I t is now just over a month since we held our last local government elections. Our movement has selected the comrades who will serve as Mayors in the municipal councils we control. In keeping with the law, the municipal councils have now been constituted. The new local governments are in place. With all this having been done, the principal Order of the Day of our movement is - let the work begin!
Happily, the overwhelming majority of the municipalities have acted to respect this directive. And yet the truth is that there are some municipalities governed by our movement in which this Order of the Day is being wilfully ignored by people who carry our membership cards.
These are the few instances where ANC councillors, supported by factions within the structures of our movement, are openly defying the decisions of our constitutional structures by refusing to accept the comrades chosen by these structures as our mayoral candidates.
Those who engage in these activities do not care that what they are doing is bringing the ANC, of which they are members, into disrepute. They are not concerned that by their actions they seek to weaken our movement's organisational discipline, condemn it to a state of anarchy, and thus reduce its capacity to lead the people and discharge its historic mission. They are intent to repudiate the commitment that has driven our movement for more than nine decades - to serve the people of South Africa!
The determination to inflict instability on the same poor black communities that sacrificed everything to liberate our country, by fighting over who among our members shall be Mayor, is not driven by any genuine desire to advance the interests of the people. Neither does it reflect any real political or ideological differences such as would explain the intense conflict over which member of the ANC should wear the mayoral chain.
What it does reflect is a grossly negative tendency in our ranks, to which our movement and the overwhelming majority of our members are fundamentally opposed. This is the abuse of membership of our movement to gain positions of state power in order to use these positions for personal enrichment and benefit. This is what lies at the base of some of the factional struggles that have emerged over which particular individual member of the ANC should be Mayor, as opposed to any other member of our movement.
In these instances, factions have formed around particular individual members of the ANC because these factions see such individuals as representatives and promoters of their selfish interests, centred on creating job and economic opportunities for members of the faction concerned. These factions engage in struggle over mayoral positions, as well as the important issue of Municipal Managers, to gain exclusive access to, and monopolise what they consider to be the material spoils of access to state power to which they believe they are entitled by virtue of occupying positions of authority.
The law requires that each of our municipalities should have an Integrated Development Plan (IDP), elaborated together with the municipal electorate, focused on meeting the popularly agreed social and economic needs of the local communities.
All ANC councils are obliged to base these IDPs both on the Election Manifesto we presented to the masses of our people as we urged them to mandate us to form the new local governments, and the outcomes of the IDP consultation with the people.
This obligation is binding on all ANC Mayors. These cadres of our movement have a duty to ensure that the municipal governments they lead address the social and economic needs of all the people in their municipalities, without any discrimination of any kind. All of them must be committed to the same developmental vision spelt out in our movement's Local Government Election Manifesto.
Nobody in the communities they lead, least of all members of the ANC, should, without just and demonstrable cause, conclude that one ANC Mayor rather than another ANC Mayor is best placed to respect the commitments that our movement, and not the individual Mayors, made to the people.
Not a single ANC Mayor, regardless of personal popularity, occupies his or her seat by virtue of having been elected on the basis of a personal election manifesto. Not a single ANC Mayor falls outside the voluntary ANC discipline, movement oversight and legal framework that binds every member of the ANC, regardless of the government position they might occupy, including the Presidency of the Republic.
Our movement will never knowingly allow that any ANC Mayor should merely serve the interests of members and supporters of our movement or factions thereof, rather than the interests of the communities they are elected to govern. This constitutes an important part of the objective stated in the Freedom Charter - that the people shall govern!
Our movement has made a commitment to the masses of our people that we will ensure that the councillors they elected honour the undertakings we made to these masses. Among other things, this requires that we immerse and induct our leaders in local government - the Mayors and councillors - into the culture, traditions and values of our movement. Among other things, we must expose these leaders to the continuum of the positions adopted by our movement over many decades.
We held our 49th and first National Conference after liberation, in Bloemfontein in December 1994. In his Political Report to the Conference on 17 December, our then President, Nelson Mandela, said: "And so we assemble today, at this the 49th National Conference of the African National Congress, converging from the Union Buildings and Tuynhuys; from parliament and regional legislatures; from ministries and provincial governments - as the majority organisation in the first ever democratically elected government of our country. We have converged from the shop-floor and informal settlements; from places of worship and learning; from urban and rural areas; as business-persons and professionals - African, Coloured, Indian and white - a microcosm of South African society.
"For the first time in the history of our country, we have under one roof, sharing the same vision, and planning as equals, delegates from every sector of South African society, including those who hold the highest offices in the land. This in itself vividly captures the qualitative change our country has undergone - a dream fulfilled and a pledge redeemed.
