ANC conference skating on thin ice

The ANC KwaZulu-Natal provincial conference finally kicks off on Friday. [View this email in your browser]( [Mail & Guardian]( [Mail & Guardian]( [Twitter]( [Facebook]( [Instagram]( [YouTube]( Hi there, Thursday. It’s about 24 hours until the long-awaited and repeatedly postponed ANC KwaZulu-Natal provincial conference finally kicks off — disaffected branches, marginalised regions and panicked chairperson candidates permitting. The conference, like many others that have been held around the country, has been delayed several times, with the factions trying to load their branches and exclude the enemy’s and win the numbers game before the first “amandla” on Friday by whatever means they have at their disposal. It’s an ugly, sometimes deadly, game — the build-up to the eThekwini regional conference in April cost five people their lives — and one that’s become deeply embedded in the ANC’s organisational culture at all levels. Thus far, there’s no indication that any of the factions has started drawing up court papers on behalf of its “members in good standing” who had been deprived of their opportunity to cast their vote in the leadership elections by one act of skulduggery or another. It can still happen; 24 hours is a long time in politics, and the province’s 2015 conference out-come ended up being successfully challenged in court — in part because the attendance register was, strangely, eaten by rats. I’ve attended pretty much all of the ANC’s KwaZulu-Natal provincial conferences. Things have changed a bit. At the early conferences, the comrades were still too busy fighting Inkatha and the National Party — remember them — to do battle with each other, so the top posts of chairperson and secretary ended up being divvied up among the big guns — S’bu Ndebele and Jeff Radebe at the first conference — with the same process taking place when Zweli Mkhize became chairperson. Everything happened in-house, with comrades shying away from the media, rather than viewing it as a campaign tool — or another branch. Nobody declared their intention to be chairperson ahead of the conferences. They would have been dealt with by what was then the ANC HQ at Shell House. So everybody kept quiet and waited for nominations to start; left it up to their lobbyists to do the horsetrading behind the scenes. I popped into Sandile Zungu’s press briefing this week — a somewhat corporate affair at the Moses Mabhida Stadium. I was a bit taken aback when I got the invite to the briefing to formally announce the AmaZulu FC owner’s decision to stand as chairperson. The ANC has never done — or allowed — that kind of campaigning, so it was unexpected. Things have changed. I popped in anyhow. It’s been more than two years since I set foot in the stadium — and I was keen to hear what Zungu had to say. Our man was all business; sure of himself, despite having withdrawn his candidacy earlier in the year; confident of getting on the ballot at the weekend, possibly from the conference floor, where he believes he has the support of the 25% of participating branches needed to secure late nomination; full of ideas about how he was going to rescue the ANC in the province from itself. Things have changed. I am grateful that the conference is going ahead, despite the fact that the ANC will — again — be robbing me of another weekend, another three days of my life, which I can never get back. It’s not because I’m particularly invested in the outcome of the weekend’s proceedings — whether it’s Sihle Zikalala, Nomusa Dube-Ncube, Zungu or Siboniso Duma who become chairperson, whether it’s the Ankoles, the RETs or the Talibans who come out on top by Sunday, whether the proxies of Phala Phala, Digital Vibes or Estina Dairy win the day. Life will not be improving for the rest of us, any time soon. I’m just thankful that the KwaZulu-Natal conference — and the national policy conference next weekend — will be over and done with before the football season starts, rather than dragging on and resulting in my being mugged for the opportunity to watch Jesus’s first official appearance for Arsenal by the ANC. The ANC is holding its provincial conference at the Olive Convention Centre at North Beach, which is appropriate, not least because of the fact that Olive used to be the Durban ice rink and the governing party is — electorally and otherwise — skating on thin ice. I giggle to myself every time the party holds a gathering at Olive. With each successive conference, the ice gets thinner, more fragile, the cracks deeper, wider, but everybody appears to be too busy singing Wenzeni uZuma to notice that they’re about to break through what’s left of the crust and go under. Drown. Until next time Paddy Harper [Subscribe now]( Enjoy The Ampersand? 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