A stable order is a rare thing in the world. The idea of freedom in South Africa remains the most illusive of Democratic experiments that emerged from a negotiated settlement. In negotiating the enfranchisement of BantuBlacks 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.
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.
As a system, Apartheid Colonialism has 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.
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 and protagonists alike
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.
In conditions like these, institutions whose design was to lead society, remain the conduits through which any semblance of newness will be funneled. 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 wishlists about the emerging post-apartheid order. The enrollment of the inter-coursing complexes meant liberation objectives had to adapt to new conditions in the maze of established economic templates and structure. There is little, if any, evidence of the established economic complex adapting to core liberation movement objectives.
As an order changes or ends, the manner and timing of its ending can be a very prolonged, if not a '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 in character 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. New templates of dominance were non-racially set. Capitalism lost race classification but gained race-based dominance.
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 having REALLY MESSED up.
In any transformation project, the variables that constitute its effectiveness are always in a state of flux, purely because its opposition is more about keeping the status quo. Leader-Managerial discretion becomes the greatest tool in the hands of those charged with the task. In exercising that discretion, their capital base or basis of capitals becomes the only power they possess.
In South Africa, financial capital is and was not a resource its leadership had to drive transformation, except the never infinite revenue that lay in the state procurement process. The use of state resources as a commanding height in growth and development litters most if not all literature on economic turn arounds in developing economies such as RSA. In fact Apartheid became what it was and still is because of its reliance on the state as a capital raising base. The political economy of development states cannot be conceptualised away from the decisions of those in charge of the nation's executive authority.
The capital complex that post-apartheid BantuBlacks and Blacks in general had, included social and political capital. The sheer numbers and social structure of BantuBlacks became a bulwark in their capacity to keep political capital in tact, thus anchoring their access to the power of state procurement, which is by far one of the single largest procurer of goods and services in the hands of ‘BantuBlack managerial discretion’.
BantuBlack managerial discretion would in these conditions emerge as the key catalyst to establish a new order whilst disestablishing, and not destroying, the outgoing. The ponorgraphic wealth disparities, anger at the immediate past political order, the extractive and mercantilist templates that sustained non-white exclusion in the economy, the risk of narrow nationalism digressing into ethnic nationalism, political patronage that might emerge from the ‘social’ and political consensus about transformation, and the natural opposition to transformation that strips beneficiaries of the old order of their economic power, would make the managerial discretion of new order leaders the foremost target to be neutralized.
Legislation, regulations and standards would thus have to be set in order to reduce the ‘potential danger posed by ‘managerial discretion’, in the hands of a new and unknown bureaucratic elite. Procurement regulations became a new maze to be managed, before any decision to accelerate development by a post-apartheid manager could be done. The no-skill or lack of skill to manage scare narrative started to dominate the academic-media-complex’s outlets. The internationalization of regulations from the developed world became a new benchmark with which ‘a developing managerial discretion’ order would be measured against.
In this vortex, a NEW MULTI-RACIAL ESTABLISHMENT was at the same time in the making. It would be accelerated into the FINANCIAL CAPITAL ESTABLISHMENT as bulwark with which the inaccessible ‘socio-political capital’ that propels Leader-managers that are struggle context-produced could be neutralised. In this way the new that command managerial discretion which is only interior to the transformation imperative of recalibrating the structure of the economy will be put under forensic control. Enter, the demonization of managerial discretion, as a bedrock if not a nest of corruption and its adjunct, State Capture.
The power of managerial discretion is so broad that it has not only become its own liability, but a self-destructive context if patronage appends itself to it. The social in the structure of BantuBlack community is so communal that the risk of patronage as a catalyst for dysfunctional managerial discretion is often unseen.
This thinking is developing. Should you want to collaborate in its concretisation please send you views to lucky@justthinc.co.za
Ake sisho nje!!
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