RAMAPHOSA: ARE WE MAKING A NEW ODER OR IN AN ECDYSIS

The 54^th ANC National Conference in NASREC was not only watershed in its decisiveness to liquidate slate politics in favour of unity, but also about the introduction of a new ‘post-liberation’ order for South Africa. The ANC led liberation struggle narrative which remains instructional to most of the ANC’s ideational postures on public policy has had its fair share of creating a restitutive paradigm of governance, that was merely trying to coexist with apartheid colonial power rather than fundamentally overturning it. The stealth of colonial power, which is hegemonic in all matters policy change, has since became the vector of analysis on any process that seeks to universalise the objects of a South Africa free of apartheid colonialism and its vestiges. The survival of ‘the established’ most of whom are  non-blacks, procures from South Africa’s leadership a resolve to create a coalition of equal opportunity creation that does not guarantee outcomes but participation.

The 100 plus years of struggle to create a South Africa based on; ‘democratic’ principles; committed to civil and human rights; accountability to its citizens; a system bound by the rule of law, anchored upon functioning institutions of state; and undergirded by a focus on economic prosperity for all, defines the African National Congress’s struggle system to date. The establishment of the ANC in 1912, and in the main by a leadership that was schooled in international universities aligned to a Wilberforcean liberal type of politics, would be disciplined into policy positions that sought to bring equality and universal suffrage as fundamental to any notion of freedom. Explaining this leadership Lord Milner declared in the early 1900s that, "they emerged from mission schools strongly attached to the ideals of Christianity, wore Victorian attire, adhered to British cultural values and put much of their faith in what they referred to as a white sense of fair play…detached from traditional society, they were employed as teachers, church ministers, clerks, interpreters and journalists, and aspired to show how easily Africans could adapt to white civilization. They shared a vision of a 'multi/non-racial' "civilised‟ society in which merit counted more than colour”. Theoretically dubbed ‘new black elite’ they embraced not only modern (read liberal) political thinking but also modern (read western) behaviour and practices. They practiced a mainstream, European-derived Christianity… became South Africa’s first generation of African (non-ethnic) nationalists.

As a cohort of 'educated' natives, they became nodes of ideational influence on how a future Union of South Africa, free of colonial encumbrances, should be. They developed policies, wrote petitions, led delegations and deputations to the British King, and lobbied the Union Parliament for favourable native policies. The policy positions they had since been advocating would later mutate into historical documents such the African Claims Document, the 1949 ANCYL Programme of Action, the 1955 Freedom Charter, the Morogoro Documents, the Constitutional Negotiations Documents of the 1980s, the Harare Declaration, the Reconstruction and Development Document and finally the 1996 constitution as the apex of the imagination by its founding fathers.

The sum total of these documents, the objects therein and the fundamental values that accorded the ANC the status of being a leader of society, became encapsulated into the 1996 Constitution as a promulgated supreme order of being South African. The 1996 Constitution in it declaration that, it will;

…heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights; lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by the law; improve the quality life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations,

…did not only connect the thread of a better life for all as conceptualised by the founding fathers of the ANC, but completes the great commission to each and every South African leader beyond 1996 to pursue policies that create a ‘new order’ out of the ashes, shackles and rubble constituting our unfortunate past. A past that towers inequality and racism as monuments of success in the execution of a crime against humanity itself. Underpinning this declaration is the entrenchment in the Constitution of the foundational values of;

…human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms; non-racialism and non-sexism; supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law; universal adult suffrage, a national common voters roll, regular elections and a multi-party system of democratic government, to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness.

…as an anchorage of the resolve as articulated in the Nelson Mandela statement of “never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another”.

However, the stability of a well written constitution requires from amongst the society it is drafted for, men and women who will rise to its vision and objects above narrow sectorial interests. The political emotion that creates a constitution should be so stable, that it is capable of regulating all other emotions that may be an outcome of the unusually optimistic and overly confident tendency by political leaders to believe in their ability to control events. This optimism can be a result of inherent dictator behaviour found in the make-up of most politicians as well as an oversupply of benevolence often created by actions of the immediate past leader. It is such human irrationality that confirms the adage that a stable political order is rare, and if it does exist it normally comes after a great convulsion which creates an unfair desire for newness in a society that is anchored upon a continuum of human fundamentals. At his election to ascend the presidency of the ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa was appointed to be a ‘new’ in the midst of ‘the old’ and thus only represented an ecdysis more than a genuine transformation; that is party politically speaking.

The context of Ramaphosa’s appointment as President of the ANC came with the exigency of creating a broader than in-ANC membership confidence in the role of politics in solving societal challenges. The wreckage of a polyvalent defined corruption and state capture, and as a dominant motif propelling change, meant the centrality of the ANC as a representative of the post-apartheid order was in question, and the balance of political power had thus tilted away from the ANC as the nexus of all ideas constituting leadership of society. In this vortex of a need for change, it is almost conventional to have opportunistic ideological endeavours that will want to influence not only doctrinal shifts to the edifice of the ANC struggle system, but to claw back on the perceived hegemonic and/or ideological losses that came with a post-apartheid non-racial South Africa. The post-1994 policies, whose intent was to bring to bear what the constitution declared and entrenched a fundamental values that create South Africa, would in this exigency be an unintended collateral in the quest to complete the Verwoedean ideal of a South Africa anchored on systemic inequality and separate but ‘somehow equal’ doctrine.

