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...