African National Congress

The African National Congress (or ANC) is the Republic of South Africa's governing political party. It has been the ruling party of post-apartheid South Africa on the national level, beginning with the election of Nelson Mandela in the 1994 election. Today, the ANC remains the dominant political party in South Africa, winning every election since 1994. Cyril Ramaphosa, the incumbent President of South Africa, has served as leader of the ANC since 18 December 2017.

Quotes

The ANC is a national liberation movement committed to the liberation of all the people of South Africa, black and white, from racial fear, hatred and oppression. ~ Tokyo Sexwale

• Like many South Africans, I have been wrestling with what the ANC has become. I had to pay homage to what it once was, and what it once stood for.
  • Nikiwe Bikitsha in OPINION: Nikiwe Bikitsha reflects on what remains of the ANC in Lusaka, 702.co.za (28 March 2017)

• I want to warn young people who lend their ears to radicals and who play around with the music from [ANC headquarters in] Lusaka - they will end up inside the bear's fur coat, but they will no longer be able to live.
  • P. W. Botha at an election meeting in Pietermaritzburg on 30 April 1987, as cited by Andrew Donaldson, Sunday Times, 5 November 2006

• Today the state coffers are empty. Even the ruling party is feeling it. The country has taken out an IMF bailout which is being poured into infrastructure. The president’s advisors are pushing for land reform. One of them, Ruth Hall, was advising Robert Mugabe on how to liquidate his pale kulaks back in 2002. Others, like Thembeka Ngcukaitobi, call for the fulfilment of the genocidal prophecy of Makhanda, and have whites deprived of all land and all moveable and liquid assets. By legislating to outlaw possession of firearms for the specific purpose of self-defence, much like in the West, the South African government now seems to be preparing the ground for this. Except it has no real power to enforce it, or any other general law or policy.
  • Robert Duigan, As South Africa, So The World, IM-1776, August 2021

• [ANC] leaders are scapegoating and blaming the Afrikaner minority group for the current economic turmoil, unemployment and poverty. All Afrikaners are presented as land thieves and land is presented as the sole solution to all of South Africa’s socio-economic challenges.
  • Pieter Groenewald in November 2008, as quoted by Marianne Merten in Expropriation without compensation set to pass next hurdle, but there’s a long road ahead, Daily Maverick (3 December 2018)

• It has escaped with little comment that the ANC vote in the Western Cape fell yet again in 2019. Yet we all know that for the past several decades there has been an immense inward flow of Africans from the Eastern Cape into the Western Cape – as well as many Africans from the rest of Africa. Simple demography would have led one to expect a steadily increasing ANC vote in such circumstances. In fact the very opposite has happened and the ANC, which once ruled the province, is now down to 28.63%. ... is there anywhere else in South Africa where a heavily increasing African population goes hand in hand with an ANC vote falling at every election while the DA scores around double the ANC total?
  • R. W. Johnson in Strange days in the DA, PoliticsWeb and BizNews (22 May 2019)

• No one in the ANC is suggesting that whites should be discriminated against in the resolution of the land question.
  • Pallo Jordan as quoted by Gemma Ritchie in Mbeki’s document ‘a falsification’ of ANC principles, Mail & Guardian (26 September 2018)

• We know that disrespect for property rights has a detrimental effect on any country's economy. We have the example of Venezuela as well as Zimbabwe close [by]. … We know that [the international community] will not invest in a country where your property rights are not safe and are not protected. This is why we need to avert [expropriation without compensation, and investors] need to send a strong message to the [ANC] government to rethink their position. Millions of people will be detrimentally affected, even those that don't have property. We see that in Zimbabwe where there is a 90% unemployment rate.
  • Kallie Kriel, CEO of AfriForum, calling on the international community, investors and rating agencies to take a stance on ANC policy (31 July 2018)

• The people who have now taken power in the name of the ANC are working very hard to destroy the legacy of Mandela, to destroy the constitution that we achieved. And it calls upon us now that to take a stand to say no, but we cannot accept that you destroy our constitutional order.
  • Mosiuoa Lekota in September 2018, as quoted in AfriForum, COPE team up to fight land expropriation without compensation, eNCA (10 September 2018)

