What can the ANC learn from Polokwane?

There are numerous  tough lessons to be taken from the ANC’s 52^nd national conference at Polokwane. Someone – present ANC Secretary General, Kgalema Motlanthe perhaps? – needs to ensure that they don’t go to waste. If I were in charge of ANC strategy development and tactical implementation, here are just a few of the items I’d focus on:

1) Level the playing fields for future such events. If you turn away delegates and voters because of flaws in their branch procedural or nomination processes, then apply the same yardstick to that desperately lacking in emotional intelligence contingent, the ANC ‘Youth’ (mega misnomer) League. How shocking to read in the Mail & Guardian Online today: “The national leadership (of the ANCYL) has extended its term of office beyond the three years stipulated in the Constitution, while the (ANCYL) national conference is overdue. In the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and Western Cape, there are no elected provincial executive committees for the Youth League.” Neatly captured in ANC Secretary General, Kgalema Motlanthe’s phrase: “The league’s actions sometimes create the perception that it is not quite amenable to the organisational discipline of the ANC.”

2) Take the leadership (wrong word I know) of the ANCYL through some sort of social skills, grooming, dress, deportment and etiquette (i.e. common good manners) process. Harking back to the late Peter Mokaba they’ve been (literally) bloated, over-age motor mouths. Example, the epitome of drama and crassness himself, ANCYL 'leader', Fikile Mbalula (pictured) recently castigating Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel for ‘being a drama queen.’ Why does the ANC not call these yapping curs to heel and manage them better? They besmirch the entire movement with their regular, overly-verbose and intemperate ranting. If you can’t control them in the playpen, ANC, God help you the day they get to the playground. (Update 19th Dec:) Mbalula now claims the ANCYL 'made' Thabo Mbeki and he was 'removed' by the youth league. 'nuff said. Time for the ANCYL to be reined in. Go read the offending Times article.

3) The ANC needs to re-look its whole (seemingly absent) awareness of reputation management. To use the words of Tony Blair’s erstwhile press officer, Alastair Campbell, ‘they’re so up their own bums’ that they have no idea what’s really happening in the world of perceptions outside of their parochial fiefdom.

4) Someone needs to outsource or take charge of the logistics for future conferences. Having media editors and journalists crouching on the floor in front of the stage due to a communications cock-up regarding eligibility for entry or not, is inexcusable. Does the ANC have any idea what this says about their ability to govern South Africa? Or how it plays in the international media – in whose eyes, their much-vaunted ANC Polokwane conference became an acronym for Absolutely Numbing Chaos? 

It's a no-brainer for any junior events organiser to have anticipated rain during voting. Some temporary covered walkways people? C'mon....the marquee-erection folk could have organised it in a trice - if you'd taken the trouble to think it through. The cringe factor surrounding the Polokwane pandemonium should not be repeated. Any corporate CEO would have had his head roll, had he fronted a debacle like this in the business world. Maybe study some video footage of how political parties in developed economies do these things - and try raise the bar a few notches the next time? As the American saying goes, 'If you want to play with the big dogs, you'd better learn to pee in the long grass!'

5) In an era of social media and the reality of the global village of communications, the ANC elite must surely realise that info about ordinary (uninvited) members swanning through the conference ‘networking' (for which read 'patronage sales and influence') area and stuffing mineral water, food and stress balls into shopping bags, speaks inappropriate volumes?

6) There’s a need for some sort of ‘global norms’ social skills grooming for many members of the ANC. I don’t give a toss that this is Africa or South Africa, or that these are predominantly black people. Some of them behave like right-royal yobs, have no manners or social sophistication and are a total embarrassment to all South Africans with even a hint of finesse. You're in the international media eye for goodness' sake.

7) Give up your outdated, romantic notion of the ‘honour’ and ‘commitment’ and all that claptrap that ANC members have historically supposedly espoused. You’re dealing with a new dispensation, in which your very vocal and ill-mannered members are re-writing the rule-book – or shredding it, as the case appears to be. If you don’t direct the modernisation and evolution of your movement, it will become a chaotic revolution of norms and mores, that will produce a totally unmanageable future outcome.

8) Try a little democracy in future. Even if your ANC national executive committee members have to kow-tow and toady at ANC functions, when they’re in national government, help them exercise their brains, assertiveness and independence of thought. So you don’t contaminate the national interest with the crack-pot ideas of the incumbent ANC president. Or have their potential competence limited by his paranoia and control-freak behaviour.

9) When your members behave badly and divisively, don't start blaming phantom 'third-force' influences. That's a careworn old saw. There's an Afrikaner proverb that sums it up beautifully: 'When you're in trouble, light a fire on your neighbour's stoep.' Learn from it.

This entire conference has been an embarassing reality-TV case-study in how not to do something of this sort. Bring on Kgalema Motlanthe - quickly. At least there’s some real intellect, gravitas and dignity in the offing. And of course, if Zuma gets in, dancing on the bonnet of a 4X4 while singing 'bring me my machine gun' will become the new social norm - so who will give a fig for any form of decorum, anyhow.