The ANC elephant is dead

The ruling ANC has often been compared to an elephant by people, including former president Jacob Zuma.

He once warned former party members who were standing in the 2016 local government elections against the ANC that “you are fighting against an elephant. You won’t even know where to begin (to strike it) … it will hit you with its trunk before you even make your move”.

Former Cosatu secretary-general Bheki Ntshalintshali took the analogy further but this time as a warning to the ANC: “Elephants move slowly… but when they move things are corrected… they sometimes need to move swiftly.”

The KwaZulu-Natal ANC’s elective conference has proved that the ANC is indeed an elephant. Sadly, this elephant is unable to change direction as it continues careering down a cliff towards electoral insignificance. And the proverbial elephant in the room at the conference? Jacob Zuma.

The faction of supporters that emerged victorious from the leadership elections had taken a leaf out of the former president’s Victimhood Handbook, adopting the song Wenzeni uZuma (What has Zuma done?) as their war cry. And maybe fittingly, they chose to label their faction the Talibans and came dressed in Arab headscarves.

Maybe it has never dawned on those grown men and women who labelled their faction the Talibans that the Muslim extremist group is not the most popular. In fact, just the name evokes images of terrorism for some people.

But not with the ruling party here. The divisions and factionalism within the party have moved from wearing T-shirts bearing the leader’s image, to naming it after a feared group, in a province that leads the country in political assassinations.

Sadly, there are still some within the party who believe the elephant can be turned around. They believe that the factions are simply a manifestation of ideological differences and when they talk of renewal and self-correction they believe their own hype.

These people think that when former president Thabo Mbeki openly criticises President Cyril Ramaphosa at Jessie Duarte’s memorial service the introspection has begun. What they did not foresee is that, instead of the criticism coming off as a guide towards self-correction, it was actually heaping coals on the president’s head at a most trying time for him.

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The first act for the newly elected Taliban faction leader Sibonelo Duma was to save the president from the complete humiliation of having being stopped from addressing the conference. And he did – but it was very clear that he would have been damned if he didn’t.

But in all of this – embarrassing their own president, defending their old president, exacting “revenge”’ on his behalf and resurrecting him, cleansing his image and redefining him as the ultimate victim of enemies hellbent on seeing him in jail – the ANC, or at least the Taliban faction of ruling party (Zuma’s supporters) have not stopped to ask themselves: where is the voter in all of this?

There was another elephant in that room that they all chose to ignore as they feverishly booed a president whose stature has been diminished by his own reckless handling personal financial affairs. That elephant was the voter.