Reversing Institutional Decay A Tall Order for an ANC in Freefall

Zamikhaya Maseti

The African National Congress (ANC) has released its National General Council (NGC) policy document, ahead of the gathering scheduled for 8–12 December 2025 at NASREC. The 49-page document demands serious political engagement and intellectual patience. Most certainly, members of the ANC have historically demonstrated the capacity to assimilate and comprehend documents of this magnitude. I have no doubt.

My cursory review of this 49-page document highlights its frankness in addressing the gravity of the moment, while also exposing areas where false theoretical assumptions are made. This is what makes the document demanding, for it requires not only reading but rigorous engagement, critique, and ideological clarity. 

The forthcoming NGC will test not only their ability to process complex policy but also their resolve to confront the harsh realities of the present conjuncture. Historically, the NGC has functioned as a political instrument of review, a mid-term mirror held up to the movement itself. It assesses how far the ANC has travelled in implementing the policy resolutions of the last conference, which ushered in a serving national leadership for a particular epoch. 

For over thirty years, ANC members have wielded this mechanism not only to shape government but also to craft the strategic direction of the State. Its election manifesto has always drawn nourishment from the deliberations of the NGC.

Yet the current conjuncture imposes a new and sobering reality. This year’s NGC convenes under the shadow of a Government of National Unity (GNU). According to my own Political Economy Dictionary, the GNU represents regression. It is a confirmation that the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution is partially deconsolidated in the aftermath of the May 29, 2024, national elections. 

The ANC’s Parliamentary and Governmental Hegemony has been decimated with its 40 per cent electoral outcome, translating into a humiliating loss of five million voters. From a once unassailable majority, the ANC now commands just 159 seats in the National Assembly out of 400, compelled to negotiate every policy shift and every legislative instrument.

By contrast, the Democratic Alliance, once derided as a regional party, has risen to 21 per cent with 87 seats. The MK Party holds 14.58 per cent with 58 seats, and the Economic Freedom Fighters, although reduced, still hold 39 seats. This reconfiguration signalled the end of ANC Parliamentary Hegemony. The ANC, long accustomed to governing from a position of strength, is now forced into a politics of consensus, its strategic horizon shaped by ideological opponents and erstwhile adversaries.

In the GNU, the ANC is compelled to co-govern with erstwhile political adversaries and ideological opponents. This conjuncture represents not just a tactical retreat but a dialectical rupture, where the vanguard character of the ANC as the principal agent of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) is diluted. It is a crisis of authority and a crisis of legitimacy. This is the objective reality that the delegates at the will have to confront.

This rupture crystallises a new epochal contradiction. On the one side stands the imperative of revolutionary continuity, embodied in the NDR as the unfinished mandate of liberation. On the other side stands the project of Liberal consolidation. This contradiction has assumed a tangible, historical character, embedded in the Parliamentary arithmetic, the loss of five million voters, and the erosion of the ANC’s mass base. 

The ANC is suspended in this dialectic, pulled between the historic task of completing the NDR and the pragmatic compulsion of administering the State in coalition with its ideological adversaries. The 2005 NGC became the site where the seeds of internal contestation were germinating, with factions positioning themselves for the decisive 2007 Polokwane Conference. Policy debates were inseparable from questions of leadership succession, illustrating how the NGC reflects not only programme but power. The 2010 NGC, coming after Polokwane and amid global recession, sharpened discussions on economic transformation and the State’s capacity to intervene decisively in the economy.

It was at this point that the ANC began to wrestle more openly with the contradictions of governing in a globalised economy while holding on to transformation. The 2015 gathering, meanwhile, wrestled with the intractable questions of organisational renewal and corruption, already foreshadowing the legitimacy crisis that would later explode into State Capture. These two councils signalled the ANC’s slow slide from moral authority to defensive survival.

Each of these NGCs mirrored the dialectic of the moment, between revolutionary consolidation and the pressures of governance, between mass legitimacy and elite accommodation, between vision and survival. It is within this lineage that the NGC on 8–12 December 2025 at NASREC must be situated.

But unlike its predecessors, it is convened at a historical low point; the ANC no longer commands hegemony, it no longer possesses the comfort of overwhelming majorities, and it is no longer the unchallenged custodian of national destiny. For the first time since 1994, the ANC enters an NGC not as the dominant force but as a diminished actor in a coalition government, compelled to negotiate its revolutionary mission within the straitjacket of the GNU. For three decades, the ANC enjoyed hegemony in both form and substance. 

Its electoral dominance of above 60 per cent allowed it to govern without compromise, but more importantly, its historical authority as the Liberator of the oppressed gave it moral leadership over society. This dual power, numerical dominance, and ideological legitimacy constituted the backbone of its vanguard character.

That moment has passed. The 2024 electoral outcome has fractured both pillars of hegemony. Numerically, the ANC’s fall to 40 per cent has dismantled its parliamentary strength, leaving it unable to govern without partners. Ideologically, the loss of five million voters represents not just a statistical decline but a withdrawal of confidence by the very masses who once saw the ANC as the natural custodian of their aspirations. 

The ANC no longer dictates the national agenda; it negotiates it. Its ideological horizon is no longer revolutionary continuity but pragmatic compromise, a politics of survival dressed up as national unity. Its authority has shifted from that of a hegemonic force to that of a participant in a negotiated consensus, where its revolutionary clarity is subordinated to the logic of class accommodation.

The delegates should not squander the opportunity by reducing it to leadership contestation, as was the case in the 2005 NGC at the University of Pretoria. That gathering, consumed by succession battles, became the midwife of the crisis that engulfed the country from 2009 to 2019. Out of that moment was born a protracted season of factionalism, State Capture, institutional decay, and the squandered promise of a Developmental State. 

South Africa lost not only a decade of growth but also a decade of moral authority, a decade of coherence, and a decade of possibility. History must therefore serve as a guide. The NGC cannot descend into narrow calculations of leadership or palace intrigues; it must rise to the level of strategic deliberation, of reasserting the National Democratic Revolution as the compass of transformation. 

Delegates who will attend the NGC must confront this dialectical lesson: when a revolutionary movement elevates internal contestation above the historic mission, it loses both authority and legitimacy. The crisis of hegemony that now engulfs the ANC has its seeds in the 2005 NGC. To repeat that mistake would not only betray the NDR but also consign the ANC to a trajectory of terminal decline.

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a Political Economy Analyst.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.