The ANC is one of the most influential political movements on the continent. As a construct, it presides as and over a political coalition of communists, capitalists, tribalists, nationalists, and everything in the bread church, as the Zondo Commission has shown what else is inside. Armed with a mandate to rebuild South Africa, being a member of the ANC is or should be a mandate to make South Africa a better place for all.
According to
the South African electoral system, the party wins an election. Leaders and
persons expire in their parties. Their influence depends on the party that
accepts their membership and elects them to leadership positions. Individual
members are subject to the inner workings of the party itself. The party can
recall your membership to it and a leader and leadership if it wants to.
Membership in the ANC is based on this reality.
In its over 100-year
history, the ANC has produced four documents of political significance. These
have thus far shown some semblance of being a unifying platform upon which some
direction can be found. It is its Constitution, the African Claims Document, and
the Strategy and Tactics document. Some may want to add the Freedom Charter, a
document the ANC adopted because it contributed to its drafting. In fact, and I
submit, any other political formation in South Africa has an equal right to
adopt the Freedom Charter as its guiding document.
The Freedom
Charter was written to define South Africa outside the potential limitedness of
party political imaginations. It was adopted at a Congress of the People, and
its injunctions were broadly presented to allow for content relating to its
practical implementation to be left to whoever can best deliver on its promise.
The Freedom Charter's inherent character made its clauses readily accepted by
even those outside the ANC as a membership political party. The 'people' in the
Freedom Charter included the late Eugene Terreblanche.
The crisis of
not having a system with which membership to your organisation should be about
its optimisation is one of the core issues responsible for the absence of a
substrate defining ANCness. At its formation, the ANC was, in essence, an
outcome of the liberal imagination of a Wilberforcean and somewhat Garveyist
political thought whose strength depended on the structural success of what
occasioned the very Coloniality it was meant to dismantle.
In the later
years, the ANC grew to become the platform upon which the express intents of
non-white professionals and abaNTU 'business' could be entertained. It mutated
into a left-thinking organisation commensurate with the shrinking capacity of
the economic right's ability to co-exist with society's organic non-racial
equity demands. The veracious race and class vector of colonialism and
apartheid could only find a match in the ideological scaffolds presented by a
Leninist-Marxist thought, whence its political rhetoric became more left than
it stood for.
As an
organisation, the aspirations of the ANC have no history of wanting anything
beyond being included in the determination of South Africa's future. The
enfranchisement of non-whites would, in this context, represent an end state of
the struggle. After this end state was reached, the real intents and
aspirations of politics as a vocation for some came to the fore. Interests
became the new currency of politics, and 'our people' got defined along the
interest-groups-personal continuum. Varieties of aggrandisement are found in human
and group identity.
These
interests found expression in an ideology less or lack of sustained long-term
thinking about South Africa or the ANC itself by the ANC. As an institution,
its capacity to contain a beyond-us-the-incumbents vision is profoundly
compromised by the absence of a what-are-we-about construct required to drive
an institution of its size, historical endowment, and brand. Arguably, some
might claim that its age must surely be based on some glue that kept it alive. The
answer is a resounding yes, but that which held it was fighting what
necessitated its formation. It is difficult to find what had it as an
unencumbered thesis of existence outside being an antithesis of what it did not
want for South Africa.
This absence of a thesis facilitates the ease of factional behaviour. In a fast-changing, uncertain political context, well-meaning members of a political organisation need to understand the why-we-are-members issues to prevent exploitation by 'resourced members' and protect its future. With a defined why-are-we-members framework, ANC members will return to their diminished leader-of-society role and be a substrate for defining why-are-we-South-Africans.
THIS WILL BE UPDATED
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela
🤷🏽♂️Be ngisho nje
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