Obsession with factionalism neutralising ethical leaders

ANC’S 2027 ELECTIVE CONFERENCE

- PROF BHEKI MNGOMEZULU

SUPPORTERS of then ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma at the opening of the 52nd ANC conference in Polokwane on December 16, 2007. Factionalism has destroyed the party. What role will factional politics play in dictating who emerges victorious in the 2027 ANC elective conference, asks the writer.

(AFP)

THE year 2027 will be a watershed moment for the ANC. It is during this year that the party will elect its new leadership. The ANC’s elective conference will find the party wounded and bleeding profusely.

Since the 2019 general election, the ANC has been falling out of favour with the electorate. In 2019, for the first time, the ANC obtained less than 60% of the national vote, only managing 57.50%.

This continued in the 2021 Local Government Election (LGE), where the ANC's popular vote was 45.59%. During the 2024 general election, the ANC performed dismally, only recording 40.18% of the national vote. These figures point to a party that is in constant decline.

But why is the ANC losing support? There are several plausible answers to this question. One of these answers is that more parties have been registered since the first democratic election in 1994, where only 19 political parties participated in the election that was held during that year.

The second plausible response would be that the ANC has seen many splinter organisations that left the party and assumed independent status. Apart from the PAC, which was formed in 1959, the parties that have pulled out of the ANC in post-apartheid South Africa include UDM, Cope, EFF, and the MKP. Logically, leaders of these splinter parties took ANC members with them.