A STABLE ORDER IS A RARE THING: HELLO SOUTH AFRICA

A stable order is a rare thing in the world. The idea of freedom in South Africa remains the most elusive of Democratic experiments that emerged from a negotiated settlement, as opposed to those that settled through a after war treaty. In negotiating the enfranchisement of Bantu Blacks from 1990 to 1996, when a Democratic Constitution was adopted, the Liberation Complex led by the ANC knew that it was beginning a process of undoing one of the well managed race-based order in the world. An order is said to be functional when it progressively grows into a means by which conflicts of interests are registered, resolved, altered and or maintained. It is on the basis of this balance being difficult that the rarity of a stable order is permanent watermark in human political co-existence

 The Apartheid-Colonial order was, and still is, a sophisticated order that got funded out of the world richest mineral endowments extracted by a global empire with an eternal plan to dominate the global financial system. The Rhodes-British Empire ESTABLISHMENT amassed so much capital that it became a model of capitalist aggrandizement etched on a race based mercantilist economic system. Perfect ESTABLISHMENTS become important as institutions for as long as they embody power required to reconcile interests in society for the benefit of the dominant. The maze of laws and regulations that carry with them the force of power define the centrality of the adjudicative significance of the judiciary, independent and/or otherwise, in establishing through judgements an order representative of the ESTABLISHMENT.

 The sovereignty of Parliament as a mechanism to sift the radicality of political mandate actuals is recognized for as long as it is subject to an order whose renewal turn over is a concomitant function of the  workings of consensuses crafted by the dominant. Similarly the sovereignty of individuals as institutions of power and influence grows in tandem to the individual’s ability to accumulate sufficient power that can coerce others to be co-opted and or captured into an established order. The durability therefore on an order is not only the essence of government and authority structures, but templates that the ESTABLISHMENT have consensus about; euphemistically called ideology, sometimes. Constitutions sanctify these templates as a background of power permanence mediated by politics, which are in themselves a theatre of consensus review through regular mandate renewals as per arrangements that a society has chosen to use for that purpose.

 As a system, Apartheid Colonialism had to have a 50 to 100 year horizon of planning. It required a maze of legislative and regulatory tools that create permanent templates without which no subsequent order will be able to operate. The plan had to have as outcomes a systemic way of self-sustenance even by those that believe in its demise. At its advanced state, apartheid colonialism got to a point where its naked application and prolonged defence became a risk to the defense of its outcomes and benefits. It could not, as an order, stomach a description that makes its legitimacy morally indefensible, whence it erstwhile human institutions are unable to accept liability for and collusion with it. What will always remain constant of apartheid colonialism as an order is its power as an institutional construct, and an antithesis reference point for those that seek to undo it. Its predominance, as an institution, in the shaping of discourse for or against it, will be dependent on how those that work on undoing it craft a thesis of the new order outside the ideational purview of the old order; an epistemic challenge of a millennium for its victims.

 For its efficiency and posterity, the plan had to have as its safety features a capability to survive any convulsions that may arise when if faces a possibility of collapse. Key of these features has, and still is, its capacity to distribute its power in a manner that makes it look like it has in fact lost it. Through a crafty management of the legal power inherent in the state, the plan’s continuity is assured by the broad acceptance of rules that regulate and govern relations between and amongst its designers, protagonists and victims alike. Human institutions, also called intellectuals, created by and for it, will by default or design be apprehensive about the possibility of its overhaul or eradication being a tool to recreate the hierarchies it has established in the social and political. Government as an assembly of interests through its command of the power to regulate interests through laws and concessions becomes a target of order creating human institutions whose sovereignty is guaranteed if they ESTABLISH themselves. Through machinations in government the ESTABLISHMENT defines the extent to which the State become an entity in law as well as being sovereign

 However, eventually, inevitably, and fortunately for humanity, even the very best of orders do come to an end. The balance of power underpinning such orders get to a state of imbalance. The turnover of ideas, albeit along a continuum of an established pattern of templates, does put institutions of any order under pressure to adapt, note not change or transform, to new conditions. Notwithstanding, the adjudicative power of an order whose history include coercion, suppression, and outright oppression over systems required to usher a new order can be strong to a level where it reverses the new, and re-invites the old order as the only known defence of privilege. The force of privilege defense has the propensity to redefine coalitions, even away from the noble intentions that undergirded the opposition to the unfairness associated with how that privilege was built. The neutrality of an ascending order becomes suspect, until it is redefined within the new conditions.

 In conditions like these, institutions whose design was to lead society remain the conduits through which any semblance of newness will be funnelled. As the condition of being free of an undesired or opposed system concretize, what seem to have fallen tends to rise with new capacities, unless those that have freed themselves have an equal force in systemic terms to replace the old. In this vortex of change, ideologues and thinkers from a declining and/or collapsing order plan a rise with new capacities, more stable and calculated wills, and new and redefined ambitions to continue dominating the ‘liberated’ space towards the maintenance of an economic status quo. Because the system was in the first place designed to uphold the order, the system becomes a network that holds together what we refer to as The Establishment.

 Upon realizing the inevitability of the demise of an apartheid order and thus the economic system that held it together, the academic-media-business Complex sought to engage those that may redefine it, of which in this case was the ANC-led liberation complex. Plausible as it was, the process became an intercourse of interests and a marrying of wish lists about the emerging post-apartheid order. The enrolment of the inter-coursing complexes meant liberation objectives had to adapt to new conditions in the maze of established economic templates and structure. As an order changes or ends, the manner and timing of its ending can be a very prolonged, if not ‘prolongable’ process. In as much the maintenance of any order depends on or requires effectual action, prudent policy making and creative diplomacy, the process of changing it requires double the effort. This, the first cohort of returning liberation complex mandarins, before the material benefits of the intercourse of interests took precedence over the resolve to recalibrate the apartheid colonial order settled in, did.

 The transformation of society became more and more an elite construct and somewhat allowed the more established order, inherently the apartheid order, to predominate design parameters thought to have been about a new order. The African majority became instead a new market for goods, it became a proximate specimen for study and analysis by long term order designers, it got open for the selection of co-optible candidates to manage value chains of economic dominance; a NEW ESTABLISHMENT was in the making. As the ideological wrestling was unfolding and the power of state procurement as a potent tool of transformation was foregrounding the transformation landscape, the war of standards and rules was unleashed on the new economic order. Whilst protagonist of the old order recognized that it is never coming back, efforts at resurrecting its continued benefits were chiseled into a maze of regulations that had ‘managerial discretion’ in the public sector circumscribed. The foregrounding of corruption and all its adjuncts, became a tool to prune the ascending establishment of its potency; notwithstanding evidence of some amongst the new that REALLY MESSED up.

 TO BE CONTINUED