ANC continues to neglect Western Cape’s ‘Coloured issue’ at its own peril

Isn’t it a little sad that the African National Congress is going to its elective conference in less than a year but no one is speculating about the impact the Western Cape will have on the outcome of the leadership contest?

For a province that gave the country exemplary leaders such as Reverend Allan Boesak, Dullah Omar, Zola Skweyiya, Geraldine Frazer-Moleketi, Trevor Manuel and Ebrahim Rasool etc shouldn’t it at least have a say on who becomes ANC President or who gets to form the top six?

It seems the province is resigned to token positions on the NEC; which translate into nothing significant excerpt consolation deployment to lower levels. Its charity conundrum speaks volumes about the province’s absence from the top six of the ANC in five successive elected leaderships.

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The last time the Western Cape ‘deployed’ a cadre to the top six was with Cheryl Carolus as deputy secretary general.

This happened at the time the ANC didn’t control the Western Cape.

It took the party another eleven years before it wrestled control of the province through dodgy floor-crossing legislation that with the benefit of hindsight, does not look constitutional.

The ANC could only hold on to power for four years before the DA took it from them in 2009.

In reality the ANC has never ever won the Western Cape. It is the only province whose people have never given the ANC a mandate to govern; and maybe for a reason best understood when one looks at how the party has failed to manage the shifting sands presented by the racial make-up of the province – something Helen Zille and quite recently Good Party’s Patricia de Lille seem to have co-authored the manual for.

Also Read: DA has probably shot itself in the foot in Western Cape

Maybe both women co-wrote the script on how to win and hold on to the Western Cape. For a moment after 2009 they coalesced under the banner of the Democratic Alliance, an alliance de Lille’s Independent Democrats abandoned, leaving the DA stuck with an ‘Alliance’ surname that makes less sense with every passing election.

You might wonder why the Western Cape ANC’s voice can’t ring louder in ANC national electoral politics, regardless of having heavyweight politicians such as Tony Yengeni and Mcebisi Skhwatsha in the NEC?

The simple answer is, the party failed or refused to understand what is referred to in political talk as the ‘Coloured Issue’.

Western Cape is disproportionately Coloured, which might explain why agitated former government spokesperson Mzwanele Manyi threw a tantrum in conversation with Freek Robinson and said, “I think it’s very important for coloured people in this country to understand that South Africa belongs to them in totality, not just the Western Cape… So this over-concentration of coloureds in the Western Cape is not working for them.”

Manyi had a point the ANC in its Freedom Charter façade has refused to acknowledge.

Apartheid was real and it had planted seeds of distrust among South Africa’s different racial groups.

The Group Areas Act is the longest lasting impact of apartheid’s spatial development planning, and to a larger extent relativity will always be based on similarity.

So-called Coloureds are most unlikely to trust anybody one shade darker than them with power over their affairs.

This weekend a rejuvenated former President Thabo Mbeki seems to believe often the ANC struggles to make inroads due to its ‘incapacity to think’ and to visualise concepts to deal with South African’s problems. That’s a surface take of the problem.

When he led the ANC Mbeki seemed to have understood that racial dynamic that bedevilled the Western Cape and was ready to dance to its tune.

When the province went to its elective provincial conference in 2005 he, as it had become his leadership style, preferred Rasool to get a third term as provincial chairperson unopposed.

This was regardless of James Ngculu, Skwatsha and other members of the so-called ‘Africanist’ camp launching a campaign to unseat him.

Mbeki didn’t talk about seeing the danger of the majority of Western Cape residents not going to be receptive of a non-Coloured person leading the province come the next round of elections in 2009.

Mbeki didn’t say it, but it was believed he foresaw that dynamic – that without a Coloured leader the Western Cape would go white instead of black.

Maybe the wool that was pulled over the ANC’s eyes was Max Ozinsky, a white Capetonian patronising the Africanist camp. Others associated with the camp were Garth Strachan, Lynne Brown and Yusuf Gabru.

With whites on their team Ngculu and Skwatsha’s definition of Africanist might have sounded ideological but at closer inspection there was tribalism and racism at its core. 

Mbeki’s fear came to bear. Rasool was recalled and replaced with an unpopular Brown.

With notable black leaders in its PEC and the possibility of a two centres of power dynamic, in the event of an ANC victory, the next premier of the Western was for the first time in its history likely to be a black person.

After that misappropriation of the meagre political capital the ANC only gained through floor-crossing the Western Cape chapter of the party seemed to obsess much with identity politics at the detriment of building inter-racial structures on the ground.

For now Western Cape ANC needs a strong Coloured leader to start dreaming of swaying the province back to the ANC.

It needs to be a leader who has no grey areas about alleged sexual misconduct.

It needs to be a leader who has not served time for accepting a Mercedes Benz ML from an arms dealer.

And it needs to be an ANC leader who has never been a Minister of Public Enterprise when the state was looted.

And that leader needs to be someone not contaminated by the ethnic politics of the Africanist camp and whatever the Rasool camp called itself. The ANC in the Western Cape needs a leader whose organisation skills can win them a seat on the ANC top six.

• Mashego is a Mpumalanga-based independent political analyst and author of the book ‘How To Sink The Black Ball’