty and opulence; to the extent that ethnic, religious and other tensions continue to ravage parts of the globe; to the extent that some of these contradictions find bold expression in our own society; to this extent and more, the transformation taking place in our country is closely intertwined with the search for a new world order.
"The ANC seeks to take an active part in shaping this order, both in the context of its relations with other parties and movements, and as the leading organisation in government. In both these areas of operation, it will pursue the same objectives. Yet we do recognise that, in their detail, party-to-party aims will not always translate into inter-state relations. This is not to imply that inter-state relations are devoid of principle. Rather, it is to underline that, in government, the implementation of our principles will be tempered by the realities of world diplomacy and conventions governing inter-state relations."
Already in 1994, before the historic elections of that year, taking into account everything we have said, but also maintaining policy continuity with the objectives stated in the Freedom Charter, in our Alliance and mass democratic movement "Reconstruction and Development Programme" (RDP) we said: "in 1994 we are about to assume the responsibilities of government and must go beyond the (Freedom) Charter to an actual programme of government. This RDP document is a vital step in that process."
Some economic policies
In this regard, with regard to economic policy, the RDP said: "The fundamental principles of our economic policy are democracy, participation and development. We are convinced that neither a commandist central planning system nor an unfettered free market system can provide adequate solutions to the problems confronting us. Reconstruction and development will be achieved through the leading and enabling role of the state, a thriving private sector, and active involvement by all sectors of civil society which in combination will lead to sustainable growth...
"In restructuring the public sector to carry out national goals, the balance of evidence will guide the decision for or against various economic policy measures. The democratic government must therefore consider:
- increasing the public sector in strategic areas through, for example, nationalisation, purchasing a shareholding in companies, establishing new public corporations or joint ventures with the private sector; and,
- reducing the public sector in certain areas in ways that enhance efficiency, advance affirmative action and empower the historically disadvantaged, while ensuring the protection of both consumers and the rights and employment of workers."
This policy perspective has informed the actions of all the ANC governments elected by the masses of our people since 1994. The governments we have formed since the victory of the democratic revolution, mandated by the people, have faithfully respected the long-standing tradition of our movement, always to respect its democratically-evolved policy positions. We say this with no fear of contradiction, and can prove it in great detail.
As was the case when John Langalibalele Dube foresaw the liberation of Africa 115 years ago, we have always known that even in the world of ideas, which, in one sense, is the human sphere of dreams, we should be ready to engage in demanding battles merely to win both the right to dream and to assert the authenticity of our dreams.
The battle of ideas
Pixley ka Isaka Seme expressed this reality as long ago as 101 years ago, in 1906, when he cried out: "Oh, for that historian who, with the open pen of truth, will bring to Africa's claim the strength of written proof. He will tell of a race whose onward tide was often swelled with tears, but in whose heart bondage has not quenched the fire of former years. He will write that in these later days when Earth's noble ones are named, she has a roll of honour too, of whom she is not ashamed. The giant is awakening! From the four corners of the earth Africa's sons, who have been proved through fire and sword, are marching to the future's golden door bearing the records of deeds of valour done."
In the 2002 Preface to the Strategy and Tactics of the ANC, entitled "People's Power in Action", to which we have referred, our movement alerted us to the ideological struggle we would have to wage to ensure the survival of our ideas, the interlinked policies that have served as the parent of everything we have done for 95 years.
These policies and the resultant programmes of action have placed us at the head of the historic process in our country of the construction of a non-racial, non-sexist, and prosperous democracy, the central organiser and inspirer of a vast popular upsurge against all forms of oppression which has led the masses of our people to advance the National Democratic Revolution to the important stage it has now achieved.
The Preface said: "In (the) ideological struggle, the ANC needs clearly to define itself in relation to modern expressions of class and sectoral interests. The principal ideological currents, in this era of globalisation, in terms of which we need to contrast our own positions, are neo-liberalism and modern ultra-leftism.
"On the one extreme is the ideology of rampant capitalism, a system in which, as the Strategy and Tactics explains, formal democracy should be underpinned; by market forces to which all should kneel in the prayer: 'everyone for himself and the Devil takes the hindmost!' This is at the core of the ideology of neo-liberalism and other such worldviews, which dare the democratic state to emasculate itself.
"On the other extreme are ultra-left practices, assumptions and ideologies. A common feature of ultra-leftist tendencies is subjectivism; a confusion of what is 'desirable' with what is actually and immediately possible. This results in all manner of voluntaristic adventures, including the advocacy of impossible and dangerous great leaps forward, which reflects a systematic inability to understand the dynamic complexity of objective factors...
"The ANC rejects both approaches. In our situation, positions that either advance the dictates of rapacious global social relations, or propagate the irrelevance of the national question and an adventuristic struggle against these global relations, are a sure recipe for the defeat of the National Democratic Revolution...The ANC, as the leader of the national democratic struggle, is a disciplined force of the left, organised to conduct consistent struggle in pursuit of the interests of the poor."
As it sits from 27 June, for four days, the ANC Policy Conference will carry with it and honour a long-established tradition of loyalty to principle, of continuity in the evolution of our policy positions, of unwavering strategic focus and considered tactical flexibility to respond to changing circumstances, of understanding that the policies it recommends to the National Conference are worth nothing if they do not advance the objective of our movement, to "ensure that the ANC that turns 100 years old on January 8th 2012 truly lives up to the noble ideals on which it was founded".
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