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SA still needs the ANC and its Tripartite Alliance, warts and all

The founding principles of the ANC need to be foregrounded again, promoted and followed up with policies, and measured against social, political, economic and cultural metrics, and cannot be left to ‘the market’ alone.
Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
10 Oct 2025
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There have been very many reports of the demise and likely collapse of the Tripartite Alliance of the ANC, SACP and Cosatu over several years.

These reports draw on factual evidence of electoral decline, evidence of prebendalism (a political system where elected officials and government workers use state resources to benefit themselves and those close to them), outcomes of rent-seeking, maladministration, negligence and incompetence, with the ideals of a democratic revolution having been lost or misplaced.

And so there has been a constant hammering of the ANC, much of which is well placed. Sometimes the hammering is driven by jealousy and rage, other times by skaam kwaad, other times by powerful forces driven by ideology with attendant biases and prejudices.

Out of all of this has emerged a political and discursive drive to completely destroy the alliance and relegate it to the deepest recesses of memory. In this latter sense, the alliance has “enemies”, not political opponents. There is no greater benefit than seeing one’s enemies vanquished — dead and buried!

Except, South Africa needs the values that constituted the alliance in the first place, and that seem to have disappeared.

South Africa needs the alliance, with the ANC at its helm, because of the values that gave birth to the movement, as much if not more than it needs the country’s old Volksraad alliance mense.

Hammering out of habit


Something may be said about the perceived need for the constant hammering of the ANC. I do it too, but not out of habit, and not for titillation…

A sure way to ingratiate oneself, build a career, secure personal pecuniary gain or tie down sources of income and prosperity is to hammer away at what is saleable or in vogue, and what follows the caprices of fashion.

There are times when a hammering is necessary to help us think about injustices, inequity, inequality, structural and somatic violence and, of course, the way that humanity has never quite drifted from the passages of war, or how we have failed to reverse the destruction that our presence has wrought on the natural environment.

There are also instances when the hammering becomes self-fulfilling, driven by vengefulness (we tend to forget that some people derive great pleasure from revenge), by schadenfreude or by a desire to appear knowledgeable.

Write a hundred lines of “The ANC is to blame for everything that is wrong with the country” (write it over and again) and you are admitted into some kind of pantheon. We forget the way that falsehoods, half-truths or truths that are valid only in an in-group tend to influence actions; a hammering that makes falsehoods become fact, or true, for that matter.

Our most dearly held beliefs (true or false) may influence what we say or do, or how we expect others to act.

If you live your life believing (without evidence) that everyone else is out to get you, you may be inclined to “shoot first” and “not wait for a mushroom cloud”. All or most of this is submitted as a reasonable basis for the Hammering, as are things like skaam kwaad or early indoctrination.

Mother’s-milk conditioning


I like the phrase “skaam kwaad”, if only because it was my late mother who first introduced me to the concept. It simply means you are angry because you’re embarrassed, or you have been shown up to be a perverted pupil of Pygmalion.

In the first instance, you and your family and community stockpiled cans of food in the weeks and months before the 1994 election, and you’re now embarrassed that you and your family and community were not marched into the sea, and that your favourite grocery shop now has more than 400 branches across the country (and at more than 150 petrol stations on the continent), or that the country’s Gross Domestic Product was $138-billion in 1993, and it is now $400-billion.

The natives did not flush the country down the tubes, and that makes you really angry/embarrassed. Skaam kwaad.

In the second instance, you have been fed fear of a black planet (in a perverse twist of Pygmalion’s early and displaced disillusionment) and about an African government with the milk from your mother’s breast, and cannot quite deal with the fact that democracy has taken root in South Africa (a little and a lot like India), notwithstanding everything that was stacked against the country in 1994.

It’s useful to remember that Nelson Mandela’s administration inherited a state and government structures that had been verging on failure and collapse since at least a decade before 10 May 1994, when Mandela became president.

I noted this previously, when I, too, was busy at the hammering, and it remains worthy of repeat mention: “The Afrikaner historian Hermann Giliomee wrote, in March 1985: Pik Botha recalls: I will never forget the night of July 31 when [Minister of Finance] Barend du Plessis phoned me… [He said]: ‘Pik, I must tell you that the country is facing inevitable bankruptcy… The process has started.’”

The reference to India above should be read in a parsing of that country’s highly celebrated economic expansion, and reproduction of the quite awful caste system. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891 to 1956) the prominent Indian jurist, economist, politician and social reformer presided over the committee that drafted the Indian Constitution, and described India’s caste system as “a veritable chamber of horrors” (for people placed on the lowest rungs of society), and associated it with Hinduism in that country.

The ANC is (and is not) all that bad


A wise colleague, whose columns remain among my favourite reads, once explained that we, as public intellectuals, have an obligation to at least be sceptical of almost everything the state or government (I will include the ruling elite) say and do. We hammer away at the ANC (and the ruling elite) for all the good reasons and believe that the alliance is rotten to the core.

No serious politician in the movement would disagree with the reality that the alliance has drifted from its founding principles and original cause.

Former president Thabo Mbeki has said that the ANC “seemed adrift from its founding principles [with] veterans clinging to relevance while offering little in terms of substantive progress… We need loyalty to principles, not just personalities.”

It is precisely these principles, the founding principles of the ANC, that need to be foregrounded again, promoted and followed up with policies and measured against social, political, economic and cultural metrics — not all of which are quantifiable. It is fair to say that there are probably as many people angry with the alliance as there are people who have been disappointed by the ANC, in particular.

It has been reported over and over again, hammered over and again, that the ANC has been “captured” and that the ANC in office has been a disaster. What is also true is that principles have been sacrificed at the altar of pecuniary gain, get-rich-quick schemes, cronyism and prebendalism as a general condition; the state is there to serve the pecuniary interests of its most loyal servants, followers, supporters and members of the political party in office.

The principles remain an ideal. Not in a romantic way. Idealism is often at its worst when paired with romanticism. These principles are non-racialism, democracy, peace, the generation of wealth and spread of prosperity (equitable growth and distribution, meaning everyone has a stake in the wealth and prosperity), generation of high levels of trust among communities, and ensuring that these principles result in a better life for future generations.

None of this should be left to “the market” or “market forces”, nor should the current problems be resolved through atomisation and excessive individualism.

Having referred to Ambedkar, above — and I did not set out to write about him, the act of writing takes over — but he described Hindu society as “a multi-storeyed tower with no staircase and no entrance. Everybody dies in the storey in which they are born.” 

The market has no incentive to build social structures that will break the structures that keep classes apart. Liberalism comes with the privilege to criticise, but leaves action and the breakdown of social barriers to “markets”.

If the ANC can revitalise the principles that guided the implementation of policies (access to water, electricity, technology and communications, sanitation, healthcare, education, and that resulted in the surge in growth and that raised the floor of poverty, distributed opportunities), there is a need for the alliance to remain active and engaged. In this sense, South Africa needs the ANC to be alive and among us.

If, surely (and in general) there is room for the parties of John Steenhuisen, Helen Zille, Pieter Groenewald, Corné Mulder, those bodies that lined “both sides” of the old Volksraad, then there is room for the parties of Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, Mosibudi Mangena and Steve Biko.

And anyway, the alliance is home to liberals, socialists, social democrats, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, atheists, capitalists, representatives of every language group in South Africa, whereas you have to be a liberal capitalist to be in the party of liberals, or an Afrikaner nationalist to join one or another party… herein lies the strength of the alliance. DM