In the last few weeks South Africa has been experiencing an
episode that threatens to redefine the ANC from its earned status as a leader
of society, to a eremite institution characterised by corruption and factionalism.
The State Capture Commission has become a new theatre within which scenes, acts
and dramatizations of the ANC’s 'apparent' loss of strategic, moral and ideational
leadership is on display and/or played out to the world. Given that the ANC is
arguably at the centre of all political life in South Africa, the 'emerging' labelling of
the ANC and ANCness as a growing example of what a liberation-movement-cum-ruling-party should not
degenerate into, presents a number of questions about the growth and sustainability
of the South African democratic experiment. The ruling party status of the ANC
makes the state an arena within which its operations will always be evaluated
and projected as defining to politics the South African way. Its political
methods, particularly as a conduit through which the dominant individuals to be deployed into ‘organs of state’ are
procured, have become the central means through which society gives full
expression to its cultural, political and economic principles; an omnipresent challenge for all ANC members in positions of authority.
It is the values that emanate from
within the ANC, as the dominant social formation in the management of all
matters hegemonic in South Africa, which should be evidence that the nation’s
political life is in synch with the values requisite of its economic values as
well. The conduct of institutions of leadership in the form of political coalitions,
ruling or otherwise, should live imprints on the stage upon which a society,
and by extension the nation, can unfold its identity and fulfil its destiny. It
is the unity of purpose, and that of ridding the country of tendencies and
orientations designed to leave imprints of values that define South Africa
outside established benchmarks of good governance, which produced an image of a
nation that abhors eremite formations. Proceeding from this basis, it can
be assumed the ANC, as a dominant political coalition in South Africa, cannot not support efforts to plug out of South
Africa’s national co-existence, practices that threaten the conferment of permanence
to good governance values.
The ANC’s ‘strategy’ to advance the
survival of its ‘leader of society’ status by adapting a posture of
transparency and taking those amongst its tried and tested leaders to publicly
account for any wrong doing is not a zero-sum framework of surrender to the ‘manufactured
narrative’ that the ANC is inherently a corrupt organization. It is in fact one
of the bravest political stunts, ever taken during an election season, by a
political party whose support has been on a decline, in statistical terms,
since the first democratic elections. It is a stunt that demonstrate its
resolve ‘to exercise maximum vigilance against forces, both within and outside
of it, which seek to subvert the social transformation’ path it has chosen. The
stunt is thus not a knee-jerk response to the vexing challenges of being a
party with state power and a growing and insatiable appetite for crass
materials from some amongst its members, but a commitment to its ideational
co-ordinates that define its ‘national democratic revolution’. This commitment,
which is etched on a dictum not to ‘conduct itself as an ordinary electoral
party’ but a party that has ‘clear value systems that attach to being a member
and leader of the ANC’, is what propels the ANC’s commitment to the State
Capture Commission.
The State Capture Commission should
thus be seen as a construct borne out of the same ANCness that abandoned its
armed struggle and many other demands in favour of creating a South Africa that
is able to, heal the divisions of its past; establish a society based on universal
democratic values; establish a society etched on social justice and human
rights; and lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which
government is based on the will of the people. The challenge of creating a
socially cohesive and functional polity for South Africa, despite growing
pressure to give expression to the variously defined notions of freedom by
those that led the ‘liberation struggle’, including those that ‘did not struggle
to be poor’, permeates the resolve to support the intents of establishing the
commission. The idea of dealing with corruption, including its advance stage of
State Capture, is not only an ideological obligation for the ANC, but a
condition for it to accelerate socio-economic transformation.
The realisation of what defines the
ANC’s historical mission of dealing with both the ‘national grievance’ and the ‘original
sin of colonialism’ require a moral high ground. The implementation of policies
such as ‘land expropriation without compensation’, ‘radical economic
transformation’, ‘black economic participation’, and ‘no-fee higher education
for all’, require a political milieu that engenders trust on those that are
charged with the responsibility to manage the implementation of these policies.
What will make a difference in the implementation of these policies, as well as
the realisation of their intents, is more the legitimacy and trustworthiness of
the political leadership than the effectualness of the policies. It is the
shared vision on the policy outcomes by citizens in their various constituencies,
especially those constituencies that stand to shed portions of what defines
their material standing in the economic system, that will undergird the stability
required to complete the transformation paths chosen.
For the ANC, the imperative of
creating a political community that will anchor the social order it wants to
create, is more important than the order itself. As a political institution in
itself, it has an obligation to take those decisions that grows the social
forces it will require to, ‘maintain the
very social order it is creating’; ‘resolve the disputes that may arise in the
process of creating the social order’; ‘select from amongst society
authoritative leaders and/or institutions of leadership to stand as reference nodes
of the social order’; and ‘making arrangements with which society will facilitate
continuous agreements on the evolving nature of the social order’. The
allocative power of government, as the ultimate price of political
institutionalisation related to the ‘social order’ envisaged by the policies
sponsored by the ANC, requires of it to not only respond to ‘the social forces’
mobilised around what it does as a ruling party, but to put in place mechanisms
such as the State Capture Commission to institutionalize its intervention.
It should however be cautioned that
‘social forces’ are a function of organization and mobilisation, all of whom
are dependent on resourcing; funding to be direct. It is the capacity to
aggregate the common interests of individuals in a society that will provide
you with a platform to be a social force. The complexities that come with the
historical divisions that characterise South Africa today, with race and class
being the dominant vectors of analysis, the relative power of a political
coalitions changes commensurate with the growth of any social conflict and the
interests its outcome would ultimately alter. In the context of the
interconnectedness of economic interests on a global scale, social forces that
are mobilised around social conflicts would invariably have their interests
defined in polities whose sovereignty is defined by those that can sustain
them. The codification of these interest into standards of commerce and trade create new syntaxes in the lingua franca of
development and economic growth. Treaties that regulate membership to trade
fraternities and blocs obligate societies to mobilise around membership to such
bodies and thus redefine how social forces are configured and/or established.
This is what the State Capture Commission dictates to ANCness as we know it
today.
WHAT THEN?
This requires a relook of how the
ANC relates to the State Capture Commission or related institutions such as the
Hawks, Public Protector, in fact all chapter 9 institutions.
MAY BE CONTINUED!!!
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