ANC in dire need of a consultative conference to fix moral decay

Zamikhaya Maseti

As the Madlanga Commission proceedings unfold, the ANC faces its most defining moments since the 1969 Morogoro Consultative Conference, a test of conscience, survival, and renewal.

The Movement, once redefined its moral compass in exile, today it must confront the erosion of that very moral foundation within its own house. The unfolding events around the Madlanga Commission echo that earlier moment of reckoning, demanding honesty, courage, and self-correction.

The recent raid on the Rustenburg property of controversial businessman Brown Mogotsi has opened another troubling chapter in the intersection between politics, money, and morality within our liberation movement.

What appeared to be a poorly coordinated police operation has now evolved into a potentially explosive political scandal. In his interview with Xoli Mngambi on Newzroom Afrika, Mogotsi issued a chilling warning, “abanye bazo khala,” which simply means some will cry tears. 

He was certainly making indirect reference to some ANC leaders with business ties to him and fellow criminal syndicates. His mention of Vusumuzi Cat Matlala’s R100,000 contribution to the African National Congress January 8th Dinner is deeply unsettling.

The suggestion that money derived from criminal activities may have entered the coffers of the ANC’s premier anniversary celebration is not only scandalous, it strikes at the ethical heart of the movement.

Herein lies the existential crisis facing the ANC, the blurring of lines between legitimate political fundraising and the contamination of its historic institutions by illicit money. The January 8th commemoration, once a moment of unity and renewal, now risks being remembered as the event that exposed the moral bankruptcy of the organisation.

If the revelations before the Madlanga Commission confirm Mogotsi’s claims, the ANC will have to confront not only the sources of its funding but also the corrosion of its revolutionary ethos.

Surely, Brown Mogotsi is hellbent on damaging and destroying the African National Congress. His posture is not that of a man seeking redemption, but of one determined to drag the movement into the mud of his own making. The damage does not end with him or his business partners.

The mere mention by Brown Mogotsi that Vusumuzi Cat Matlala contributed R100,000 to the January 8th Dinner has already shaken public confidence and cast a shadow over the party’s moral standing. What Mogotsi threatens to reveal before the Madlanga Commission could well trigger political convulsions and epileptic seizures among tried and tested cadres who gave their youth and their lives to the noble cause of building this movement through decades of struggle.

The burning question confronting the ANC today is this: will it wait for its leaders, particularly those in the upper echelons, to cry tears before it acts? Or will it rise now with revolutionary courage to rid itself of the ethical corrosion that has taken root within its body politic? The ANC can no longer afford the comfort of inertia or the illusion of business as usual.

Every act of silence becomes complicity, and every day of inaction deepens the wound inflicted upon the organisation’s moral fabric. If the ANC fails to act decisively, it risks becoming not the victim of Brown Mogotsi’s vengeance, but the architect of its own destruction. The Madlanga Commission has become a mirror before which the ANC must now look at itself. It is no longer about individual wrongdoing, but about the collective consciousness of a movement that once defined ethical politics and the pursuit of justice.

If history is any guide, the ANC has always found renewal in moments of deep crisis. The ANC elders often remind us that the movement carries within its DNA a tradition of self-correction. Yet my honest submission is that the self-correction thesis is tired. The last genuine and successful self-correction occurred since the 1969 Morogoro Conference.

Some historians and ANC veterans define Morogoro as a watershed consultative conference that reoriented and repurposed the ANC. It was at Morogoro that the movement produced the famous ANC Strategy and Tactics Document, a revolutionary blueprint that guided it until the democratic breakthrough of 1994. That conference was not a ritual of introspection, but a revolutionary rupture, a decisive confrontation with complacency, ideological confusion, and organisational drift.

In view of the current crisis and what more is still to be revealed at the Madlanga Commission, my considered view is that the ANC must convene a Consultative Conference in mid-2026. A repeat of the Morogoro Conference is necessary if the ANC is to survive and weather the political storms that threaten to tear its soul asunder.

The Consultative Conference that I am proposing must serve as the moral and political reset of the ANC, a moment of self-confrontation and collective renewal. It must reawaken the revolutionary spirit that once animated this glorious movement of the people, reassert its ideological clarity and hegemony over society, and restore its ethical integrity.

The conference will hear the cries and concerns from the basic units of the ANC, from its broader membership, from ANC supporters and sympathisers who are deeply worried about a movement drifting dangerously close to the cliff’s edge, suspended in a political cliffhanger.

The Movement now finds itself suspended in a political cliffhanger, uncertain of its next historic turn. It has lost its majoritarian hegemony in Parliament and now governs through consensus within the framework of the Government of National Unity. That electoral setback should have awakened the movement. It should have compelled its broad membership to reflect honestly and fearlessly on what has gone wrong. 

Yet, the moral and political awakening that such a defeat demands has not fully materialised. The polling houses are already projecting a perilous 32 percent outcome in the forthcoming 2026 National Local Government Elections, and a similar trajectory is being forecast for the 2029 National and Provincial Elections.

If this warning is ignored, the ANC will continue to drift, suspended in a political cliffhanger of its own making. The Consultative Conference, therefore, should not be about the 2029 succession battles, which are bound to turn ugly, but about saving the ANC as an organisation and breathing life back into the popular self-correction thesis. Now is the time to save the movement from itself.

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a Political Economy Analyst and holds a Magister Philosophiae (M.Phil.) Degree in South African Politics and Political Economy from the erstwhile University of Port Elizabeth (UPE), now Nelson Mandela University.

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