How do we make sense of the current direction of the ANC, described yesterday by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as purveyors of “gutter politics.”  There’s a lot of sound and fury and nonsense passing as analysis. Much of it is focused on Julius Malema, now sent to ANC “political school” for rehabilitation run by a convicted felon. But let’s not get distracted. What does Malema mean? What can we expect from ANC quarters for the foreseeable future.  The best take–forwarded to me in an email exchange a few days ago–come from Hein Marais, who, for me at least, still remains one of the trenchant critics of South Africa’s transition*:

… The ANC’s ethical moorings are pretty rickety, and there’s a case to be made that it is also politically unhinged. Rather than a coherent, cohesive organization it now functions as a field, a zone in which motley interests and ambitions can be pursued — which puts a premium on retaining power not for any single, ‘progressive’ objective but in order to facilitate the pursuit of disparate objectives. The ANC can no longer credibly claim to be the custodian of a coherent ‘liberation project’.

Which is exactly why it has to broadcast that claim ever louder and in new ways.

Its central biggest problem is how to retain power in an economy which structurally is incapable of providing jobs on remotely the scale and of remotely the quality required, where public service is proving elusive, where inequality is widening, and where precariousness and misery and a palpable sense of unfairness is rampant. Power is then only nominally based in material change, which forces increased recourse to ideology, to various bonding notions and affirmations about belonging, rights and entitlement. In a society this unequal and unjust, there is a very real risk that chauvinist, exclusionary notions of belonging, citizenship and rights will prove politically rewarding, i.e. for shoring up power and its reproduction … [Julius] Malema represents one possible way of reproducing power in the decades ahead.

But he’s mistakenly understood literally, as Julius Malema.

What we’re being exposed to through him is an idea, a construct which some in the ANC feels might offer a way forward, out of the impasse the organization has blundered into.

* For those, unfamiliar with Marais’ work, I suggest checking out his 1998 (revised in 2001) masterpiece, South Africa, The Limits to Change. I hope he writes more.

— Sean Jacobs