The th!nc Foundation

Establishing a human rights-anchored Constitutional Democracy remains one of the unique 'freedom guaranteeing legacies the Mandela cohort of Parliamentarians, leadership complex, and thinkers had bequeathed to posterity. The isolation of each citizen into a human with rights protected and enshrined in the Constitution has not only subjugated organs of state humanism in the Constitution but also put the vices of legal practice in check.  The judgement of Jacob Zuma will go on in history for various reasons, with the blindfolded lady justice being the one to be questioned if she did not see the person in the human before her. The person of Jacob Zuma has been in the courts for days more than he had been to account in Parliament. His relationship with the law has been so troubled that Lady Justice might have developed an ability to sense him without using her eyes, which makes such blindfolded eyes symbolic and potentially meaningless. True, he is in contempt of court; he should face ...

The sentencing of Jacob Zuma, a significant figure in South African politics, has far-reaching implications. As he faces a 15-month jail term and becomes a subject of planning at correctional services, the focus shifts to the impact of this sentence on our fragile democracy and the functioning of our legal system. The transition to democracy in South Africa, orchestrated by the Nelson Mandela leadership cohort, was a Monumental decision. It was not just a shift in political power but a transformation that was deeply rooted in the rule of law. This decision bridges the normative statehood established under apartheid and the envisioned pathfinder legacies of transitioning to the current rule of law.    The South African legal system, inherited from the apartheid era, faced challenges. Arbitrary judgments and chauvinisms, such as racial biases, were prevalent. Overcoming these challenges and building trust in the normative aspects of law, free from historical prejudices, is cruci...

Democracy is supposed to be the arrangements with which society has agreed to govern itself. These arrangements are codified into laws and regulations through which society reconciles the conflicting interests of the individual members of society. How these interests aggregate into an acceptable policy position, generally coded as law, is a function of coalition building, creating and sometimes manipulation. Historically the will of the dominant coalition was imposed through wars, conquest and/or force of traditional acceptance of some as royalty. These mechanisms of will imposition have for centuries been undergoing constant review as the locus of political power shifts in societies. When military power was the arbiter of conflicting interests political power got located on the proverbial 'king's table', when the choices of humanity became the arbiter those they agreed to select from amongst themselves carried the collective will of all. In a democracy where the wills of s...

Former ANC President Mbeki has penned a document to the effect that the ANC should not amend Section 25 of the Constitution in its quest to pave way for its National Conference resolution that directs ‘expropriation without compensation’, as a land restitution strategy. President Mbeki titles his document 'suggestions on the draft proposals on amending section 25 of the Constitution' , thus denoting the spirit with which the document is penned. He does not come out as being hostile to the idea of amending section 25 of the Constitution, but instead cautions that the process should be disciplined by the perspective on Land Redistribution in the Freedom Charter, and the National Conference as well as NEC positions on the matter. In the document all he managed to do was “to give the NWC a historical account of the land discourse and the disparate ideological stances… (and) what is interesting is that he acknowledges the existence of settler colonialism which dispossessed both the ...

A South American scholar, Unger, defines democracy as the arrangements by which society agrees to govern itself or each other. In this definition, he introduces the notion that if it fits that society, it is its democracy. The Chinese, on the other hand, have, over centuries, been thinking and designing a democracy that would be able to hold their society together, notwithstanding its size and diversity. In this pursuit, the Chinese have developed a vertical democratic system whose stability is anchored by its refusal to allow a horizontal review of its decision-making process. For some time, democracy has been about incorporating and integrating others into a governance construct whose outcome is coherence and identification. The lens through which the crafting of democracy is examined is a national or, rather, community-specific one. The stability of a democratic order lies in the organisation of institutions that will shape and protect the arrangements to govern each other....

Bra Jabu Mabuza was a quintessential South African who combined the world of practical entrepreneurship, street wisdom, profoundly connecting networking skills, and the finesse of 'wat bang'. He rose to his stature through hard work and understanding of a relationship between own energy and output.   In his short life he became a public servant that volunteered himself to the service of the nation at many of its levels. He carried the public from one point to the other, and thus became a thread that connected employment with the employed, retailers with those that came to buy, public services with those that came to access them, families with their relatives as far as they might have chosen to be or dumped. He was a taxi driver. He carried many a human souls and listened to several conversations about people he did not know but whose life stories as told by passengers definitely shaped him. He potentially buried many he did not know, because it was his business to carry the ber...

The National Society for Black Engineers will be in a breakfast meeting with the Minister of Water Affairs and Sanitation on Friday, 18 th June 2021. The breakfast provides an opportunity for the NSBE to dialogue with the Minister, and potentially get a members-only response to the ongoing tensions between Black Engineering professionals and the Ministry, especially in the wake of the Cuban Engineers saga. As part of the advisory complex to the NSBE leadership and practitioners therein, The thinc Foundation (th!nc) has been invited to the Breakfast Meeting. We consider the breakfast meeting as the beginning of an epistemic departure point for Engineers of African origin. In its analysis thinc dubbed the interaction with the Minister to be about ‘Engineering for Economic Liberation’ (EEL). Engineering for Economic Liberation should be, …   …a clarion call by Black Engineers, who are essentially Humans of African Origin, to claim center stage in any post-COVID19 and/or post-co...

The coronavirus has redefined the entirety of how humanity relates with itself, the environment and each other. Almost all arrangements that humanity devised to deal with economics, politics, science and technology, commerce, and education have been redefined. It has accelerated humanity into a world that was imagined, thus changing how human labour is traded in an open market. One of the areas which has occupied    humanity's attention to a level its contestation and management thereof is now a key determinant for the competitiveness of nations, is politics. Politics of a society, given their almost total reliance on interests as a currency with which to make political systems work, attract all breeds and creeds of persons to claim leadership. The organisation or arrangements with which humanity agrees to govern itself and thus form a government, otherwise also referred to as a democracy,have become a vocation whose plying has made government the ultimate prize of good politi...