JUSTICE MALALA The coalition apple won’t fall far from the ANC tree

When most of us try to imagine where South Africa will be in 10 years, we think of a ‘clean break’ happening in the next few years. We see a gatvol nation, tired of scandals and empty promises, breaking decisively with the ANC in 2029. We see an alternative emerging, and a new set of leaders running the country through to the 2034 election and beyond.

That may be a fantasy. The ANC is not about to collapse from 40% of the vote to nothing. It will most likely decline to, say, 30% or worse, 20% nationally. Others will gain, but the improvements will be dispersed such that none breaks through to 50% of votes cast.

The ANC may well remain dominant or strong in places such as Limpopo and Eastern Cape. Many of those who will take over the seats and positions the ANC now occupies will be with some or other offshoot of the organisation, such as the MK Party, meaning that ANC culture will still run through government structures in some or other form.

So what we may have in 10 years will not be the hoped-for rise of a dedicated, clean set of leaders who march South Africa into the future with clarity and purpose. Instead, we may have a ruling elite that displays the hopes of efficiency and service we want intermingled with the corruption and criminality we have failed to defeat. We may still be waddling through the contradictions and the pain of coalition politics, where you have the good acceding to the corrupt just so we can continue to have a “not-too-bad” government and settlement.

We have learnt this lesson well from the coalition that President Cyril Ramaphosa built within the ANC after he won the party presidency in December 2017. He accommodated the state capture groupings of the ANC, allowing the culture of thievery they had flourished under to make up part of his “Thuma Mina” renewal brigade.

We were asked to believe that a clean break with the thieves of the Jacob Zuma era would lead to a rupture that would destabilise the government and the country. So the “good guys” slept with the snake. The leading lights of the Zuma era, such as the late Nathi Mthethwa who was a central figure in that administration, became ministers in a Ramaphosa government.

Events of the past week showed clearly just how morally and ethically compromised the ANC has become because of this accommodation of corruption.

It may break up further along the way, but it will not be extinct. It will continue to limp along, patching itself up and trying to regain its greatness. The hopeful house that the ANC started building in 1994 will be approaching total collapse. But it will still be here.

On Thursday we had the extraordinary spectacle of former police minister Bheki Cele, who made 10 calls to alleged criminal mastermind Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala on the day of Matlala’s arrest, eulogising his predecessor Mthethwa. Mthethwa, who until two weeks ago was South Africa’s ambassador to France, is a former police minister who has been implicated in the Marikana Commission, the Zondo Commission, and is currently named in the Madlanga Commission as having obstructed justice by protecting a criminal police bigwig.

So here you had a former police commissioner and minister (Cele) who has been using and sleeping in a possible criminal mastermind’s house (Matlala’s) singing the praises of a man who was one of the chief architects of the discredited Zuma tenure of 2009 to 2018.

This shameless display was not frowned upon, rebuked or repudiated by the ANC. There was no-one to repudiate him; no-one to tell him that he is an emperor without clothes. Everyone is compromised.

These are the many contradictions that now grip the ANC. They are deep, and they are pushing the party towards its loss of power in 2029. It may break up further along the way, but it will not be extinct. It will continue to limp along, patching itself up and trying to regain its greatness. The hopeful house that the ANC started building in 1994 will be approaching total collapse. But it will still be here.

This is the entity that the DA, the MK Party (which represents the ANC that was compromised during the Zuma era), the EFF, the new party born of Rise Mzansi, Bosa and GOOD, and others will have to work with into the future.

So one can imagine what that looks like. The Patriotic Alliance, led by ex-convicts who seem to still have an affinity for compromised “businesspeople” such as the “KT” Molefe who was arrested while Kenny Kunene was hanging around his house, will have consolidated the growth it has shown lately. The ANC will be what it is, seeking tenders and its leaders hankering for the enrichment of only themselves and their relatives.

The age of coalition we entered at national level last year is in its infancy. The South African voter has not, to my mind, shown the decisiveness that will deliver a break with the sloth of the past 30 years.

So we will be caught in this transition for a while to come, and that will bring all kinds of weird morbidities. Our future is not a straight line.