There is a matter that the African National Congress can no longer afford to treat with diplomatic evasion or organisational nostalgia. The observation made by Comrade Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko, Gauteng Provincial Deputy Coordinator, cuts to the bone of a profound organisational pathology. What she describes as the “new tendency of the new cadre” is not a marginal aberration. It is the crystallisation of a deeper infiltration: the steady colonisation of a liberation movement by careerists who regard the ANC not as a historic instrument of national emancipation, but as a convenient ladder for personal ascent.
This cadre does not measure the health of the organisation by its capacity to win the confidence of the electorate, to deepen the National Democratic Revolution, or to advance the material and spiritual liberation of the South African people. Success is recalibrated in purely private terms: nomination for deployment, placement on a preferred slate, or the elevation of one’s factional champion. When that personal calculus is frustrated, the response is not disciplined internal contestation but the deliberate manufacture of disorder. Meetings are disrupted, organisational programmes are undermined, election campaigns are sabotaged, deployees are targeted for failure, and the movement itself is publicly traduced on social media. Supporters are discouraged; morale is poisoned. What presents itself as political difference is, in reality, the politics of entitlement unmasked.
Nowhere is this pathology more starkly revealed than in the emerging practice of aggrieved cadres dragging the organisation itself into the courts of law once their personal ambitions have been thwarted. When internal democratic processes fail to deliver the desired deployment or positional outcome, the careerist impulse does not yield to collective discipline. Instead, it externalises the conflict, treating the ANC as an adversary to be litigated against rather than a movement to be built. Court papers become the new instruments of factional warfare. Interdicts, urgent applications and publicised legal battles are deployed not in defence of organisational principle, but in pursuit of individual reinstatement, preferment or the nullification of decisions that obstruct personal advancement.
This litigious reflex is the clearest proof that the ANC has been hijacked as a convenient ladder for private ascent. A genuine revolutionary cadre understands that internal contestation, however sharp, remains bounded by the organisation’s own constitutional and political processes. To haul the movement before the bourgeois courts is to declare that one’s personal claim upon position supersedes the collective authority of the organisation. It converts membership into a proprietary interest and the ANC into a contested estate. In doing so, it strips the movement of its political character and reduces it to a site of individual career litigation. The organisation is no longer the vehicle of popular emancipation; it becomes the defendant in a private dispute over spoils.
Such conduct constitutes a direct assault on the foundational principles that have sustained the ANC across more than a century of struggle. Democratic centralism is reduced to a slogan emptied of content. Collective leadership is displaced by personality cults and factional patronage. Revolutionary discipline yields to factional anarchy and the courtroom. The culture of selfless service—once the ethical core of the movement—is subordinated to the logic of personal accumulation of power and position. In this inverted moral universe, membership becomes a claim upon the organisation rather than a commitment to it.
The ANC was never conceived as a career escalator. It emerged as the organised expression of a people’s determination to end racial domination, to reconstruct a fractured society on the foundations of non-racialism, non-sexism, democracy and social justice. Its legitimacy has always rested on its capacity to subordinate individual ambition to the collective mission. When that hierarchy is reversed—when the organisation is treated as a platform for private advancement rather than a vehicle for public transformation—the movement begins to lose both its moral authority and its strategic coherence. No liberation movement can successfully contest state power while it is internally consumed by those who view electoral victory merely as the precondition for their own preferment, and who are prepared to litigate against the organisation the moment that preferment is denied.
The remedy cannot be administrative accommodation or the quiet absorption of such tendencies in the name of unity. Unity without principle is merely the suspension of necessary struggle. What is required is deliberate political rehabilitation: a sustained process of ideological reorientation that reasserts the primacy of the collective over the individual, of organisational discipline over factional licence and litigious blackmail, and of service over entitlement. Cadres must be reminded, repeatedly and without apology, that membership of the ANC is not a pathway to personal enrichment or positional security. It is a lifelong undertaking of selfless commitment to the people of South Africa.
The organisation does not belong to factions, to slates, or to those who temporarily occupy its offices. It belongs to the people whose historic aspirations it was formed to advance. The movement remains larger than any individual, any grouping, or any generation of cadres. To restore that understanding is not an act of nostalgia; it is an act of political survival. Only when the careerist tendency—manifested in disruption, sabotage and the courtroom—is confronted, isolated and transformed can the ANC recover the organisational integrity and revolutionary purpose necessary to lead South Africa through the complex challenges of the present epoch.
I remain,
Nelson “Dieta Motjhapalong” Mokoena
