‘ANC, fire the corrupt or lose election’: Expert urges radical action to avert crisis

The ANC has only one solution to win next year’s election: fire all of its criminal elements to recoup the confidence of the electorate, an expert says.

There is nothing lawful and honest that the ruling party can do in the next 10 to 15 months to win the 2024 poll, said political analyst Sandile Swana.

The electoral trends were clearly facing downwards and the ANC track record of failure was prominent and indelible, he said.

Swana’s bombshell came as the ANC was faced with the reality of losing power for the first time in its reign of 29 years.

Instead of growing, the party was in decline and things were likely to get worse next year because the promises made in the 2019 elections had not been met.

The party then asked the electorate to give it a second chance so that it could rectify its mistakes. The party also apologised for its mistakes, but there had been no improvement.

In fact, the level of electorate disgruntlement over government service delivery failures has increased.

But if the ANC asked for a second chance in 2019, will the voters give it a third chance in 2024, with the worsening load shedding, corruption, crime and poor service delivery?

Swana said for the ANC to regain the confidence of the voters, it would have to fire about 70% of its national executive committee members, provincial executive committees and regional executive committees “because they are not fit for purpose and the bulk of the leadership is not ANC at all”.

Another political analyst, Zakhele Ndlovu from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said nothing inspired confidence under the ANC rule.

Infrastructure had collapsed and education was substandard, while crime was at its highest.

Ndlovu said the country was faced with a reality where the electorate was not equipped to hold the ANC or their representatives accountable for its failures.

“To hold the representatives accountable, you have to be equipped to know where to look; to say the ruling party has done well or it has not done well,” Ndlovu said.

“I am talking about the vast majority of our voters. The ANC would not have been in power this long if we had voters who knew how to make the right decisions at the polls.”

The ANC had been getting away with not delivering simply because voters were not holding them accountable.

“But also, in Africa generally, we have voters who are very loyal to the ruling parties, as can be seen in Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Angola, where the former liberation movements have remained in power since independence.”

Swana said even the party itself acknowledged it had failed the people.

The expert cited the re-elected president of the ANC Veteran’s League, Snuki Zikalala, who admitted that the ANC had veered off the track of success around 2009.

Zikalala also said they were prepared to sit in the opposition benches if they were not granted a clear outright majority to govern, rather than enter any coalition.

The league opposed a coalition with the Economic Freedom Fighters, despite the ANC having expressed willingness to align with the red berets in 2024.

Swana said even if “the criminals, careerists and opportunists are fired”, it will take “five to 15 years to build a high-performance ANC in a rapidly changing landscape”.

New political parties and revived parties such as Inkatha Freedom Party, Azanian People’s Organisation, Pan Africanist Congress, Freedom Front Plus and others would gain seats as the ANC declined.