Just finished reading the book, Sabotage: Eskom under Siege, written by investigative journalist Kyle Cowan and there was an interesting part towards the end of the book, where Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, speaking in his capacity as Eskom Chairperson, makes the following comment about the issue of meritocracy in appointing people to take up senior roles within the state and its many entities, "If we want to redress the past, we need to do it with the people who meet the criteria. The danger is that if you attempt to redress the past with people who do not meet the criteria, you are setting them up for failure...Once you give people false power, and they themselves know they are not qualified, they mess up. They don't follow the rules because they were not appointed according to the rules."

This obviously caught my attention, in light of the brouhaha around the ANCs policy of cadre deployment, especially with the DA having recently won a case in the Johannesburg High Court that compels the ANC to make its cadre deployment committee meeting minutes and records available to the DA as the official opposition, whilst the DA is at the same time waiting for a separate court judgement that it hopes will declare the ANCs cadre deployment policy to be unconstitutional.

It is fair to say that cadre deployment (along with its supposed twin, the moving target that is called corruption) is often blamed as the main reason why things in South Africa are seemingly following a pattern that is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics, with entropy levels increasing at an alarming level.

It is generally assumed to be a given that cadre deployment has failed, has been ineffective and inefficient because of the fact that incompetent, unqualified politically connected ANC cadres have been deployed to critical positions within the state and because they are uneducated and unskilled, they have failed to deliver quality services and a better quality of life to South African society and are in fact achieving the opposite, taking South African society backwards (hence others astonishingly hanker after the apartheid days).

Has cadre deployment failed in South Africa and should we blame it and its twin corruption for all our ills? Addressing the ANC parliamentary caucus national staff lekgotla in 2005, former president Thabo Mbeki made the following statement, “The matter of the cadres of the movement has always been an important part of what constitutes the ANC, of what defines the ANC.” So, what then would constitute a cadre, given the existentially important role that cadreship plays within the ANC itself?

Cadres are those who embody the highest levels of a revolutionary organisation’s principles, values, history, policies, discipline and tradition. Cadres are those who have achieved sufficient political development to the point that they place their time, talents, gifts, skills, abilities at the hands of the revolutionary organisation in order to advance the people’s cause, not their own selfish ends.

Cadres are people of conviction who work within a collective (none of this popular individualism of western liberalism) who are constantly engaging in self-analysis and self-criticism, even as they work towards the fulfilment of revolutionary objectives. It bears reminding ourselves that the ANC is not a party of liberal democrats, who are happy to defend and maintain the status quo, but rather the ANC is a liberation movement of revolutionary democrats that is dedicated to the radical socio-economic transformation of South African society, collapsing the status quo and establishing a new order that will be for the betterment of the lives of all South Africans.

Revolutions, like the ANCs national democratic revolution, can only succeed based on the quality of the cadres they produce. So, it goes without saying that a revolutionary movement like the ANC should be a constant factory that produces cadres of the highest calibre, who can help to address the complex systemic and structural problems of society.

These are cadres who would carry the responsibility of transforming society and building the country, who would understand the aims and objectives of the ANC and execute them, who would be experts in various fields in order to be change agents with transformative impact, who would have expertise and skills which would make them relevant and able to make significant impact in various sectors of the SA economy and SA society at large, who would live with the people and be amongst them and work with them to make society better as opposed to being distant from them. It goes without saying that if what I am saying about cadreship is true, there has been no cadre deployment in truth in post 94 SA, because these are not the kind of people we have seen being deployed, hence the crisis we find ourselves in.

Perhaps there have been comrades that have been deployed and this is what has created the mess we are in, but as per the definition or description that I have given of cadreship above, we are yet to witness true cadre deployment in contemporary SA and that may actually be the fundamental problem.

There is a huge distinction between comradeship and cadreship and where the ANC appears to be failing SA society in the post 94 dispensation is in its cadre development policy and in the implementation of authentic cadre deployment, because what we have seen up to now is nothing close to cadre deployment.

As part of its renewal drive, if the ANC wants to remain relevant to South African society, this is an area that must receive maximum attention. It is time for the true cadres to stand up and be counted, because this lot that has been messing the country up till this juncture, are in no way cadres, in the truest sense of the word.

What SA society needs is a proper implementation of cadre deployment, something that we have not really seen in the post 94 dispensation, so au contraire, cadre deployment is not the real problem, because we have not truly experienced it yet. True cadres are those who live and act with the conviction that is evinced in the words of this poem by Don Mattera,

“Remember to call at my grave
When freedom finally
Walks the land
So that I may rise
To tread familiar paths
To see broken chains
Fallen prejudice
Forgotten injury
Pardoned pains.

And when my eyes have filled their sight
Do not run away for fright
If I crumble to dust again
It will only be the bliss
Of a long-awaited dream
That bids me rest
When freedom finally walks the land.”

Mugabe Ratshikuni works for the Gauteng provincial government; He is an activist with a passion for social justice and transformation. He writes here in his personal capacity.