It was one of those weeks for the ANC. Every platform you can think of was dominated by flamed conversations on its stance on land expropriation without compensation.
In New York, President Cyril Ramaphosa was giving repeated assurances to world leaders and investors that everything was being handled with care.
Back home, his party was fighting fires after a former president penned a 30-page pamphlet laying into his party on the matter.
Born a year before that seminal moment – the enactment of the 1913 Native Land Act – the ANC has throughout its history tried to be many things to many people, but being advocates of the land question to any meaningful extent was never one of those.
Rival political parties have in the past accused the ANC of promoting only its history, or worse, of distorting others’. The least it can do is distort its own, and therein came the value of Thabo Mbeki’s pamphlet.
The land act was one of the most horrendous actions of white minority rule.
At the stroke of a pen, not only did the settler minority take from blacks what they already had, but sought to bar future generations from having.
The act brought an end to tenant farming and individual tenure, thereby forcing blacks into being migrant labourers at the service of the white baas.
But as Luli Callinicos, the author of Oliver Tambo’s authorised biography, Beyond the Engeli Mountains, writes, the ANC objected to the enactment of the land act, but at best these were confined to “a number of respectful but fervent protests and deputations to government officials”.
Tambo’s protégé, of course, dismisses this.
In his pamphlet he details the ANC’s ideology and principles, and how they differed from the breakaway parties, the PAC and the EFF.
Mbeki’s departure point is an assertion that from its founding constitution to its bible, the Freedom Charter, the ANC stance was not only unambiguous, but adequately captured both the ideological and principled stances of the movement.
He illuminates his points by quoting extensively from writings and speeches of such ANC leaders as Pixley ka Seme, Chief Albert Luthuli and Dr A B Xuma, and by citing, among others, two 1991 ANC policy documents, “Ready to Govern” and “The Policy on the Restitution of Land Rights”, as well as the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme.
So, while some of his comrades these days don’t mind being told that their movement has been on the wrong side of history on the land question and won’t defend the fact that the ANC consciously chose a different path, Mbeki is not shy to get into where the ANC differed with the PAC then and with the EFF now.
He is sticking to and defending a position he still believes was good for SA.
Obviously not chuffed by the ANC’s December conference resolution, he suggests the ANC’s desire to stay in power may be the principal driving force.
Whether or not Mbeki is out to protect whites – as the EFF charged this week – is really not the issue.
Revisionism and populism should concern everyone.
Amending the constitution may in fact be what we ultimately need to address the issue comprehensively and, hopefully, once and for all.
But to make that pre-determination now, in the absence of any compelling evidence that the ANC government even tried to address the issue using the currently available instruments, is both disingenuous and dangerous.
We didn’t need a constitutional review committee to tell us that people need land, or that the government’s attempts at reforms have been pathetic.
What we need instead is an open, honest and thorough appraisal of 24 years of the ANC government’s mismanagement or incompetence.
That should have preceded any parliamentary process that may lead to constitutional amendments.
The danger with the approach being followed now is that it stopped the ANC from accounting for its dismal performance and then allowed it to prescribe its own, convenient solution to a lot of problems that are in fact of its own making, or downright ineptitude.
The ANC’s newfound stance on land has everything to do with expediency.
It is a disingenuous, dangerous and pathetic attempt at masking the ANC’s abject failure on the land question.
In the 24 years it’s been in power, it didn’t use currently available constitutional provisions, for it never thought of land as so serious an issue that warranted the kind of focus and attention that the Mbekis gave to the black economic empowerment, for example.
ANC leaders were never as single-minded about redistributing land to the people as Jacob Zuma was about dishing out to the Guptas so that they and his son, Duduzane, could grab everything under the SA sun.
What has forced the ANC’s hand is a recognition that it’s been dismal in its handling of this issue and facing the real possibility of losing more power in next year’s election to the EFF.
It had to decide whether it sticks to non-racialism and suffers significant losses in the coming election, or go the populist route, win an election, consolidate and make amends.
Ramaphosa and everyone backing him knew at Nasrec that there was no plausible explanation to their resolution and he knew it as he was explaining himself in New York.
Neither its history, nor the current constitutional provisions prevent the ANC from doing what it needs to do.
Not that ANC leaders are listening, or even bothered.