Tshediso Mangope

Yesterday I attended the Branch Biennial General Meeting in my branch. I was expecting politics, but what I found instead was unapologetic vulgarity. At some point, decency packed its bags and divorced the chamber.

A woman stood up and announced, with tall confidence, that she could stand naked on the table because she feared nothing. This was in addition to a plethora of rude things flying around.

For a moment, I wondered whether I had mistakenly walked into an ANC meeting or a late-night beerhall karaoke.

This is the curse of being a broad church. Once upon a time, being a broad church meant ideological diversity. Today, it means anything goes; no discipline, no decorum, no shame.

Nowadays, the only qualification for political participation other than paying the subscription is a willingness to embarrass the movement in public. Everyone is welcome, including political illiterates, attention seekers and professional disrupters who mistake chaos for radicalism.

Vulgarity has become a substitute for politics. If you cannot argue, shout. If you cannot reason, threaten. If you cannot persuade, remove your clothes. It seems we confuse being mass-based with being mannerless.

What makes this tragic is that all of this is done in the name of “fearlessness.” But there is nothing fearless about disorder. There is nothing radical about vulgarity. Standing naked on a table is not revolutionary; it is madness.

The founding fathers of the ANC taught us that freedom came with discipline. Oliver Tambo was very clear that “a revolutionary must be distinguished and distinguishable from a common criminal”. That distinction mattered because the struggle was moral before it was political. Our conduct today teaches the young ones that our minimum political programme is about freeing freedom from discipline.

The ANC’s authentic broad church produced the generation of Oliver Tambo. Today we struggle to produce a coherent sentence without insults and rudeness. The church has lost its altar, and the congregation is applauding the wrong things.

The real danger is not that the ANC is a broad church. The danger is that we have become a church without doctrine, without discipline and without self-respect.

Yesterday was not an isolated incident. It was a mirror. And what stared back at us was an organisation flirting with self-destruction. We have seen this play before, in almost all liberation movements that gained independence before us. Liberation movements are brought to heel not by enemies from without, but by scoundrels within.

We must decide whether we want to be a serious political force or a permanent stand-up situation. Reminded that history has been cruel to liberation movements and it certainly does not clap for nonsense.

*Tshediso Mangope is an ANC member in Mangaung and writes in his own capacity…

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of this publication (Journal News).