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Letter of the President
29 June , 2007
The ANC remains a true agent for change
[Editor’s Note: Below we publish an edited version of the Address of President Thabo Mbeki at the Opening of the ANC Policy Conference on June 27. We carry the full text of the Address on this website.]
We will be meeting over the next four days to carry out a vital task. That task is to try to define what the future of our country will be during the five-year period leading to the Centenary of our movement in 2012. That task is to try to define what the quality of life of the masses of our people will be when we celebrate the historic 100th birthday of the African National Congress.
The decisions we take at this Policy Conference will be finalised at our 52nd National Conference in December, our last Ordinary National Conference before we celebrate our Centenary on January 8th 2012 and participate in the 2009 General Elections. Before I proceed any further, I would like to say something about the African National Congress I have known for over 50 years.
What I know of the ANC is that it is a people’s movement. It is not, and has never been a movement that was formed 95 years ago merely to represent the interest of its members and its leaders. The African National Congress is and has always been a parliament of the people.
It was not formed to be, and has never been an instrument to advance the personal interests of its members, regardless of the positions within the organisation that any of its members might occupy. It has always asked of every important decision it has adopted, and all actions it has taken – do these bring the masses of our people closer to the realisation of their dreams!
I have spoken as I have because over the recent past all of us, loyal members of the African National Congress, have been subjected to a sustained barrage of propaganda that has suggested that we remain members of the ANC because we are determined to gain positions of power at the various levels of government, and thus to use these positions of power to accumulate wealth for ourselves and secure our positions of power by a mercenary dispensation of patronage.
Even as we prepared for this Policy Conference, that has absolutely nothing to do with who is or will be a leader of the African National Congress, by virtue of election by our membership, those responsible for the propaganda to which I have referred, have made it a point to assert that what we will do over the next four days is centrally driven by what they describe as “the leadership succession”.
The African National Congress was formed 95 years ago to liberate our people from colonial oppression and white minority domination. The colonial and apartheid power saw as the objects of its racist policies, all the black oppressed, regardless of race, gender and class, and sought to bribe the white working people to accept both subservience to the colonial and racist power and an obligation to cooperate in the subjugation of the black majority.
It is out of this reality that the ANC was born. It was formed to advance the national interests of all the oppressed, regardless of distinctions of race, class and gender. At the same time, our movement knew that the democratic revolution would also serve the fundamental interests of the white working people.
An important document was issued in 1996, entitled “The State and Social Transformation”, in which leaders of our broad movement said: “The most important current defining feature of the South African democratic state is that it champions the aspirations of the majority who have been disadvantaged by the many decades of undemocratic rule.
“However, there is a need to recognise that the South African democratic state also has the responsibility to attend to the concerns of the rest of the population which is not necessarily part of the majority defined above.
“To the extent that the democratic state is objectively interested in a stable democracy, so it cannot avoid the responsibility to ensure the establishment of a social order concerned with the genuine interests of the people as a whole, regardless of their racial, national, gender and class differentiation. There can be no stable democracy unless the democratic state attends to the concerns of the people as a whole and takes responsibility for the evolution of the new society.”
This defined the tasks of the ANC, and what we had to do to ensure that the masses of our people benefited from the victory of the democratic revolution.
Even 13 years after the victory of the democratic revolution, its defence and further entrenchment remain principal tasks of the National Democratic Revolution.
In this regard I must say that unfortunately the Discussion Document, “Legislature and Governance for a National Democratic Society” does not reflect on some of the major issues we should discuss relating to the task to defend our democratic gains and further deepen our democratic system, consistent with the perspective that – the people shall govern!
In this context I would like to mention such important issues as: the responsibility of the members and structures of our movement and the broad democratic movement to defend the democratic state and its institutions; respect for the institutions of the democratic state by members and supporters of our movement; respect for the institutions of the democratic state and public property owned by the people as a whole, during the exercise of the entrenched democratic right to engage in public demonstrations; the use of force during public demonstrations and mass protests resulting in such unacceptable actions as violent assaults against the people, intimidation in various forms, looting and destruction of property; the deepening of popular participation in governance through such interventions as the Ward Committee system and the Izimbizo process; the constituency work of our public representatives at national, provincial and local levels, and its relevance to the process of democratisation; the place of civic street committees and similar structures, as well as non-governmental and community based organisations in the process of deepening our democracy; the concerns raised by the media about restrictions to the freedom of the press, as well as issues that relate to the responsibility and public accountability of the media; and the full integration of the institution of traditional government within our democratic system of governance.
The Policy Conference gives us an opportunity to raise and consider all these and other important issues relating to our democratic system, which might inadvertently have been left out of our discussion documents.
Yet another important strategic objective of the national democratic revolution is the eradication of poverty and therefore the restoration of the dignity of all our people of all ages, including the young, the elderly and the disabled, by liberating them from the indignity of hunger and want.
Necessarily, therefore, the Policy Conference will have to assess the policy positions that have informed our activities since 1994 focused on: the growth and development of our economy; the more equitable sharing of the national wealth; the reduction of the inherited and persisting racial, gender and class disparities in the distribution of income and wealth; employment creation and poverty eradication; and the provision of a comprehensive and sustainable social security net.
Our movement and government have made it a point constantly to remind all our people that we still have a long way to go before we achieve one of the central goals of the national democratic revolution, the realisation of a better life for all our people, on a sustainable basis. In this regard, we have pointed to the challenge posed by unacceptably high levels of structural unemployment, persisting endemic poverty, and underdevelopment that affects many of our urban and rural areas.
