The events that followed the suspension in 2021 of the ANC's Secretary General, Ace Magashule, are not only m definitive of the ANC's future, but will at the same time redefine South Africa's politics as we know them. Beyond this suspension will be questions of what becomes of the ANC, and can the ANC muster courage and energy to renew itself and still continue to govern. This piece will attempt to provide context on this matter by, and amongst others, looking at the kaleidoscopic character of the ANC as a movement and lately political party in a capitalist democracy.
The ANC was formed in 1912 as a culmination of several responses by a Native African Political Elite to their exclusion from the post-South African War peace arrangements that gave birth to the constitutional formalisation of the geopolitical space called South Africa. At its inception the ANC was in essence an imagination of a Victorian English educated black elite that was Wilberforcean liberalism influenced with a Gaveyist radicalism both of whom advocated civil rights without changing templates that structure political economy power. This ideological default posture defined the ANC as a trans-tribal and later multi-racial political formation whose civil rights demands end state could only be, the securing of enfranchisement as a political breakthrough mechanism through which the parliamentary political power would be used to recalibrate socio-economic relations. In the various phases of its struggle system, the ANC became both adversary and collaborator to the extent that the law allowed or could be defied.
In its more than a century old history, the ANC has been involved in a 'struggle' to negotiate inclusion in an otherwise extractive colonial economic system. At inception it positioned itself as an alternative Parliament for those that were not in the one determined by the 1910 Constitution. The successive cohorts of ANC leaders organised themselves into deputations that went to England to craft a political path to be 'included' in the established post-1910 system. Being part of her Majesty's recognised subjects would for a while be the objective of their representations to the British Imperial government.
As the obstinacy of the coloniser grew commensurate with the needs of an extractive and black labour exploiting economy, the posture of the ANC's approach to political emancipation, then liberty, got gradually radicalised. As the intensity of economic exclusion grew to include land dispossess and suppression of the right to freely express political opinions, the ANC, and emboldened by a growth of a black cognitive elite, started to rethink 'inclusion' . It was the growth in non-black support for the Apartheid system that culminated into the 1948 seizure of Parliamentary power by a narrow nationalist and race based National Party that generated calls for Freedom in Our lifetime. The generation of leaders that stood up to demand the redefinition of power relations in the political economy, politics and social affairs, started to chronicle alternatives to what they were opposed to.
It was the 1949 generation of younger ANC leaders that developed a process with which a beyond Apartheid South Africa could be defined, and the Freedom Charter of 1955 was drawn up. As the Charter declared South Africa to be belonging to all who live in it, it locked into that aspirations an insurance for dispossessors of land to have rights of property to 'spoils of the wars' of dispossession that engineered the spatial geography of access for South Africa. The ideological appeal of the Freedom Charter became the basis for the creation of an anti-apartheid coalition that grew into a liberation movement; whose end state could only be the attainment of enfranchisement as set in 1912.
The demand for political freedom would in this quagmire relegate matters of economic emancipation, despite the Charter being clear on the integrated nature of the freedom sought. The consolidation of the struggle system into a programmatic endeavour with defined outcomes was met with a programmatic rule by law based institutionalisation of the apartheid system. It is in the decade that produced the Freedom Charter when we saw the promulgation of the most institutionalisation of apartheid laws. The sum impact of these laws was the entrenchment of inequality in a genocidal manner, a condition that has in fact led to the appropriate definition and/or characterisation of apartheid as a crime against humanity. Racial inequality became a strategic vector for a race based economic domination template that was crowned by the declaration of South Africa into a Republic outside the British Commonwealth of Nations, in 1961.
The legislation driven definition of South Africa as a race based political economy meant all criteria of societal development would have the advancement of racial domination as an index indicator. The abuse of the system to advance this indicator, including state procurement based corruption, would be seen as a means to achieve a race dominated economic system. The foundations of a State being captured by a race-defined political and cognitive elite whose ideational centre was driven by a 1918 established think tank, the boerderbond, was laid to be an unfortunate benchmark In this condition of growing hopelessness at the capacity of the apartheid state to come to the table and engage on the proverbial demand for inclusion by the ANC, a military solution was then sought by the 1949 cohort of young leaders and uMkhonto we Sizwe was established as a strategic pillar to anchor the next phases of the 'liberation' struggle.
The most strategic of responses by the ANC would in fact be the theorisation of the South African struggle system into a multifaceted program of action whose outcome was the seizure of power. The strategy and tactics document of the ANC became the window within which ANC members could find co-ordinates of where the struggle system would otherwise end, is, and what are the 'balance of forces in the process. The isolation of the apartheid State from the international community and trade systems, as yet another pillar of the 'liberation' struggle, meant that an economic system based of undermining the emerging global order and its institutions had to be established through a network of state sponsored and clandestine networks. This meant the national security and crime intelligence edifice had to be attuned into a survivalist means through which the objective of building an economy templated on racial domination could be sustained. The precision at which the state security system interlocked with a global sanctions busting underworld created a political economy with its systems of government including intelligence. The State was in the process of being formalised as a captured agency of corrupt individuals disguised as its defenders; this infrastructure had generational continuity and its co-option prowess undermines anti-corruption efforts.
