A ‘CAPTURED’ ANC LEADERSHIP SUCCESSION RACE: VOLUME 1

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”