As we have done in the past, we must again examine our policies and programmes to determine what we need to do to accelerate our progress towards the resolution of these problems.
In addition to the issues I have raised, and as all the delegates know, the strategic goals of the National Democratic Revolution, which also define this revolution, include building a non-racial society, a non-sexist society, a society that develops and empowers our people with disabilities, our youth and our children.
This Policy Conference has an obligation to ask itself the critically important questions – what progress have we made towards the realisation of these objectives? Have we put in place the policies and programmes to achieve these outcomes? What policies do we need to accelerate our advance towards building a country defined by the perspective of a truly caring and people-centred society?
I am certain that all of us would like to see greater progress in the pursuit of the important goal of the emancipation of women.
I am equally certain that all of us would like to see greater progress in the struggle to eradicate the legacy of racism which continues to manifest itself in our society in thousands of ways.
Similar challenges continue to face us with regard to the development and empowerment of the youth, the development and empowerment of people with disabilities, and the effective protection of the rights of children.
Again I am certain the Policy Conference will address all these important matters to empower our movement to accelerate our country’s advance towards the realisation of the goal of an inclusive and people-centred society.
In this regard, I must state and restate this fundamental truth with absolutely no hesitation, that objectively and practically, it is not possible to solve problems that have accumulated over 350 years in the mere 13 years of our democracy.
The issue of the relationship between the national democratic and the socialist revolutions has been raised once again. I hope that as we reflect on matters raised in the Draft Strategy and Tactics document we will discuss this important matter that our movement has grappled with for many decades. However, I must restate some of the fundamental conclusions that have informed the functioning of the broad movement for national liberation for many decades already, which enabled this movement to achieve the historic democratic victory of 1994 as a united and disciplined force for progressive change.
One of these conclusions is that there is a distinct, material and historically determined difference between the national democratic and the socialist revolutions. Objectively, and not by proclamation or conference resolutions, the ANC necessarily serves as the leader of the forces committed to the victory of the National Democratic Revolution, which struggle for the realisation of the national democratic goals of the masses of our people.
For many decades already, our movement, the African National Congress, precisely because it accepted and supported the right of our people to choose their path of development, accepted the proposition that our ally, the SACP, and not the ANC, would lead the forces and the struggle for the victory of the socialist revolution.
Historically, the ANC has deeply appreciated the fact that over the decades, the SACP has defined itself as an integral part of the national liberation movement, of our movement committed to the victory of the National Democratic Revolution, and therefore accepted that, objectively, the ANC must serve as the leader of the NDR.
In this context, the SACP has always understood that it could not delegate its socialist tasks to the ANC, consistent with the fact that the tasks of the socialist revolution could not be delegated to the National Democratic Revolution. For many decades, the SACP has therefore not seen and acted against the ANC as its political competitor, which we are not.
I must also add this, that already during the 1940s, if not earlier, our movement recognised the strategic position that our working class occupied and would occupy in our economy, in our society, and in all our struggles to achieve the victory of the National Democratic Revolution.
Accordingly, to speak about the motive forces of the National Democratic Revolution was to speak of the working class as a leading echelon in the struggle for national liberation, which would also organise and fight for its interests in terms of higher wages and better working conditions, and a role in determining the future of our country.
The historical evolution of our society has meant and means that for the ANC to secure the victory of the National Democratic Revolution, our movement must draw into the common struggle our country’s democratic forces, our country’s socialist forces, and our country’s proletariat.
This means that our Alliance, composed of the ANC, the SACP and COSATU, expanded to include SANCO, is not a product merely of intelligent conference resolutions. It is an imperative imposed on us by the nature of our society and the ideas and organisational formations that have developed within the bosom of that society.
The nature of the society we inherited and the impact on us of a rapidly changing international environment mean that our movement must indeed develop the necessary capacity, ingenuity and maturity successfully to “take responsibility for the evolution of the new society.”
The objective reality in our country is that in the same way that the defeat of the apartheid regime would not have been possible without the ANC, so would it not be possible to construct the new South Africa without the ANC.
This underlines the historic responsibility that rests on the shoulders of all the delegates to the Policy Conference, all other members of the ANC and all our structures, properly to position themselves to carry out the task of the fundamental social transformation of our country.
Consistent with our internationalist traditions, this obligation also relates to the work we must do further to advance the African Renaissance and contribute to the building of a better world, even as we confront the challenges of globalisation and the unjust distribution of power within the system of global governance.
I trust that all of us gave ourselves time to study and respond to the Discussion Document, “Towards the Centenary of the ANC: A Strategic Agenda for Organisational Renewal.” The Document ends by inviting “all cadres to join in the festival of ideas about the fundamental challenge of strengthening our movement so that it remains a trusted leader, loyal servant of the people and an agent for change!”
To discharge this historic responsibility, we must continue to pay the closest attention to the accomplishment of the task we set ourselves at the 2000 National General Council, the task to build new cadres who are truly committed to serve the people, and who must develop the necessary capacity and competence to handle the complex process of the construction of a new society and a new world.
This important Policy Conference must itself also be characterised by a festival of ideas, producing the rich complex of policies that will confirm to the people that their movement, the ANC, indeed remains a trusted leader, a loyal servant of the people, a true agent for such change as will enable the masses of our people fully to realise their aspirations.
This page was last updated on Friday June 29, 2007