By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
@AlaisterRussell.
Former President Thabo Mbeki bemoaned poor membership quality and people who join the African National Congress (ANC) for personal interests, and not what it stands for.
Mbeki on Friday delivered the annual Chief Albert Luthuli Lecture during a virtual event that coincided with 60 years since Luthuli was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960 for advocating non-violent resistance to racial discrimination in South Africa.
He said that the ANC continued to retain opportunists and careerists within its ranks, who see their party membership as a means to get access to state power and enrich themselves.
Mbeki reflected on former president Nelson Mandela’s presentation of the political report at the ANC’s 50th national conference in 1997. At the time, Mandela stated that “a number of negative features within the ANC and broad democratic movement have emerged during the last three years”. He said the organisation had an inescapable responsibility to attend to these matters frankly and decisively, in defence of both its movement and revolution.
“One of these negative features is the emergence of careerism within our ranks.
“Many among our members see their membership of the ANC as a means to advance their personal ambitions, to attain positions of power and access to resources for their own individual gratification,” Mbeki said.
Mandela had stated that the organisation found it difficult to deal with such careerists decisively.
The party had to take all necessary measures to purge itself of such members, said Mbeki.
At the ANC general council in 2000, speaking as president, Mbeki had stated that the ANC, as a mass movement for social change and a governing party, had produced “a result with which we must contend and which comrade Nelson Mandela dealt with when he presented his political report at our last national conference”.
“The result I am talking about is that we have attracted into and continued to retain opportunists and careerists within our ranks. These are the people who join the movement not because they respect or support any of the strategic objectives of our movement,” said the former president.
“They join with great ease that our procedures as a mass movement permit with the sole aim of furthering their personal careers and using their access to state power we have as a ruling party to enrich themselves,” Mbeki said.
He said the internal weaknesses of the ANC and the urgent need for organisational renewal was emphasised during the party’s previous conferences since 1997 in diagnostic reports. However, little has been done to arrest the degradation in the quality of the membership.
“The continuous degradation in the quality of the membership of the ANC emphasised at all ANC conferences for the two decades between 1997 and 2017 contributed directly to this sustained loss of electoral support by the ANC,” Mbeki said.
He said the ANC’s electoral support has been declining over the years and this was clear to everyone in the party.