Political parties have a tendency to atrophy. Corruption is most often the reason for atrophy, whether we are talking about the once omnipotent Indian Congress Party in India, the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico, or Richard Nixon's Republican Party.

The African National Congress (ANC) is in disarray because of an arms deal that should never have been undertaken in the first place.

Ultimately, the troubles facing the ANC must be located in the political culture that has evolved under President Thabo Mbeki's leadership. After all, the buck stops with the president as the leader of the organisation. His is a highly centralised, secretive and technocratic culture in which public policy decisions are hidden from public view.

It is, for example, an established fact that the switch from the reconstruction and development programme to the growth, employment and redistribution strategy was the brainchild of a few well-placed economists, to the exclusion of the alliance partners of the ANC.

Once the decision had been taken the rest of us were just informed. Gear was government policy. No amount of public protestation would change government from its course.

Government has adopted a similarly defensive posture on the arms deal. Despite civil society warnings that the procurement process was profoundly corrupt, we were again simply informed the arms deal would go ahead in any event.

As Indian writer Partha Chaterjee put it, we have become "empirical objects of government policy, not citizens who participate in the sovereignty of the state".

In one of the best papers on the relationship between civil society and the state, writer Michael Walzer argues, rather tellingly for the ANC government, that "no state can survive for long if it is alienated from civil society". He warns "the effort to go it alone one form of totalitarianism is doomed to failure".

The question the ANC must therefore ask itself is whether the haemorrhage in the party is not too high a price for an arms deal of dubious value. A related question is what authority lies with the president as political head and what authority lies with the general secretary as the chief administrative officer of the ANC.

For example, does the president articulate his own position, which he then transmits in a top-down fashion to the secretary-general and constituencies? Or should the president articulate the policies of the organisation as they have been transmitted to the secretary-general through a bottom-up process?

The recent creation of an office of the presidency in the ANC further clouds the question. In the short term it can be argued the president is somehow removed from the pressures of constituencies and can thus adopt more independent positions.

However, in the longer term it is the clamour of the different philosophical positions that will lead to better decision-making in the party, and by extension in government.

Adjudicating the differences would then become the actual challenge of leadership. Perhaps if the arms deal had been subjected to vigorous internal debate, the ANC would not be experiencing the difficulties it is now.

From what I can tell Kgalema Motlanthe is trying to reassert the authority of the office of the secretary-general . He has objected strongly to Penuell Maduna's decision not to make himself available for a second term, because that is an organisational decision. Perhaps something good came out of this bad situation.

Unluckily this reassertion comes as a result of the corruption scandal facing Deputy President Jacob Zuma. By association the secretary-general and constituencies may at worst be seen to be condoning corruption, or at best turning a blind eye to corruption for the sake of party solidarity.

This may seem to give credence to the argument for technocracy and rule by experts rather than democracy, entailing rule by the people.

And yet the world is full of examples of innovative populist public policies from Kerala in India, Porto Allegre in Brazil to Harold Washington's Chicago. Populism has been given a bad name by business and government leaders through concepts such as the ultraleft.

However, it may well be that populists are now giving populism a bad name. Populists need to lead the march against corruption if we are to restore popular accountability as the basic tenet of democracy, and therefore as a check against the blind spots of the technocrats.

Unless Mbeki and his comrades adopt a more open political style, and unless the ANC's constituencies become active participants in policymaking processes, the ANC is likely to be dogged by scandals, and will atrophy like it did under the aloof leadership of Dr AB Xuma in the 1930s.

Mangcu is executive director of the Steve Biko Foundation.

With acknowledgements to Mangcu and the Business Day.