The birth of our democracy was hailed as a miracle for reasons that we ourselves seems to have not understood, if not embraced. Was it a miracle because a Rabbi could eat pork and yet still recite the Torah? Was is it because it was a freedom that could not be a liberation from what defined the liberation struggle? Was it a miracle because of the abstract nature of what was forgiven and forgotten to constitute our version of reconciliation?
Finding this miracle has been one of the most elusive ideational endeavours the political scientists tried to provide answers for. The trance in ideation this created could not reconcile with many of the theories and praxis of liberation struggle outcomes. The absence of a traditional victor in a valorised liberation war that did not have a committee of commanding generals debriefing victorious armies and wounded platoons makes this miracle an interesting phenomenon still to be studied.
The persistence to characterise the miracle as a democratic breakthrough to continue with a National Democratic Struggle to create a National Democratic Society could have only treated the outcomes of the negotiated settlement as a truncating phase of what still needed to be achieved. The liberal democratic constitutional outcome that valorise an open society and guarantees the rights of minorities as well as protecting spoils of previous dispossession created an uneasy freedom. In this construct of the miracle the vision, justifiably so, of those that sealed the 'political accord', and not 'treaty', was anchored on the then built capability of the State-to-be-inherited to create new contexts of human co-existence wherein 'a better life for all' could pacify demands previously characterised as National Grievances.
African Claims that became subsumed into a South Africa belongs to all preambled Freedom Charter which became the literal substrate of the intervening constitutional dispensation became the basis of the miracle. The capacity of the Constitution to co-exist with the uneasy and previously legislated templates of economic dominance might be descriptive to the miracle. The belief in the ability of 'a market economy' created by a 'exclusion-based political economy' to reimagine itself into an 'inclusive' one without interfering with property ownership patterns, both in terms of land and titling of intellectual properties, could be the miracle.
Despite these interesting intellectual safaris that rendered many in the human co-existence forest that South Africa has become, the country could still be able to sustain a semblance of stability. The stable order that followed the 1994 Freedom rested on the institutional leadership provided by the statist templates which defined the apartheid state. The regimentation of supply side government processes as manifest in the operating procedures instructing to its public administration systems provided organisational arrangements for any policy to either sustain or dismantle. The hierarchical order that provided a policy processing path into the national executive kept the miracle alive for as long as the systems stayed respectable to ascending policy makers.
The truism that institutional leadership is about institutions assuming leadership beyond the individuals inside them, continued to index the lasting power of the miracle. What the miracle managers seem not to have understood is that institutional leadership is about building and jealously protecting mechanisms and templates enforcing requisite behaviour without the risk of dependence on the human element. The miracle managers should have protected those signposts in institutions that directed all that are within them to do the basic minimums allowable therein.
Institutional architectures that produced en masse a policing system anchored on the maintenance of law and order should have reined supreme as endowments to the stability of an otherwise at risk miracle. Public education anchored on a state controlled supply line of its teachers to ensure the ease of deploying a new patriotism to undergird the miracle should not have been dismantled into its current nebulous form. The globally recognised power of the military training of youth as an investment into the general discipline and pecking order establishment in a society should have been protected. The capacity of the army to be an institutional enforcer of generic human skill to youth should have been protected for the sake of making the miracle sustainable.
We should not have closed the training prowess we had inherited as an institutional asset to strengthen the miracle. We should have refused the characterisation of parastatals into companies, commissioned state institutions should have been kept as our economic commanding heights. It is in the ability of a bureaucracy to stay true to its conservative character which makes strong states to last beyond the human element. In the new 'reconstruction' of the country we are challenged to look for all RESET TO DEFAULT buttons without deleting lessons of what we may have transformed.
The challenges that the miracle is facing might be self inflicted if we would be brutal in honesty to ourselves.
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela
🤷🏽♂️Be ngisho nje
Comments
Post a Comment