Last week I listened to Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of Thabo Mbeki the former president of South Africa. Moeletsi is one of the most trenchant critics of African leadership in general and South Africa’s ANC government in particular. An analyst and commentator, and also an entrepreneurial businessman, three years ago he wrote a best-selling book Architects of Poverty: Why Africa’s Capitalism needs Changing, which is a damning indictment of African leadership from independence in the 60s through to the present-day.

More recently he edited a book under the title of Advocates for Change: How to Overcome Africa’s Challenges. This is a first-rate collection of essays full of great ideas for Africa on agriculture, the economy, education, regional integration and cooperation, health and the management of Africa’s mineral resources, etc. The publishers intended the meeting at the Cape Town Press Club to be the launch of the book in the Mother City. But that was not to be.

Instead, Moeletsi delivered an absolutely damning indictment of the South African government and the ANC. In his opinion, the ANC was not part of the answer. What he said was expressed at the end of his introductory chapter to the new book. Referring to the twenty-six year old unemployed Tunisian university graduate Mohamed Bouazizi, who started the revolution in Tunisia by setting himself on fire, Moeletsi writes: “The response of the South African government to what has happened in North Africa is that it cannot happen here. They argue that South Africa is a democracy which, according to them, shields it from extensive social and political conflict. Ironically, South Africa being a middle-income country like the North African countries, is the one country in sub-Saharan Africa who is most likely to experience what has happened in North Africa. Closer examination of events in South Africa shows that this has already started. South Africa is one of the largest occurrences of social protest against incompetence and corruption at various levels of the public sector.”

This is heavy stuff, and hardly the sort of thinking or sentiment to associate with the introduction of a volume of creative, imaginative political thinkers on subjects as diverse as those mentioned above. While the publishers of Advocates for Change might have been aghast, I understand Moeletsi’s problem. In South Africa at the moment, all these brilliant ideas, so very relevant to our circumstances, amount to nothing. And the reason is the lack of leadership. What in effect he was saying is: Why bother?

When he concluded his address with: “The ANC is not the future of the country. We should stop obsessing about the ANC”, The Cape Times reports that members of the overwhelmingly white middle-class audience called out: “Then who is the future of the country?” But he had already left the podium.

I think there is an alternative view to Moeletsi’s approach. To write the ANC out of the equation is a mistake. While the present governing alliance might not hold, the fact is the ANC – one hopes not in its existing form - is going to be around for a long time. That being the case, one should distinguish between the ANC and the disastrous presidency of Jacob Zuma.

Secondly, the fact is that the ANC is hardly ideologically or intellectually homogenous. There are people in the ANC who understand just what is going wrong in the country and what is needed. How to activate them – whether inside or outside the ANC – is the challenge. In this regard, Julius Malema is a positive catalyst. Aside from these people asserting themselves within the ANC, we should not exclude the possibility of another COPE breakaway – except this time intelligently led and therefore sustainable.

An additional factor in activating what one might describe as the positive thinking people in the ANC, is a scenario suggested by Gerald Shaw, a distinguished former Cape Times political journalist and columnist.

Under the heading: “Only a centre-left coalition can save South Africa”, Gerald argued in the Cape Times that “a split in the ANC is inevitable in the long run. Perhaps this will happen sooner than we may now expect. Hopes for the future would then lie in a political realignment which will have to bring the Democratic Alliance (DA), or a significant part of it, into government. ..... Until then, South Africa is on a road to nowhere.” (The Cape Times July 29, 2011.)

The article has generated a lot of interest. But how does one move not the full body of the ANC but those people within the ANC – and as I said, they are there – who would see the sense of such an arrangement. This is something that Moeletsi Mbeki should consider. The issue is not unlike the National Party and attempts to change the direction of its policies in the 70s and 80s. What drove home to white South Africans the fact that apartheid had failed was less the ANC’s armed struggle than business and economic pressure - both international and local. That is what is needed now. The point may be illustrated by statements within the last couple of days by three senior ANC Cabinet ministers disassociating themselves from populist calls for the nationalisation of mines and banks, etc. The reason they give is the damage this rhetoric is causing investment sentiment – both foreign and domestic.