"That pledge, made in this (Mangaung/Bloemfontein) mother-city of the ANC 83 years ago by yet another representative gathering, was to transform South Africa into a non-racial and democratic society. As we meet in the environs where they planted the seed, we can proudly say to the founders: the country is in the hands of the people; the tree of liberty is firmly rooted in the soil of the motherland!...
"We have assembled at this Conference precisely to chart the way forward to a truly free and prosperous nation. The real measure of success or failure of this Conference will be whether we will emerge motivated and stronger than before, and whether the decisions we take bring practical relief to the millions who so graphically demonstrated their confidence in the ANC and in democracy last April...
"In as much as we succeeded in mobilising the people for the victory we have scored, we have today the responsibility to mobilise them to become active participants in improving their quality of life, (and) in defending and advancing our newly-won democracy. We have to inculcate among all our people the culture of taking responsibility for the task of reconstruction and development. Neither Government nor the ANC alone can realise these plans."
In his Closing Address on 22 December to the same 49th ANC National Conference, President Nelson Mandela said:
"Like several conferences before, this one was also a mirror image of the new South Africa we are building...For the first time in our history, delegates discussed, not resistance, but reconstruction and development...Our delegates were concerned with the implementation of the RDP, bettering the lives of our people. The level of discussion was very high and the concerns of people on the ground - the building of a better life for all - formed an important part of the agenda...
"As has been pointed out here by many speakers, what is of immediate concern to us now are the forthcoming local government elections, which we must win at all costs. In many respects, these elections are far more important - far more crucial - than the national elections on the 27th of April. It is in the level of local government that we come into physical contact with the problems of the people. It is at that level that delivery in terms of the RDP has to take place.
"We cannot be general in fighting (the) local government elections. We have to move from the elevated, from the general tone of our work, to specifics. At that level what the people want to hear is: how many jobs are you going to create within the next 12 months? how many houses are you going to build? how many clinics? how many schools? how many boreholes are you going to make? You have to know the conditions in that particular area very thoroughly to make an impact on people at that level...
"It has happened in many countries that a liberation movement comes into power and the freedom fighters of yesterday become members of the government. Sometimes without any idea of mischief, precisely because they are committed and hard working, they concentrate so much on their portfolios that they forget about the people who put them in power, and become a class, a separate entity unto themselves, who are not accountable to their membership, and who rely on law, that now I am a Cabinet Minister, the political organisation that put me in power can do nothing.
"One of the ways of preventing that temptation is for members of the Cabinet to go regularly to their areas, talk to the people. Go to the squatters or informal settlements, enter those rooms and see how people live, talk to them and also explain to them, on a regular basis, what the government is doing to give them feedback as to what the government is doing to address their needs...
"The Cabinet, the outgoing Cabinet, as well as the incoming Cabinet, consists of highly motivated, able and hard-working men and women who, as I have said, work 24 hours a day to discharge their duties. Members of the Cabinet have done so in order to honour the pledges we made in the run-up to the elections. We are fortunate to have such remarkable leaders in the government.
"They will guarantee, and I hope the present (ANC) Executive as well, that the endemic corruption, waste and inefficiency that characterised the apartheid government will be tackled effectively in the weeks and months and years that lie ahead."
The messages communicated 12 years ago by President Nelson Mandela on behalf of the then NEC of our movement, about the tasks of the ANC in a liberated South Africa, constitute our movement's programme to this day. When, today, we say - let the work begin! - we refer to our post-liberation tasks spelt out by Nelson Mandela at our 49th National Conference, just 8 months after our victory in our country's historic first democratic elections of 1994.
Accordingly, the Order of the Day to the ANC councillors elected on 1 March, and the ANC Mayors chosen by the municipal councils, is that they must:
As our newly elected local government leaders begin their work, to honour our commitments to the masses of our people, they must constantly recall what Nelson Mandela said at the first National Conference of our movement after Liberation Day - "We can proudly say to the founders, the country is in the hands of the people: the tree of liberty is firmly rooted in the soil of the motherland!"
What this meant then, and means now, 12 years later, is that we had and have arrived at the moment when the motherland, in all its institutions and programmes, will and must, at last, and after many centuries, respond to the genuine interests of all our people, in conditions of liberty for all.
Nothing whatsoever should and will divert our movement and its genuine cadres from the loyal, disciplined and principled defence and pursuit of this perspective, focused on the radical and continuous improvement of the quality of life of all our people and the restoration of the dignity of all these masses. Whether we remain a people's movement or not will be defined by what we do in this regard, and nothing else.
