1 THE ANC’S POLICY DEVELOPMENT AND CHALLENGES: FROM THE LIBERATION STRUGGLE TO THE HOLDING OF STATE POWER By Professor Modimowabarwa H. Kanyane Dr Gregory F. Houston HSRC Abstract From its inception in 1912 at the inaugural conference of the then South African Native National Congress (SANNC) – renamed the African National Congress (ANC) in 1923 – up until the first democratic election in April 1994, the ANC has struggled against injustices of various forms imposed on the black population of South Africa by the successive white minority administrations. Its formation, for instance, was preceded and motivated by the launch of the Natives Land Bill, which restricted Africans to a small fraction of the country. Several hundred members of South Africa's educated African elite met at Bloemfontein on January 8, 1912, and established a national organization to protest against racial discrimination and to appeal for equal treatment before the law. The ANC was to spend the next 82 years fighting for justice for the dominated race groups of South Africa, and against injustice around the world. All these struggles shaped and sharpened the ANC policy on governance – both in terms of what governments should not do, and what governments should do. This paper therefore traces the historical evolution of the ANC policy on governance through the prism of various struggles it waged and witnessed inside South Africa, and supported in the international arena, and uses the same policy to judge the ANC’s performance as the governing party in the new democratic dispensation. The study of the policy development and challenges is historical and contemporary in nature linked to an investigation of how the ANC responded to the challenges posed by the demands of the developmental state and the manner in which these challenges could be resolved. The research problem here is to trace how policy born in struggle has shaped governance in the democratic era following the ANC’s ascension to power in 1994 and thereby assess how it has responded to the mandate of the democratic and developmental state.