The ANC's fall from grace and the danger in its decline

The Citizen

08-08-2025

Once a disciplined, nonracial liberation movement, the ANC now faces internal rot, shrinking support, and growing irrelevance.
In a long career as a journalist, one moment stands out for me.
A little black girl, about three, standing in the warm winter sunshine of Tanzania, her little fist balled up into a Black Power salute, trying her best to sing Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika.
Every day in the ANC's exile community at the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College, just outside Morogoro, would begin with the national anthem.
I remember that child's innocence – we often see hope in the faces of the young.
That hope was also on the faces of the ANC exiles, a mix of black, white, Indian and coloured, long before the Rainbow Nation myth took root.
When I arrived, I was almost mobbed by South Africans who had been out of the country for months, or even decades, and who were all eager for news of 'home'.
They were disappointed when they found out I was actually a Zimbabwean journo, working for a South African newspaper group's Harare bureau.
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The ANC had deliberately invited me to record what I saw because I had no connection with either side in their liberation struggle and was, therefore, the proverbial 'blank page'.
This was critical to them, because South Africa had just concluded the Nkomati Accord with Mozambique and the ANC believed the South African military had just got 1 000km closer to them in Tanzania.
I wrote what I saw – which was an efficient, energetic community, with no so sign of military installations.
That was what the ANC wanted – to show the world this was not a target for a 'cross-border raid' by Pretoria.
I could not vouch for other facilities in the area, though, because I wasn't shown those.
This old-school, nonracial ANC – before corruption and plotting became the organisation's way of life – came to mind the other day when I saw someone on X opining that the ANC was planning to become a one-party state.
That is one of the most out-of-touch ideas I've heard in a long time.
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The ANC is weaker, as a political organisation, than it's ever been.
You only have to look at the pathetic 40% it won in last year's election to see that.
Nor – given the in-fighting in the organisation and its innate incompetence, never mind having effectively no military muscle behind it – can I see it enforcing a one-party dictatorship.
The reality is that the ANC is going slowly, but inexorably, down the toilet. And that should worry all of us on a number of levels.
Firstly, as any empire – or long-standing supposedly democratic organisation – withers, its leaders become increasingly depraved.
If the prospect of doom begins materialising, then we can expect the sort of looting which would make the Gupta circus look like Amateur Half-Hour.
And, of course, who is in line to replace the ANC? Not the DA – it's too divisive and doesn't have enough national support.
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Nor the EFF, which is a bunch of Gucci socialists who just don't have the numbers, at least not at the ballot box.
The same can be said of the uMkhonto weSizwe party, which is Zulu by culture and location. The rest of our political parties are also-rans.
That's a situation ripe for some kind of putsch, where a malign player, backed by foreign money and untrammelled by ethics or human rights considerations, has his (or her) eyes on the prize.
I wonder what that little girl's children make of the dying of that revolutionary light.