This post is an update on the Cyril Ramaphosa's perilous path to renew the ANC.
A few days ago I posted an effortpost explaining Ramaphosa's plan to fix ANC run municipalities by centralising the selection of mayors in the national body of the party, rather than leaving it to regions. The ANC opened nominations even to non-members, and promised a mayoral selection process based on qualification and professionalism.
These changes were opposed by regions, who twice managed to prevent the announcement of the selected candidates. In terms of Acemoglu thought, this is a fight between centralising forces and decentralising forces, as in The Narrow Corridor.
The stalemate saw the ANC submit its candidate lists so late that some lists were submitted incorrectly (they submitted the lists but didn'thit "submit as final"), putting the ANC at risk of being unable to properly contest six municipalities. That blunder was taken to court and the court has now sided with the ANC – their incorrect submission will still be accepted and their candidates can run.
Ramaphosa's side have now backed down slightly. The national ANC have said they will not announce the selected candidates. They don't want to sow division in the party before the election, and are worried that the losing candidates' supporters will not vote. The ANC is already behind the DA in big cities, and is at risk of losing majorities in other municipalities. They can't risk it.
Curiously, they don't say that they have abandoned the process as a whole, or that the selected candidates will not be installed. Just that they will not announce them. This is what I said in my Cupcake post: you never get the "decisive" leadership, just endless compromise right up until the very last mimute.
The relevance of this for this sub is that it is a live case study of the dynamics described in Acemoglu's The Narrow Corridor. A corrupt party with an absent leviathan is centralising, but the decentralising forces are pushing back. Can they reach a balance that reforms the party? Or will the stalemate and the fighting destroy the ANC entirely?
It is also interesting because it shows what I have always said about the ANC: they are institutionalists at heart, corrupted or not. The ANC believe that the way you solve problems is through rules – making them, changing them or scrapping them. Unlike the majority of South Africa's political parties, they are actually doing playing the game of politics: building coalitions of people who disagree and fighting over rules and processes that distribute power even risking the destruction of their party (one way or the other).
South Africa's small, stagnant parties (small than UDM) need to learn from the ANC how to actually play the game of politics, as messy, risky, and chaotic as it may be. The small parties are not like this and that is why they're small.
I am posting this now, rather than waiting for the final outcome of the ANC stalemate, because the value is in observing the system as the various incentives play out, rather than to do retrospective analysis and pretend it was all obvious.
The local government elections are in two weeks.
Posted by Top_Lime1820