ANC Branch Leader Warns Movement Faces Deep Crisis as Renewal Stalls

An essay by an African National Congress (ANC) member and branch chairperson Tania Bowers, published in the party’s weekly newsletter ANC Today, has issued one of the most candid internal warnings yet about the state of the governing party.

In the piece, Bowers argues that the ANC is confronting a profound crisis of organisational integrity, ideological clarity, and governance capacity; a crisis she says now threatens both the movement and South Africa’s democratic project.

Bowers writes that the ANC stands at a: “defining juncture” in its post-liberation trajectory, no longer able to ignore the erosion of legitimacy, the weakening of organisational structures and the widening gap between founding values and contemporary practice. She argues that the party’s much-publicised agenda of renewal has too often become a slogan rather than a meaningful process of reform.

According to her analysis, the recent reconfiguration of provincial structures reflects this problem. Instead of confronting corruption, factionalism, and unethical conduct, Bowers contends, these exercises have tended to prioritise internal compromise and the preservation of elite balance. She argues that this approach misinterprets unity, mistaking cohesion for principle, and allowing dysfunction to become entrenched.

Bowers links the ANC’s organisational malaise directly to the declining capacity of the state. Administrative failures, policy incoherence, and corruption, she says, are outward expressions of deeper dysfunction inside the movement itself. Reconfigurations presented as renewal, in her view, too often reinforce patterns of patronage by selecting leaders to appease factions rather than strengthen public service.

A significant section of her essay reflects on the ANC’s historical ideological foundation. Bowers recalls the movement’s earlier synthesis of nationalism and Marxist analysis, designed to challenge what she calls the racialised capitalism of the apartheid era. She argues that in the democratic period, the ANC’s relationship with capital has shifted from critique to complicity, with internal politics increasingly shaped by access to resources, patronage networks, and material accumulation.

This drift, she says, has produced a core contradiction: while the movement continues to use socialist rhetoric, it now reproduces the very capitalist logic it once sought to overcome.

Bowers also warns of deep moral drift within the movement. She points to the normalisation of wrongdoing, the tolerance of impunity, and the elevation of loyalty above integrity as signs of an organisation that has moved far from its liberation-era ethical standards. Governance failures, economic exclusion, and ethical compromise, she argues, now represent the modern form of oppression that earlier ANC leaders urged the movement to resist.

The essay calls for a more profound and principled renewal. Bowers argues that true reform requires ideological clarity, rigorous political education, and a disciplined cadre culture rooted in service and accountability. Structural adjustments, she says, are insufficient without a moral and ideological reorientation.

She concludes that the ANC’s current struggle is: “a struggle for its own soul,” with consequences that extend far beyond the party. The crisis, she warns, is at once ideological, institutional, and moral - and overcoming it will require confronting hard truths about how the movement has changed, what it has normalised and what it must now rebuild.