The pursuit of what would be a ‘new’ order, also dubbed a ‘new dawn’ by Ramaphosa himself, beyond the 54^th Conference of the ANC, as an antithesis of an order that existed before it, got entangled into the palace politics and ‘putsch’ that characterised the conference itself. The Ramaphosa mandate of creating this new order has not had an opportunity to craft an unencumbered thesis of what should be done as the basis  of his intervention to create conditions envisaged and demanded by the constitution; a thread that connects all liberation and emancipation ideals of South Africans. The ‘putsch’ politics, including the triumphalism that accompanies the Ramaphosa mandate have not only choked the need for an honest discourse on the recognition that there was an order whose in-party demise should be used to offer valuable lessons on how to manage the affairs of the state better. Such a recognition would have already made the party apparatchik to realise that for a new order to prevail it must be created as it will never be an outcome of a benevolence firmament, but an output of deliberate efforts of tried and tested bureaucratic thinking and a choice to drink from a well of experience that has now become stranded intellectual assets of society.

The inherent experience of South Africa in creating a new order out of its many convulsions through dialogue and institution building, should not only be called to service, but must be harnessed upon a platform that refuses to create any new where an existing ‘old’ is functional. The context of the ‘new and obligatory dialogue’ should be disabled of the transformation paradigm and be disciplined into a reform path, because the gains should be crafted  that they accrue to all that agreed ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’; as the constitution proclaims. There is at present a shared understanding on the need to make this country to accrue all its benefits to those who live in it, this understanding also assures anyone of a right to associate and be as they wish. This understanding recognises, and unfortunately so, that there will be those that would want to entrench more disagreement in society that social cohesion, there will be those that will create opportunities for separate development and own affairs dispensation, and so on. It is in the decay of humanity and society that the Ramaphosa mandate is called upon to recreate a new hope, new dawn and a new order with which all South Africans can shout the proverbial call of ‘Thuma Mina’.

The 25 year experience of transitioning from apartheid government to a non-racial and democratic order has had its gains in policy development and social cohesion losses. Fundamental to what needed to change was the recalibration of how the commanding heights of the economy become catalytic to a economic opportunity and freedom foe all South Africans. Whilst post-apartheid South Africa created a better policy architecture for that to happen, there are still structural and legacies emanating from the legal system that are obfuscators to the realisation of the new policy objects. The imperative to have a long term view of South Africa’s opportunity revolution procures for a new order that is not an ecdysis of an old order.

An ecdysis is (biologically) defined as a process of shedding the old skin or casting off the outer cuticle. It is in fact the renewal of the outer look of the same organism, the reptile in this case. The outcome of an ecdysis is a better looking same organism, it is never the total transformation of the organism into a completely new creature. In the context of the ANC, the change of ‘guard’ at NASREC did not change the essence of what the ANC stands for. The policy conference recommendations to the elective conference found their way into far reaching policy shifts of how the ANC struggle system should be conducted further. In vintage ANC tradition, conference resolutions define ANCness. All conference resolutions that have been adopted and were never amended by another conference constitute the policy direction of the ANC. The cumulative effect of ANC policies for its entire 107 year history are very defining on the policy trajectory the ANC has been taking. The transformation imperative is thus defined and almost cast in stone and a dice, as far as it remains unamended, and a future policy making template is thus set.

In this policy whirlpool, that depends on the ANC’s ability to translate them into government policy, the impact of state realities is an area that creates perpetual negotiation for space and opportunity. The extent to which the mind of the state, the bureaucrats, embrace the instructs of the governing party’s policies is a function of how hegemonic are those policies. The influence of the academic-media-complex on how the mind of the state is trained in how to govern will determine how implementable are party-political instructs. The dominant ideological posture of the economic establishment, the media establishment and the captains of the political economic system ultimately dictate the pulse of policy embracement. The change therefore of a leadership of a political party is no guarantee that there will be change of how a country is governed, the least that can be guaranteed might be a change of emphasis.

The Ramaphosa mandate, change-branded as it looks, has not changed either the ANC or government, it is reminiscent of a process of ecdysis, the academic-media-complex seems to be hellbent on creating a perception that the person of Ramaphosa is independent from the ANC and thus does not represent what it stands for or has mandated him to do as a deployee in government. This posture of making Ramaphosa a ‘new-look’ leader instead of a ‘new mandate’ leader has started to create a mobilization centre with which a ‘new order’ out of him as a ‘new dawn’ can be opposed. In the parlance of what an ecdysis is and could mean in politics, the body that is the ANC may have only shed its skin for a new one to deal with its image and reputational changes including the need to do away with what was becoming cancerous from the outside, but was never about changing the form and character of the ANC, unless that is proposed for the next policy process making phase.

The exigencies of growing South Africa and creating an opportunity revolution for all has made the state the ultimate price of in ANC politics to a level that capturing the state is now the object of politics. The interests that define the ANC as a coalition of interests that needs to be mainstreamed through the state machinery are being relegated to the corruption-service delivery dichotomies that are redefining who is the public that the state is serving and what is the service that should be publicly served. The doctrinal shifts towards privatization and the general role of the state in creating conditions for an opportunity revolution as espoused by government and ‘certain of the voices’ from within the ANC are all indicative that, the Ramaphosa presidency might be an ecdysis. An ecdysis in a sense that what the ANC has chronicled might not find it way, in totality, into the decision centres of the state apparatus. It might also be an ecdysis in that it might be representing a policy revolution that rains from clouds never created by the ANC. The question therefore is, are we making a new order or in an ecdysis of some sort.

 

Dr FM Lucky Mathebula

The Th!nc Foundation

Pretoria, 2019 March 28