Nelspruit, 15 August 2008
This Provincial Conference is convened at a time when we are celebrating Women's Month and also shortly after celebrating National Women's Day on August 9. Every year during the August month we pay tribute to the various generations of women who have contributed to the transformation of our country in many ways. We also take this August month as an occasion to highlight our commitment to the struggle for gender equality.
Over the years, the ANC has come a long way from being a club of few elite African men, by transforming itself into a mass democratic revolutionary movement that provides political home to all of our people irrespective of race, gender or class.
By singing "Nkosi Sikelela i-Africa" during the founding conference of the ANC, our forebears were declaring continental solidarity that ran contrary to the recent shameful xenophobic attacks that have consequently embarrassed us as a nation. Historically, the ANC assumed a national character that united our people in their diversities against oppression. The ANC also assumed an internationalist character that enabled solidarity in the African continent and around the world.
It was in this province in 1986 that such international solidarity between our people and the people of our neighbouring countries was dealt a huge blow by the counter-revolutionary forces that forced the crash of the plane carrying Comrade Samora Machel, the then President of Mozambique and Leader of FRELIMO, who was subsequently killed as a result of that crash. As we meet here today, our country is hosting a SADC Conference that will see South Africa assuming chairpersonship of this regional structure. Indeed a lot has changed since that fateful day when President Samora Machel was killed, when the region was engulfed in a protracted struggle against apartheid. Despite some challenges that we continue to grapple with, a lot has been done to further the aims of regional solidarity through regional integration processes.
Again as we gather in this Provincial Conference, we must pay tribute to the struggles of our people as led by Shadrack "Gert" Sibande, our people's hero, who led in the "Potato Boycott" that highlighted the plight of our people who were exploited in the rural outskirts of our country.
The 52nd National Conference of the ANC made various resolutions on the urgent priorities for our country's development, and I believe these will inform further discussions in this conference.
Each time we convene in conference, we have to answer the simple question as to what are the critical challenges facing our movement and our country.
There is no doubt that every conference of the ANC must answer the question of how the organisation can better place itself at the centre of people's mobilisation while at the same time ensuring that we provide leadership towards comprehensive social and economic transformation.
What this means is that we must strengthen our movement as a political rallying point of our people as we seek to resolve their economic challenges.
In other words, the ANC must be alive and must live amongst our people and be there as our people fight their various daily struggles on issues such as crime, high costs of food, lack of public transport, unemployment and lack of public services. We cannot afford to delegate the function of spearheading social and political mobilisation to other organisations.
Critical amongst these policies was how we must use our ascendancy to power to de-racialise the economy and ensure gender equality. As we command the levers of government, it is also our responsibility to expedite the realisation of our objective to halve poverty by 2014 and address the various socio-economic needs of our people.
Indeed as some have alluded, we have sufficient policies on the various challenges we face, but the critical challenge is implementation. This Provincial Conference must come up with mechanisms on how we can expedite translation of policy into implementable programmes. In expediting policy implementation, we must also correct some of the mistakes of the past, where for instance the good intentions of the Black Economic Empowerment ended up benefiting only a few.
Some of the policy issues arising out of Polokwane resolutions pertains the following:
We must leave no stone unturned to ensure implementation is done massively yet efficiently and effectively.
Some of the issues raised around issues of lack of capacity to implement our policies are:
We must put to an end to the infighting between those deployed in government organs and structures of our organisation. We must create regularised and clear platforms that enable the organisation at respective levels to interface with deployed cadres at corresponding levels in government on a continuous basis.
Such regularised platforms between structures of the ANC and government structures would give meaning to our assertion that there is only one ANC that leads in government programmes as its electoral political mandate.
As per the resolutions of the ANC in Polokwane, we must deepen our engagement in the battle of ideas in the public domain and other spheres and institutions of influence.
The ANC is the oldest liberation movement in the continent and its proud record of revolutionary struggle has been a beacon of hope for many of our people throughout the continent and we need not fail them.
