Renewal in SA and the ANC will remain elusive as long as the ANC fails to come to terms with the fact that much of the recent violence in the country arises from its own doing. This, in fact, is an optimistic view. A strong possibility is that the ANC is unlikely to be saved from its self-inflicted wounds.
General Siphiwe Nyanda is a former South African military commander and politician. He served as Chief of the South African National Defence Force from 1998 to 2005 and Minister of Communications from 2009 to 2010.
The ANC does not seem to be acknowledging its past mistakes and accepting some culpability for the recent mayhem in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.
All previous conferences of the ANC since the Mbeki leadership have been alerted to the growing political weaknesses of its general membership and the prevalence of careerists within its ranks. It has, however, done very little to address the problem. In fact, it exacerbated the problem by significantly growing its membership, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, after the Polokwane conference in 2007. In so doing it attracted undesirable elements, which most probably resulted in the internecine violence and killings within its ranks which have been…