COVID19 has become a departure
point for many an analysis about governance, economies, the global order, and
even family life. High impact and academic journals are clogged with a variety
of articles purporting to be crystal balling into a post-COVID19 world. The
rush might be inspired by humanity’s innate character of wanting to anchor
status quo thinking as the non-negotiable background of permanence for any
future thinking. In this quest humanity tends to forget that after any
disruption, what has been, can no longer come back, and efforts at resurrecting
that will be in vain. In South Africa, the ANC, arguably the foremost nexus of its
political economy life, would not escape post-COVID19 interrogation by society.
As a liberation movement and a
custodian of most of the struggle system that defines todays South Africa, the
ANC had gone through a number of phases that shaped its form and character. In
this journey, it has not been a roller coaster ride, but a journey of deeper
valleys and stony higher grounds, including, and especially, its life as a governing
party to a constituency which is not yet convinced that the reasons for the
liberation struggle are liquidated. The fact that its liberation movement
journey was concluded through a political settlement wrought with compromises,
most of whom were in the maintenance of the economic status quo undergirded by
a belief on the capacity of ‘the markets’ to somehow generate equilibriums of
opportunity, has made the inherited political and political-economy order the
ANC presides upon to be chronically unstable.
The CODESA and 1994 Constituent
Assembly settlement chronicled as the 1996 Constitution, and legislations and
policies that flowed therefrom, represented a convergence of ideals by the then
South African leadership on how the country will be governed. In ANC terms this
political accord had to be ritualised into its policy making structures and
architecture, whence adopted at the … Elective Conference. By adopting the 1996
Constitution, the ANC sealed the need for new convulsions to demand anything
more than what the Constitution promises, including the commitments it imposes
on successive governments and organs of state. The manner in which the
settlement distributed the authority to execute, legislate and adjudicate in a
judicious way , would be the base upon which the requirement of a stable
distribution of power and a broad acceptance of accompanying rules for any
order, was born.
This process was engineered by a
constituent assembly that had a more than 67% majority approval for the African
National Congress to establish a new nation or nation state. This mandate, in
constitutional law standards was executed to the acclaim of many a authority in
constitution making and political conflict and settlement management. A
semblance of political stability was thus created, the Nelson Mandela dividend
accrued to; those that controlled the economy; a emerging black middle class;
the poor, through an expensive social grant; and in many other fields of South
Africaness, more pronounced were the feats in sports and cultural recognition
beyond the country’s borders. In the same vein South Africa went through global
financial meltdowns whose impact were mitigated by the anti-cyclicality of its
post-apartheid infrastructure driven reconstruction and development.
The leadership of the ANC as the
governing party, notwithstanding its own internal convulsions that exploded at
the … Elective Conference in Polokwane, provided a CODESA settlement continuity
that assured the investor community of stability in the new post-apartheid
order. The institution of leadership character of the ANC, and systems it has
developed to anchor policy making and adherence became its greatest asset in maintain
its hold as a governing party. The Oliver Tambo dividends of; grooming a
leadership core with creative diplomacy; building functioning organisational
institutions that processed decision making through hierarchies of conferences;
and crafting a policy outlook that allowed agility to the changing ‘balance of
forces’, would buttress the ANC as an institution to its resilience. Whereas
many a pundit seem to be seeing the internal convulsions within the ANC as haemorrhaging
to its institutional make-up, a journey into its past would indicate that it is
in fact undergoing a process of ecdysis as an institution and its new self might
well propel it into another century of being the nexus of political life in
South Africa, and the Africa.
However though, as the truths of
governing and the altering of interests by those in leadership rage, the ANC as
an institution experienced a massive encroachment of corruption, and its adjunct
state capture, as a new context that almost became the context of all contexts.
This represented a truism that even the best of orders face from time to
time challenges that may look like the end of an order. The immediate last
conference of the ANC, in 2017, positioned itself as one that refused to allow the corruption
and state capture induced imbalances to prevail as the anchor reasons for the
end of a 100 year history of moral authority over evil in all its
manifestations. As the faltering wills and growing ambitions of the ‘corruption
brigades’ were taking root, a new breed of leadership, also with its own
sponsored wills and ambitions, sought to expire the hold of those defined as ‘corruption
brigades’ on the ANC as an institution. In this continuum of events, it should
be stated that the institution of the ANC could still not be faulted in terms
of how it has been conducting its affairs. The Oliver Tambo Leadership dividend
was intact, whence systemic reform to build a bulwark against ‘state capture’ could
only be achievable through the institution of the ANC.
In 2017, a new cohort of persons were then
elected onto the highest decision making structure of the institution of the
ANC. Various mandates were given to them to deal with the unity of the ANC. The
personalities that went into the institution of the ANC would naturally nuance
how it goes about dealing with its leader of society role as well as its
contested governing party role as accorded by the 1996 Constitution. The
post-2017 Conference renewal process would thus be about restoring the
institution of leadership status of the ANC as a post-1994 democratic
breakthrough gains protection mechanism. As this process was underway, a global
pandemic was declared. The pandemic meant the traditional tools and mechanisms
at the disposal of the ANC for its renewal would be disabled by the basic of
pandemic containment methodologies, lockdown and social distancing.
It is common course that after
elective conferences, and in the first two years after the conference, the
process towards the next conference starts. This means the institution of the
ANC gets into a mode of renewing it mandates and by extension persons that will
be trusted to execute. This becomes a built up to the various policy
conferences that inform municipal elections manifestos, provincial and national
general council decisions, and ultimately the next National Conference. COVID19
enters this process as a disruptor of note, it creates a condition where social
distancing has in fact become political distancing with structures of the ANC
as convention has determined. The only other time the ANC was able to operate
in such conditions was when it was an underground movement operating through
cells and proxy structures. It has never operated as a mass based organisation
restricted by social distancing, it is in fact a social construct.
The vulnerabilities of the ANC as
an institution can only be apparent only after its systems actually collapse.
This COVID19 condition of disaster require higher levels of depth, knowledge
and wisdom from persons that find
themselves in the institution of the ANC. Concluding a opinion pieces in the
2012 ANC Today Volume 12 No 6, Mathebula writes
“Without
vitiating the ANC’s experience and capacity to manage its conglomeration of civil
society interests through its long held congress alliance platform, it needs to
migrate towards a post-liberation struggle mind set. It needs to start
operating as an organisation ‘rooted in its liberation history but not
restricted by it’. Its identity should not only generate pride for its members,
but for South Africans. It must become the political vernacular that creates
social pride to its beneficiaries to an extent that ‘the sheer plasticity’ of
ANC-ness ‘defeats the ever growing attempt to blind its meaning to any one camp
of being South African.”
The COVID19 pandemic has been able to return vintage operations of the ANC into an underground resembling mode. The virus containment lockdown measure's regulation that The heritage site of consultative democracy that the ANC
has become, its ability to integrate its basic units of membership into various
hierarchies of decision making, as well as its tested capacity to hedge its
hegemony across sectors remains its greatest of assets to navigate COVID19 like
conditions. The socio-economic impact of the pandemic, its restrictions on
rights associated with the post-apartheid liberation gains, and its unequalizer
potential as a result of the declining livelihoods accompanying it, will draw
into the traditional civil activism hegemonic spaces of the ANC new players
with objects whose ideational basis may theoretically not be as consultative as
what the ANC has mastered. The governing party incumbency of the ANC, which
compromises its Non-Governmental Organisation status and moral authority to
speak into government dysfunctionalities is fast making the ANC to be a fragile
player in leading society through the pandemic, unless as Government.
The multi-party character of
TO BE CONTINUED SOOOME TIME
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