• Our people are still staying in the same houses that were given to them by apartheid. Our people still stay in the shacks. They came and abandoned you here. They have forgotten about you. They are going to come back next year during elections and say ‘no, you must remember Nelson Mandela, this is the party of Mandela, and we have come a long way with the ANC’. Mandela is no more. He is dead, with his party.
  • Julius Malema, as quoted by Siviwe Feketha in Mandela is no more. He is dead, with his party, says Malema Mandela is no more. He is dead, with his party, says Malema, www.iol.co.za (26 July 2018)

• South Africa is not a poor country. As I have said, our budget this year is R126 billion. [The ANC] also are going to reorganise the budget, restructure the budget in order to avoid the wastage of Apartheid. We will be able to use the country's resources in a more efficient manner, and to prevent the corruption which is so endemic in the National Party government. The gravy trains, where most of the funds of the country have gone [to], have come to an end. We have committed ourselves to leaders trying to lead a style of life similar to those of the community. ... I am going to suggest that my own salary, if I am elected as state president, must be cut. I am doing that unlike the National Party government which has ... attempted to pay large sums to the director generals, when there are 5 million people unemployed, when there are 7 million people without houses. We are not going to live as fat cats. My friends in the National Party can do that, that is what they know.
  • Nelson Mandela in De Klerk, Mandela pre-election debate rebroadcast, 14 April 2019, SABC (14 April 1994)

• Today it feels good to be an African. It feels good that I can stand here as a South African and as a foot soldier of a titanic African army, the African National Congress, to say to all the parties represented here, to the millions who made an input into the processes we are concluding, to our outstanding compatriots who have presided over the birth of our founding document, to the negotiators who pitted their wits one against the other, to the unseen stars who shone unseen as the management and administration of the Constitutional Assembly, the advisers, the experts and the publicists, to the mass communication media, to our friends across the globe -- congratulations and well done!
  • Thabo Mbeki, "I Am an African" speech, 8 May 1996
• … the strategic task of the ANC is to position the peoples of Africa, and specifically the indigenous South African Africans, as frontline fighters for the creation of a non-racial, democratic, humane and humanist global human society. … the ANC has never identified its principal objective as being accession to positions of political power. Where striving to access such political power became unavoidable because of the 1994 victory of the Democratic Revolution, the ANC has sought to explain that it would use such political power to transform South Africa into the kind of entity we have sought to define. In essence, responding to the racist, colonial domination of the indigenous African majority which characterised politics and governance in South Africa and virtually the entirety of the rest of Africa as it was formed in 1912, the ANC took exactly the opposition view – i.e. that it stood for the freedom of all humanity, black and white, including the colonial oppressors, and much more besides! Established in 1912 as a “Parliament of the Black Oppressed”, pursuing the strategic objective we have just stated, the ANC came to be accepted especially by the indigenous African majority as virtually their only true representative and defender of their interests.
  • Thabo Mbeki in What then about Land Expropriation without Compensation?, Thabo Mbeki Foundation (September 2018)

• You could understandably reduce terrorism by improving security and increasing the number of police spies, but it can only finally be reduced by removing the number of just causes. ANC terrorism was pointless after the end of apartheid.
  • John Mortimer, Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life, Chapter 15: Interesting Times (2003)

• Over the past few weeks, as the world commemorates Nelson Mandela, an uncomfortable spotlight has been shone on Conservatives who branded the ANC as terrorists in the 1980s.
  • Mohamed Nasheed quoted on BBC News, "Mohamed Nasheed: climate denying Conservatives “risk irrelevancy”" (14 January 2014)

• To witness the damage a single person can inflict on a country, one can head to South Africa. Following the liberation from apartheid, Nelson Mandela, as president from 1994, created a climate of reconciliation while democratizing the country and liberalizing the economy. Under Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, inflation was tamed, government debt was halved and the growth rate reached 5 per cent. The outside world thought South Africa could be the next economic miracle. But the leader of the ANC’s left wing, Jacob Zuma, agitated against this ‘neoliberal’ model and gained power in 2009–18 on a programme promising that state control of the economy would create fair distribution. He really did change things – for the worse.
  • Johan Norberg, The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World (2023)

