The ANC has confused Strategy with Principle on the National Question.

Both Thabo Mbeki and Pallo Jordan miss the proverbial elephant in the room when Mbeki leaks a 30 page pamphlet on the Land and National Question and when Pallo defends the ANC in return.

Mbeki seeks to make the conversation about the participation or rather exclusion of Whites in the National Question and links the land question firmly to the National question and argues that the ANC has deviated from its historical position, While Pallo relies on the Morogoro conference of 1969 to argue that the ANC has not deviated from its historical path.

Both speak of the central analysis of ANC which argues for prosecution of the struggle in favour of Blacks in General and Africans in particular. Mbeki uses it to argue that it excludes whites from the Land question which undoes the National question, while Pallo argues that it is consistent since at least Morogoro.

What they both miss, is that the very analysis of the Morogoro Conference which places a Berlin Wall between what it calls Black Africans and other oppressed groups,(even though the document denies it vigorously, time has proven the assumption that it will advance non racialism, incorrect) , is fundamentally a multi racial concept which keeps the oppressed separated in terms of both ideological understanding and in terms of practical expression.

Even then, both of them suggest that this analysis was some kind of principle, when the document itself calls it a "STRATEGIC AIM". Not a principled position.

             "The main content of the present stage of the South African revolution is the national                          liberation of the largest and most oppressed group-the African people. This strategic aim must govern every aspect of the conduct of our struggle, whether it be the formulation of policy or the creation of structures."

Yet the document vacillates between policy and strategy when it states that:

              "Equality of participation in our national front does not mean a mechanical parity between the various national groups. Not only would this practice amount to inequality (again at the expense of  the majority), but it would lend flavour to the slander which our enemies are ever ready to spread                    of  a multiracial alliance  dominated by minority groups. This has never been so and will never be so."

Yet as a strategic necessity one could understand the logic of mobilising around the immediate contradiction of the South African context then. But as a principle it bordered on a chauvinism which today has become the very basis of Mbeki`s lament, albeit not in protection of the oppressed, but in protection of the descendants of their historical enemy.

As a Principle it should and must take into account the non-racial claims of the ANC and in fact reject the notion of race as a defining characteristic/principle of any analysis.

As a principle It should also take into account that the Khoi and the San for example, and their descendants have experienced colonial dispossession and genocide for more than 350 years whereas the Eastern Northern and Western parts of the country only encountered colonialism as recently as 150 years ago and then only really felt its genocidal and more brutal effects well into the 20th century.

By which time the Khoi and the San and their descendants had been decimated and experienced an Epistemicide which historically far outweighs any other experience in the country.

(Epistimicide is a systematic destruction of any indigenous knowledge base. Any knowledge which doesn’t converge with the perpetrator’s knowledge system. It doesn’t believe in fusion or exchange of knowledge but complete disregard of the other’s knowledge. And superimposing an alien system at the expense of the other’s annihilation.)

Thus any principled affirmation of who was more worthy, would have to include this reality.

When Mbeki and Pallo gloss over this minor detail, they not only ignore that this was a strategic position and not a principled one, but also that this very analysis which has been turned from a strategy into a principle is the very same analysis which continues to underpin the gross inequality of society and that unless we correct this flawed analysis, that the land question can never resolve the National question as it is currently articulated in multi racial terms with a hierarchy of worthiness.

The National Question first needs to deal with who was historically Oppressed and if a ranking of worthiness must apply then that ranking needs a radical overhaul. Not only should we reconsider the historical accuracy of the fallacy of who qualifies to be an African and who does not, we also need to strengthen the analysis with a firm appreciation of the political economy.

The solutions of the future must take into account the historical nuances of our oppression, it must also take into consideration the privileges of the present.

Pallo argues that the beneficiary's of the Land Question must be Blacks in General and Africans in Particular, but perhaps it is time for us to say that the beneficiaries must be the Historically Oppressed in General and those Living in Poverty in Particular.