This institutionalised corrupt system would interface with its adversaries in the banned liberation movement, most of whom occupy strategic posts in the current government as the agency of the State, as well as in the governing party the African National Congress. With industrialisation and ownership of the financial services sector being the most towering of outcomes defining the success of the 1948 to 1961 programmatic institutionalisation of the race based template of economic dominance, government procurement grew to become an economy for the then marginalised, most of whom were Afrikaners mobilised as a 'narrow nationalist' and 'white privilege' defending voting bloc. State owned entities, then called parastatals, became alternative centres for the breeding of 'non-black' executives and procurement propelled economic mandarins. A template that stood the test of time as the platform upon which State Capture could rightly or otherwise be theorised was set. It 'non-white' equivalent, post apartheid, could not reach the level of sophistication its non-black pathfinder mustered.
Fast track to 1990 when the ANC and all it represented was ultimately 'invited to the table' to engineer its 'proverbial inclusion' demands, otherwise spun as a 'pillar of the struggle', it came to the table under a basket conditions that would have put it under pressure to compromise. These included a global realignment of power blocs that saw 'communist Russia' redefining its geopolitical interests in the aftermath of the declining appeal of 'communism' as an ideological plank to anchor post-colonial liberation state building efforts. The American ascendancy as a global power and a centre of liberal democratic ideation had elevated the idea of .... as the basis upon the global balance of forces could be tilted towards facilitating what the ANC spun as a 'democratic breakthrough', a euphemism to accepting that it all came down to enfranchisement of 'non-whites' without touching the templates of economic dominance.
Enfranchisement as a means to a democratic breakthrough grew to being the new index with which a new template for a democratic society of liberty thinking South Africans would be built. The system that made apartheid work would be inherited as an institution of leadership for the new political incumbents. Whatever worked in the system defined its continuity and thus success. How it operated as a political economy would also define its success and thus defence. The correctness or otherwise of how it utilised the commanding heights of the economy could only be faulted if it was outside the new template of economic redress without interference with the working templates of dominance. Political executives that went into the system and became its incumbents assumed the roles of politically managing the system to keep its 'foreign direct investment' flows that had 'investor confidence conditions' anchored on ensuring liberal world order objects define South Africa.
State procurement running into trillions, if SOEs are computed into the grand total, became the 'new prize' of politics, and thus the emerging political economy. Those that managed these trillions became targets of economic turkey shooters. Without a defined thesis of the new economic trajectory South Africa should follow, officials of the 'new' government as 'person forms of organs of state' became sitting ducks of State Capturers. Given that the electoral system elevates the political party as the victor to be crowned once government as the prize of politics has been won, the ANC as the ascending post 1990 political coalition became the greatest of prizes sought by all breeds and sorts of entrepreneurs.
The economic conditions occasioned by.decades of marginalisation defined many that would be in the bureaucracy as 'the-poor-sitting-on-buttons-of-power'. Their vulnerability to being captured grew commensurate with the continued absence of an economic development thesis for a post-conflict democratic State. The modus operandi whose end justified the means settled into the new political and cognitive elites to a level where corruption was normalised. A nomenclature to normalise this developed, and when international instruments designed to deal with corruption were acceded to, most of how 'business' was done defined many of the practices as corrupt and arguably characterising the governing party as being captured by many of its dominant operatives.
It was the grammar that these international instruments became to how South Africa is governed that interrogated the settling vocabularies of corruption which became a game changer in respect of what becomes a priority to make democracy stable. The institutional organising and reality conceptualisation demands of these international instruments, which also carried with them the memories of colonial control and an anthropologist view of a 'liberated' South Africa, would scupper objects of recalibrating templates of economic dominance to follow a path less preferred by 'liberation' objects which defined a 'before-government-ANC'. Understanding or settling into the global anti-corruption institutional edifice meant 'learning that was tied' with 'capture and enslavement' to the 'somewhat' national sovereignty questioning interests of the 'global system'. As our global visibility as 'corruption fighters' through the language of the 'investor' community grew, the invisibility of our development language disappeared into the priority of fighting 'corruption' by all means possible, including abandoning transformation of society.
Having enjoyed the 'cognitive monopoly' of defining the anti-apartheid struggle system, including adopting the illusionary 'South Africa belongs to all who live in it Freedom Charter, the ANC agreed to the shaping of South Africa's future in the image of its past economic dominance templates. The visibility of South Africa's presence as a democracy is ideationally not African, and is at best Afrikaner Nationalist with a state sponsored zeal to make it 'internationalist' without an indigenous anchorage. This of course is a function of the loss of focus on the 'national' of the African Congress, the thinking has defaulted into being a permanent coalition.
Therefore, the renewal of the ANC cannot be conceptualised outside a Damascus seeking endeavour anchored on the famous Winnie Mandela line at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission when she said 'It is true, Things went terribly wrong. I fully agree with that ...And for that part of those painful years when things went horribly wrong---and we were aware that there were factors that led to that --- we are deeply sorry". Whilst not taking full accountability of what happened, the Winnie Mandela line was an acknowledgement of how a system can assume leadership in the absence of a thesis to guide it. To date the governing party of South Africa has not defined in a scientific way, or rather in vintage ANC parlance, for itself what it understands to be Corruption and State Capture. The absence of this definition makes most of its activities and way of doing the business of politics to be vulnerable to interpretation depending on the objects that are advanced when the interpretation is made.
The stepping aside of the Secretary General, and the looming reality of many following him, should in fact be seen as the stepping aside of the ANC itself to go and find itself in the cesspool of corruption created by an understanding of State Procurement as a tool of economic empowerment that "went terribly wrong". In rescuing itself from itself, there will be a need to accept that it must emerge in a new form without discarding its nature. It cannot be satisfied with an ecdysis but must seek to metamorphosise into its different self.
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