The th!nc Foundation

      The ANC’s succession debate has again taken centre stage in the analysis of all manner of discourse in South Africa. The contest for political power is now firmly within the ANC domain. Opposing factions have once again concretised around personalities and not ‘policy positions’ and ‘promises for change’ even within the ANC itself. The ANC policy conference that was supposed to create a mandate template with which contesting leaders would have naturally used to galvanise support for themselves is a lost opportunity again. Issues of service delivery and ‘serving the nation’ are not foregrounded in favour of personalities and cliques organised around nefarious criteria either than ideology and ‘promise for change’. Yes, Nkrumah was right “when a revolution has been successful, the ideology comes to characterise society…just as there can be competing ideologies in the same (ANC) society so there can be opposing ideologies”. The construct of the national electoral proce...

Article Published in The African Executive and LITNET. It is oftentimes unusual to have a name of a locality being analyzed for its political significance and meaning rather than what it means for the residents of the area. Mangaung, South Sotho for a place of cheetahs, is metaphoric in its relationship with the political developments of South Africa. It is a foundational home to the ruling African National Congress of South Africa and the erstwhile National Party which ruled for an uninterrupted 46 years. Amongst the known characteristics of a cheetah, lengau, are its speed, agility, patience and an insatiable capacity to rear its young to meet realities of the terrains they must operate under. Mangaung, to South Africa, will always be about the ‘foundational location’ of the nationalist ‘character’ of the country. It represents a place where the two ‘nationals’ were formalized into movements that shaped the political topography of present day South Africa. The socio-economic texture...

Published in the June Edition of The Thinker. African post-colonial democracies and states are functioned by a perpetual need to undo the vestiges of colonialism. The passionate zeal with which this assignment is pursued creates in the state formation paradigm of the post-liberation rulers a government deconstruction firmament that always gets presented as a reconstruction and development programme. The anti-colonial rhetoric becomes the most visible constant in the nation-building endeavours of post-liberation governments. The manner in which the political settlement was reached has thus far been found to be what separates the state formation models of post-colonial governments in Africa. Given the development path of limiting ‘the reach of the African state’ and funding the extension of coherent governance beyond the colonial-urban centres, the necessity of building strong governance systems got inextricably linked to the amassing of political power by the ascendant political elite...

In the discussion document titled ‘organisational renewal’ the ANC identifies the seven dangers that any governing party has to contend with. The contextualisation of these dangers is within a ‘rather short’ and yet potent self-critique heading of organisational shortcomings and weaknesses. Whilst these weaknesses are presented for members to concur and/or refute, the bravery within which they are articulated in public demonstrates a resolve by the ANC to decisively ‘shed’ itself of the skin that it has grown post the 1994 democratic breakthrough. A ‘skin’ which represents detachment from its ‘ideational’ and ‘political’ constituencies. Like a proverbial snake that is bound to shed its skin in order to progress into its next phases of growth and maturation, the ANC has to undertake its renewal programme in a manner that does not change its earned rich character. A character that subsumes into itself all strands and shades of thought and persuasions known to have united South Africans...

In his 08 January 2012 President Jacob Zuma spoke of an ANC that has been born out of a call for unity in diversity. In the same speech the President dealt with the heroic anti-colonial and later anti-apartheid struggle the ANC has waged against both a distant and a resident coloniser. The narrative remains authoritative in the ANC’s scheme of historical events and should be lauded, as has been, by South Africans. The position of the ANC as leader of the liberation movement is thus inscribed unto the tombs of South Africa’s history.  The movement’s ability to galvanise broad support for its course beyond racial and sexist lines towers its 100 year story thus far. The flexibility with which the ANC was able to adapt its policy trajectory to be in line with the dictates of history got crowned by its adoption of what would otherwise have become a document of democrats irrespective of political affiliation, the Freedom Charter. The charter’s declaration that ‘South Africa belongs to a...

In one of his seminal speeches Martin Luther King Jnr warns society that “in the end, we will remember not the words (or noises) of our enemies, but the silences of our friends”. The ascendance of Mr Julius Malema to what is arguably the most powerful position to be held by a young adult in South Africa has attracted noises and silences that only history will tell of their animosity or friendliness. In whatever manner the answer turns out to be, Mr Malema has entrenched himself as both a legitimate leader of a sizeable section of South Africa’s youth and a political phenomenon available for intellectual inquest. As a youth leader Mr Malema represented the biggest organised youth constituency in the developing world. According to the ANCYL conference attendance procedures, every delegate that graced the conference in a representative capacity commanded 50 registered members of the Youth League. The conference has been reported to have had 5300 delegates; this translates to 265 000 memb...