The leadership succession process
in the ANC, arguably South Africa’ and Africa’s most influential political
coalition by any standards, is in full swing. The nomination process by
branches of the ANC, the often overrated ‘basic units’ of decision making in
the ANC, is underway. Branches of the ANC are nominating from a pool of seven
individuals who have ‘supposedly’ ‘accepted’ to be ‘deployed’ ‘where the ANC
wants them to serve’. They have been nominated for one reason or the other with
the ‘anything but Zuma’ theme taking centre stage, and propelled by outside ANC
interests as abstracted in the reporting by members of the fourth estate; the
press.
The Jacob Zuma corruption
narrative has occupied centre stage in many a discourse South African politics.
State capture reports and reports on the state of capture of the state have
flooded the ideational space in South Africa to levels where this concept is
variously referenced on South African authors, scholars and public
intellectuals. The theory of State Capture is still in its infant stages albeit
dependent on its adjunct corruption. Defined in facile terms as a systemic form
of corruption where the levers of state are manipulated to normalise corruption
by making private interests of the ruling elite to be processed within a policy
machinery that advantages them. Its reliance on the theory of corruption as an
intellectual basis and its tangential relationship with the theory of political
lobbying makes it a difficult to concretise theory and yet easy to pronounce on
it attributes.
As a phenomenon it is generally
been reported to be prevalent in ‘transition economies’, notwithstanding the
fact that its visible attributes do find polyvalent expression in ‘developed’ economies.
The often undefined or fluid political economy reforms often associated with
transition economies have, and unfortunately so, been found to have been
accompanied by state capture as a grandiose form of corruption that is now
recognized as being the most pernicious and intractable problem of such
economies. The reality of transitional economies challenge of creating new
economies that will be subject to the basic rules governing economics, such as
allowing market forces to determine points of stability in economic activity as
well as creating environment for entrepreneurs to apply their inherent
innovator character, has elevated the importance of state intervention above
that of state facilitation.
In South Africa, and a very much less
attended to aspect of the succession discourse in the ANC, this challenge is
compounded by the truths of an economy that must transition itself in respect
of the demographic character of those responsible for growing it and at the
same time be competitive in the pure merits associated with an economy. The
apartheid reality of having excluded the majority of current voters in the
economy, has made politics in South Africa to be etched in the binaries of race
as the dominant vector of analysis and discourse; this thus creates new forms
of political economy reform strategies that invariably lends themselves onto
the state capture terrain of operation. Political mavericks and populists would
in such circumstances polarise any discourse on leadership to always be about
the race and access dynamics obtaining in the manner in which this economy is
run.
On the other hand, the transition
from an apartheid state to a ‘democratic’ one, if democracy is herein
conceptualised as the arrangements with which members of a society agree to
govern themselves, has created two distinct centres of political power managed
through a dualized system that has thus far compromised the state-party divide.
This divide has also themed the succession debate where the contest is focusses
on taking control of the ANC and yet using performance in the state as criteria
to galvanise support. The constitution of the country and not that of the ANC
is a dominant feature in the succession discourse. Platforms that are created
to canvass votes have been less and less about performance on ANC policy
implementation and more and more on state and government policy performance and
corruption therein. This histography of these two platforms of influence within
the ANC has its roots in the ANC’s conception of itself as an alternative
government of ‘the people’.
The ANC has in this circumstance
created a duality of ‘conflicting imperatives’. The imperative of creating a ‘national
democratic society’ as a sequel to the 1994 ‘democratic breakthrough’. The
National Democratic Revolution, which is an ongoing process with an undefined
end or defined attributes to indicate its end state, remains a programmatic framework
that defines ANCness in achieving a particular imperative, and, the achievement
of objectives set in the pre-amble of the South African constitution as another
imperative that is funded by state revenue. These have become the basis of a
duality. The theory of the South African Democracy as a function of a duality
makes this succession to be the most hollow in comparison to the content
demands of this phase in the development of South Africa as a competitive
economy in Africa. In this succession discourse, an expectation should always
be how the candidates will continue to shape our democracy and migrate it from
the duality of competing imperatives towards one that sets up a dynamic harmony
between the elements of these imperatives into one.