Speaking in what then became one of her last commemorations of Comrade Oliver Tambo's birthday at his graveside in 2004, comrade Adelaide Tambo cautioned us about the challenges facing the ANC and that it should not be said in the future that our generation were the one responsible for breaking down the proud ANC tradition of selfless struggle for the emancipation of our people and the defeat of racism, patriarchy and all forms of chauvinism.
While the struggle against apartheid did not offer opportunities for self-emancipation, in contrast, the struggle for the emancipation of our people since 1994 has also brought in a lot of opportunism that has steadily begun to erode some of our precious timeless revolutionary values of our movement.
Some people who have joined the movement have clearly done so not to further our struggle but to enrich themselves and in this have brought in battles that have divided our movement and cast doubt on the integrity of our organisation in many instances.
We must therefore fight against the commercialisation of the ANC structures, particularly the branch which according to our constitution remains the basic unit of our organisation.
In this we call upon all principled members of our organisation not to allow this commercialisation of our organisation. We call on our members to reject those who see our branches as means to enrich themselves instead of a platform to debate policy issues and inform implementation programmes by both the ANC and government.
Some of the tendencies that have emerged in some ANC structures would make comrades Chris Hani, Gert Sibande, Oliver Tambo, Chief Albert Luthuli, Lillian Ngoyi and many others turn in their graves!
While former President Nelson Mandela spent over 27 years in Robben Island, Pollsmore and Victor Vester Prisons, he forgave those who incarcerated him. Yet the new culture creeping into our movement is such that comrades view other comrades as worse than the architects and collaborators of apartheid the latter whom Comrade Nelson Mandela could forgive.
While many of these behaviours were for a long time limited to the branch, now it appears they have permeated other higher structures of the ANC. In fact it would have been short sighted of us to think that the rot in the branch would not influence regional, provincial and ultimately the national conference in due course.
This Provincial Conference must therefore come up with means to stop this rot at its root, that being at the branch level, and then also at all other higher structures of the organisation. We should emphasise the practical meaning of the oath we make when a new member joins the ANC which is stated in our constitutions and that is to say:
I solemnly declare that I will abide by the aims and objectives of the African National Congress as set out in the constitution, the Freedom Charter and other duly adopted policy positions, that I am joining the organisation voluntarily and without motives of material advantage or personal gain, that I agree to respect the Constitution and the structures and to work as a loyal member of the organisation, that I will place my energies and skills at the disposal of the organisation and carry out tasks given to me, that I will work towards making the ANC an even more effective instrument of liberation in the hands of the people, and that I will defend the unity and integrity of the organisation and its principles, and combat any tendency towards disruption and factionalism.
As a movement, we cannot afford to let down the historic struggle of our people for which many paid the ultimate price so that you and me can enjoy this freedom.
We must make it clear that there is nothing that prevents people from pursuing wealth accumulation for as long as this is done within the confines of the law and also not at the expense of our organisation.
Our movement is not an instrument at the disposal of individual wealth accumulation but the emancipation of our people as a whole without prejudice or favour.
Through political education and party political work, we must build cadres and leaders who embrace these timeless values of our movement, those being at the service of our people and country without motive for material advantage and personal gain.
We must continuously be seized with the battle of ideas as this is about the very survival of our movement and by extension the success or failure of our struggle. The battle of ideas has everything to do with the relevance of our organisation and the revolutionary struggle, in the hearts and minds of our people.
As Lenin said, there cannot be a revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory, and this theory is contested because the material ends it seeks to enact run contrary to the material interests of those who wage a counter ideological onslaught to our struggle.
Our movement has a proud history of producing distinguished leaders. We have observed that there is a tendency to glorify past leaders while contrasting them with current leaders with the sole objective of declaring the current leadership of the ANC as unfit to lead the movement or our country for that matter. This is a direct attack on the integrity of our movement, its credibility and ability to provide leadership to our revolutionary struggle and society at large. It is a contest for the hegemony of the battle of ideas.