• Zuma jacked up public spending, but for consumption and corruption, not investment. State-owned companies were drained by Zuma and his lackeys, who are suspected of having looted about the equivalent of 20 per cent of GDP. Constant power outages and collapsing infrastructure contributed to growth collapsing and soon becoming negative. After being halved under the predecessors, public debt doubled under Zuma. Extreme poverty had also halved under the previous administration; under Zuma it not only stopped declining but even began to increase. That’s the way it usually goes. Strongmen who complain that growth takes too long to provide results are like the farmer who has no patience with the harvest and quickly makes himself popular by letting everyone gorge on the seed. Fewer seeds means you will have less to eat next season. Sooner or later, you’ll run out of other people’s harvests, as Thatcher would have said.
  • Johan Norberg, The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World (2023)

• The apartheid government was characterised by repression. The current [ANC] government is characterised by predation. This predatory behaviour has become clear by the huge losses the fiscus has suffered by the predation of a few who manipulated the levers of power with impunity and continue to do so. … They have emptied the public purse, now they aim to empty out our private wallets, whether it be by high VAT, high petrol taxes, or the latest scam, land expropriation.
  • Leslie Petrik in a letter to the Daily Maverick, After apartheid repression, South Africans are now falling prey to predation, Daily Maverick (25 July 2018)

• For most Africans, Gaddafi is a generous man, a humanist, known for his unselfish support for the struggle against the racist regime in South Africa. If he had been an egotist, he wouldn’t have risked the wrath of the West to help the ANC both militarily and financially in the fight against apartheid. This was why Mandela, soon after his release from 27 years in jail, decided to break the UN embargo and travel to Libya on 23 October 1997. Mandela didn’t mince his words when the former US president Bill Clinton said the visit was an ‘unwelcome’ one – ‘No country can claim to be the policeman of the world and no state can dictate to another what it should do’. He added – ‘Those that yesterday were friends of our enemies have the gall today to tell me not to visit my brother Gaddafi, they are advising us to be ungrateful and forget our friends of the past.
  • Jean-Paul Pougala, writer of London Evening Post, quoted in The New York Times (18 April 2011)

• The last decade has seen many of the gains of the early years of democracy reversed through state capture and corruption, a failure of collective leadership, policy uncertainty and a growing distance between the people and their movement and their government. We have had to come to terms with the erosion of the values of the ANC and confront difficult questions about the quality and integrity of our leadership as the ANC.
  • Cyril Ramaphosa, At a memorial lecture for the late struggle icon Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in Johannesburg, as quoted by Siviwe Feketha in Ramaphosa slams Zuma's tenure, calls on ANC to tackle divisions, IOL (30 September 2018)

• The ANC is a national liberation movement committed to the liberation of all the people of South Africa, black and white, from racial fear, hatred and oppression.
  • Tokyo Sexwale addressing the Pretoria Supreme Court judge in 1978 shortly after his conviction on a charge of high treason, as quoted in Down with Afrikaans - Oakes, D. (ed.), 1988. Illustrated history of South Africa – The real story, Reader’s Digest: Cape Town, sahistory.org.za

• When the ANC says that they will target British companies, this shows what a typical terrorist organisation it is. I fought terrorism all my life and if more people fought it, and we were all more successful, we should not have it and I hope that everyone in this hall will think it is right to go on fighting terrorism. They will if they believe in democracy.
  • Margaret Thatcher at a Press Conference, in answer to Alan Merrydew of BCTV News who asked what her response was "to a reported ANC statement that they will target British firms in South Africa?" (17 October 1987)

• We are in an election year and it is not advisable for us to subscribe to the lie that the past decade has been a completely wasted one. It was the ANC in charge, and we should not be taking such a message of defeatism to those who have given us their votes, and trust.
  • Jacob Zuma on twitter, as quoted by Quinton Mtyala in Zuma hits back over Ramaphosa's 'nine lost years' comments, IOL News (29 January 2019)