The th!nc Foundation

  September 30 marks the end of South Africa's public service month and ushers in the National Book Month. I celebrated the 30th of September with Titus Mafolo, a public servant who served with his literary skills as advisor to President Thabo Mbeki, on the occasion of launching his three volumes book African Odyssey. I had the rare opportunity of reading a prepared paper that keynoted the event on behalf of Professor Muxe Nkondo. It was an odyssey of a special type for me as I traversed the interior of Professor Nkondo about the essence of Titus Mafolo's own African Odyssey. Muxe characterised Mafolo as an organic intellectual whose absence in his past has become a presence he has defined into posterity. Having been a public servant that was in the cohort of advisors and thinkers around South Africa's philosopher President, Thabo Mbeki, Mafolo's odyssey as a post-apartheid public service mandarin is now on record to usher in the book month.  A casual read of the launch...

   As the South African Association of Public Administration and Management holds its annual conference with a focussed discussion of professionalisation of the Public Service, the Mandela-Mbeki Public Service mandarins were in the same week launching an Association of Former Directors Generals (AfDGs). Addressed by the Minister of Public Service and Administration in KZN, the SAAPAM Conference, arguably the ultimate Mecca of all matters P/public A/administration Theory and Practice discourse, attracted scholars and practitioners to its 56 year old platform whose outcomes find expression in a peer reviewed Journal of Public Administration. In the same breath the National Head of Administration, the DG of DGs in the Presidency, was attending the launch of the AfDGs, and declared it a reference structure through which found paths could be deinstitutionalised in government and organs of state. The coincidence of these events happening during the last week of the P/public S/servic...

The African National Congress launched its elections manifesto for the November 1 local government elections on 27th September 2021. The theme of the manifesto is 'Building Better Communities Together'. Whilst the elections are about the household bread and butter issues, as well as citizen primary reception with the hospitality of government, being governed and democracy, the manifesto was rather more nuanced on 'other' politics than the 'politics of citizen primary reception'. In his maiden speech as President of South Africa, President Ramaphosa defined his local government strategic pathway as one that will be anchored on increasing the efficacy of intergovernmental relations and integrated development planning. He identified the inefficiency of government planning as being an outcome of silo planning and deviations from the 'one plan' government paradigm instructed by the National Development Plan. He posited the District Development Model (DDM), a ...

 I have been asked by many a friends on whether I would be voting the ANC or not. Some even went to an extent of reading my blog posts to being a sign of my political 'doctrinal' shift, given the personal history some know I have with the ANC. In response to their question I thought I deal with the question on a platform many have come to associate with my opinions outlet.  In my imagination of the time I believe I still have in this world, I did not think I will find myself in a condition where I am governed by a party other than the ANC, Tshwane ANC showed me it is possible. I saw many a miracles in my life time, I saw a lot I thought was impossible like a Black American President, a World Cup in Africa, and Woman President in Africa. Being governed by a party other than the ANC in Tshwane, Gauteng and South Africa has to me fell off the miracle history, it is a reality I have received counselling about. Comrade Kgoši Maepa's sterling performance as leader of the oppositi...

 I  have just finished reading a book on reinventing capitalism. One of the striking revelation about capitalism is the power of price to aggregate information about a commodity into a figure. That figure captures all and/or most dimensions of the product in ways that the product itself becomes passive in the process that is about its exchange. Power, and political power to be specific, is a commodity whose ultimate market is Davos. It’s ultimate price is determined there. The creme de la creme of power as a commodity have an annual pilgrimage to its perfected market, DAVOS. In Davos, the rules of the market of ‘political power’ are determined. As power is categorized downwards from its pinnacle market, Davos, it is traded in ‘various’ markets for a ‘price’ that aggregates ‘different’ sets of information thus creating imperfections in the ‘power trade market’. The greater the imperfection the lesser the integrity of players in the market.  In the main, the data and metada...

 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 Blacks from 1990 to 1996, and when a Constitutional 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 political-economy 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 had to have a 50 to 100 year horizon of planning. It required a maze of legislative and regulatory too...

One of the dividends of the 1994 democratic breakthrough is the elevation of heritage as a national asset worth celebrating and bringing aspects of the economy to a halt for its own sake.   What makes heritage real to a nation, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at its centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions that house it. At its core, heritage is the texts that are taught in schools, learned by future generations and recollected in times of tribulation. As we celebrate heritage day in South Africa, we need not forget to reflect on the questions of what is or constitutes a South African heritage. Do we have a heritage that brings us together as a nation in a state. Can we securely claim that our diversity is indeed the basis of a heritage commonly shared? As a nation we have a history of strife and conflict. The battles that were fought to create a society that embraces the values of non-racialism, non-sexism and prosperity for all have come and gon...

  The influence of civil society bodies and movements committed to truncating the post-1994 political economy gains in South Africa is inexorably rising and on the verge of defining the 'liberation movement' complex out of relevance. These bodies have become the largest magnets of non-political party funding that has political economy recalibration intents. Created as constitution defending bodies, social capital accumulation entities, and political capital risk mitigation movements, they have craftily succeeded in undermining the power of traditional democratic power often associated with quantitative voting, otherwise also referred to as majority rule. The thrust of their strategy has been to crumble all efforts aimed at levelling the economic playing field. The freedoms that the constitution protects have been gradually redefined to include the freedom to defend the economic status quo. Case law, most of which has its origins in jurisprudence whose intents were at some point...

When EDI Holdings was established as a company to begin the transformation of the electricity industry, the ideational construct was to 'unbundle' the industry into generation, transmission and distribution. EDI Holdings would be modelled as a company holding majority shareholding in six regional electricity distribution companies (REDS), demarcated to be anchored by the then six metropolitan municipalities. The plan was for municipalities and ESKOM to enrol into the process by amongst others collapsing their electricity distribution assets in exchange of shareholding into the REDS. As part of its stakeholder engagement process, EDIH had to engage with key players along the restructuring journey. National Treasury was one of the first to be engaged. Then Director-General, and now Reserve Bank Governor, Lesetja Kganyago, asked a question in one of the engagements; "if you take electricity distribution away from municipalities, which makes up for a substantial part of the lo...

T he resilience of an organisation is a function of its systems. The more an organisation introduces in its working systems what can be repetitive and scaled beyond its centre, the better a resilient entity it will become. The African National Congress was formed in the wake of a deliberate exclusion of Natives from the post-South African War arrangements on how to govern the then Union of South Africa. In the main, the ANC was, and arguably still is, a systemic and organised (Native and/or abaNTU) response whose moral legitimacy appeal stood the test of time.   Into its various phases of struggle it experienced the worst of what defines status quo challenging organisations. As a construct, it was premised on the unity of abaNtu ('nations', 'tribes' and/or ethnic groups), later the unity of all races, and ultimately included the ambitious unification of the most antagonistic of human sectors, 'unity of classes'. But what has made the ANC to navigate this journey...