Membership Scams, Criminal Cash & the Myth of ANC Renewal
Former President Thabo Mbeki’s question at his recent KwaZulu-Natal lecture—“Who are these people that we are conferring whilst we said we are prioritizing renewal?”—is not just a casual provocation. It is a warning siren. A reminder that the organisation which once claimed to be the moral compass of our nation is now drifting into dangerous waters where legitimacy is for sale, and the sacred project of liberation has been hijacked by cash syndicates and criminal brokers.
The Madlanga Commission has revealed a scandal that should shake the ANC to its very foundation: membership bought in bulk, paid for with looted funds, handed to ghost delegates who owe allegiance not to the movement or its ideals, but to shadowy financiers. Money meant for the sick and vulnerable—stolen from clinics, hospitals, and the poor—is converted into membership subscriptions that determine who attends regional conferences and who emerges as a “leader.”
This is not renewal. This is rot.
The Illusion of Renewal
The ANC’s “renewal” mantra has become a cruel joke. Renewal assumes a return to integrity, a cleansing of corruption, and a revival of values. But what we are witnessing is the opposite: renewal has been captured as a slogan to cover a deeper criminalisation of the organisation. If the very delegates who vote are manufactured through fraud, then the resolutions they pass, the leaders they elect, and the policies they adopt are all fraudulent by extension.
We are not dealing with a weak organisation. We are dealing with a counterfeit one. An organisation where legitimacy is not earned through service to the people, but bought through brown envelopes and dirty cash.
The Scam Begets the Scam
Membership scams produce an organisation that is itself a scam. If leadership rises from a fraudulent base, then that leadership cannot be authentic. It is leadership with no moral compass, no organic roots in communities, and no obligation to the people. Instead, its obligation is to the criminals who financed their path to power.
This is why state resources continue to be looted with impunity. This is why municipalities collapse year after year. This is why service delivery protests have become the real “conferences of the people,” while the ANC conferences remain playgrounds of political brokers.
Global Lessons
History teaches us that liberation movements which fail to renew authentically eventually collapse under the weight of their own lies. In Kenya, KANU rotted into irrelevance when it became more about patronage than people. In Zimbabwe, ZANU-PF became indistinguishable from the oligarchs and war profiteers who sustain it. And in our own country, the ANC faces the same fate: if conferences are determined not by principle but by criminal patronage, then the ANC is not a movement in renewal, but a movement in decay.
The Crisis of Legitimacy
Mbeki’s question forces us to confront a painful truth: the ANC renewal project has never been a renewal project of the ANC—it has been a survival project for factions, designed to launder legitimacy through fraudulent structures. The question is no longer whether the ANC can renew itself. The question is whether South Africans can afford to place their hopes in an organisation that has hollowed itself out to the point of becoming a front for criminal syndicates.
The liberation colours are now a cloak under which looters operate. Renewal is no longer about Oliver Tambo’s vision or Chris Hani’s sacrifice—it is about who controls the cash flow that buys membership books.
Cry, the Beloved Country
It is heartbreaking that 30 years into democracy, our people are still forced to cry out for water, housing, and jobs while criminals masquerade as ANC delegates to decide the future of our country. This is not what generations fought for. This is not what Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for. This is not what the mothers of Sharpeville buried their sons for.
Renewal without legitimacy is not renewal. It is deception. It is betrayal. And it is time that South Africans—especially the working class, the unemployed, and the poor—recognise that a political project built on fraud cannot lead us to freedom.
The ANC renewal project, as Mbeki’s haunting question reminds us, has collapsed into a myth. The truth is stark: an organisation that cannot renew itself truthfully has already written the obituary of its own relevance.
-✍🏾By Rev.Mo’hau Khumalo
Political Writer & Commentator
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