In fact, many of the arguments made in the public domain seek to contest the relevance of the ANC and this is done by some who seek nothing but to stop our revolutionary struggle at its tracks. Liberalism is portrayed as self evident natural logic as means to win over the hearts and minds of our people and therefore render the ANC irrelevant.
Our revolutionary ideology is rubbished as something of the past and therefore outdated. Our quest to correct racial imbalances of the past is itself rubbished as reverse racism. Affirmative action is not only presented as reverse racism but also as responsible for the claimed economic woes of our people in South Africa since 1994.
Some have attempted to portray the euphoria of the 1994 democratic breakthrough as the ultimate victory that should not have been followed with concerted efforts at black economic empowerment, when in fact clearly the apartheid structural inequalities still defines our socio-economic realities mainly in terms of race. Even those who jailed Nelson Mandela, today they hypocritically celebrate his life, while rubbishing the legacy that he stood for as an ANC leader throughout his life.
The tactic by our detractors is to suggest that everything was fine with past leaders such as Luthuli, Tambo and Mandela, but that everything is wrong with current ANC leaders. The same is said of the WL and the YL, in that past generations in both these structures were noble beings and that today's women and youth offer nothing to be proud of.
These are revisionists who forget that even those past heroes whom we celebrate today were in fact vilified during their times of ANC leadership by our opponents antecedents.
In building a strong revolutionary movement, we must project into the future the revolutionary path that we must undertake. The Strategy and Tactics vividly illustrate such a trajectory into the future. We must encourage our branches to further engage themselves with the positions of the Strategy and Tactics as well as all other resolutions adopted in Polokwane.
Many have assumed that with the demise of the Soviet Union, alongside it was the end of ideological contradictions and conflicts. However, both global and national events still show that economic and social interests are still pursued along ideological lines. Wealth accumulation, or its deprivation, still reflects the ideological fault lines of victors and the vanquished, black and white, North and South.
As we mobilise our people behind our programme for change into the election period, we must explain to our people why certain forces in the political opposition, public discourse and internationally, continue to vilify our course of struggle. We must explain to our people as to who stand to benefit due to the struggle led by the ANC and why therefore our people themselves in general must avail themselves as united motive forces for change.
But we must also explain to our people that the battle of ideas is not going to be a neat linear struggle, but is going to be a tough and complex one. This is because our political opponents seek to shake even the foundations of our political legitimacy as a people, as a movement and as a party in power.
We must explain the lie the political opposition and others in the public discourse make, that being the lie that they have the best interests of our people at heart, when in fact we know many of them seek nothing but the preservation of the privileges of the status quo as emanating from the apartheid legacy.
In conclusion, I here re-state what you already know very well, that the future of this province is in your hands as ANC members, as branches, as regions and as a PEC. But I have complete confidence that the Mpumalanga Province and the movement as a whole, will triumph over all these challenges.
This provincial conference must not fail in articulating clearly what must be done to strengthen and position the ANC at the centre of our provincial transformation agenda. The ANC must be a strong organisation characterised by mass cadreship that is steeped in the culture, tradition and constitutional principles of our organisation. The ANC must be one with the people in their daily struggle for service delivery at various levels, as well as in their various campaigns to spearhead social change.
Ultimately, the ANC must be clear on the role that organs of government or the State must play to lead in our comprehensive transformation as articulated by our policy positions adopted in Polokwane.
However, all these ideals would remain a pipe dream if indeed we fail to ensure unity and cohesion in our movement. As we made quote of the oath that all new members must be sworn with, all of us must accordingly work for the unity of our movement. All our membership must banish the new culture of opportunism and factionalism. Unity is the foundation stone upon which the ANC was founded.
All of us must be inspired by the common desire to serve our people freely and voluntarily and not for gain, this being the golden thread showing common character of all members of the ANC since it was launched in 1912.
I wish you every success in your deliberations.
I thank you!
Amandla!