The systemic erosion of the inviolability
of law through the tacit or otherwise
undermining of the rule of law that has mutated into a characteristic of the
post Mandela state; has in fact elevated the centrality of political discretion
in the governing of South Africa. The National Democratic Revolution imperative
has created an environment where acting for the public good is often
theorisable outside what the law provides or without the prescription of law.
This increase in the index of prerogativity in dealing with matters of state
and particularly those of redress and restitution creates in the environment an
opportunity for private interests to be integrated into public ones, thus
building some ‘legitimacy for the capture of the state’. The paternal rights over
South Africa’s democracy that the ANC still enjoys has to a greater extent, and
especially in the policy implementation space, graduated into a complex of paternal-despotic
power with catastrophic public-state trust reduction consequences reminiscent
of a dictatorship. The jurisdiction over policy outcomes has thus become the
prerogative domain of the ANC whilst the presumption of jurisdiction has been
abrogated to the constitution by society.
Cyril Ramaphosa, one of the architects
of South Africa’s Constitution, gets into this succession discourse with a
profoundly normative posture that elevates the presumed jurisdiction of the
constitution above the traditionalised jurisdiction over the Constitution by
the National Democratic Revolution imperative. In this posture Ramaphosa is
attracting the ear and support of those that procure for a normative South
Africa as opposed to a in-party prerogative revolution. The dictatorial
authority often attributable to the incompleteness of the NDR, is in the
ideational posture presented in the Ramaphosa rendition of why he should be
elected, only limited by what the law provides. The law becomes therefore the
only constraint in matters government. Evidence, and still awaiting final
pronouncement by the courts, in the past 8 years of Zuma rule is that the
organs of state in a Cyril Ramaphosa envisaged state would have discretionary
power in so far as the rule of law dictates and never in the realm of
discretionary power derived from NDR imperatives outside what the law
prescribes.
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, one of
the architects of enabling legislation to effect the constitution under Mandela
and Mbeki, gets into this succession with a policy outcome deficit removal
posture. This posture seems to be premised on dealing with ‘dream deferred matters’
of the policy machinery she, as part of the Mandela-Mbeki cohort of leaders
could not pursue to its logical destiny or abandoned it. The
institutionalisation of economic transformation through legislation and other
regulatory instruments such as charters during the Mbeki era was a programmatic
attempt to ‘cut to the heart of the economic foundations of the ongoing social
order creation as envisaged in the constitution as a norming firmament in the
stead of the prerogativity espoused in NDR nomenclature. The embrace therefore
by Nkosazana Zuma of the Radical Economic Transformation path dependence is
symptomatic to a ‘prerogative posture’ herein associated with the NDR and yet
could also be theorised within the paradigm of social order restructuring
through intervention by the state. Through this posture she has drawn a line
between her campaign and the historical economic establishment that seems to be
keen on a transformation path defined outside the ‘radical path dependence’;
whence the famous ‘thieves’ statement.
These state capture perspectives
on the succession discourse and how this has relegated our relationship with
the process to a Gupta themed discourse will leave a country in a condition
where we support a candidate without content. Both candidates this renditions
has focusses on, have what it takes to make South Africa different. It is the
soul space of the ANC that they need to impact upon. In the soul space they
will find fears of its core constituency, fears of its blood-sucking, fears of
its nostalgic membership, fears of its warrior constituency, interests of its
elite, and interests of its global would be suitors either way. They need to
navigate this phase of leadership choice in a manner that makes South Africa a
victor. In his seminal speech about on leadership General Eisenhower concludes
this rendition by saying “the supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably
integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on
a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office”
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