Society's experience of politics is local. The prize of good politics is the control of government as an agency of the state. In the local sphere of government, municipalities are an agency of the local state, and how they govern represents the sum total of how society experiences government. The procurement path for political parties, individuals, and/or coalitions to have control over the allocation power of government has in South Africa been determined to be through an election.
The path to the enfranchisement of all South Africans was laced with conflict, negotiation, and compromise. In this path, the African National Congress became the oldest of pathfinders to have been consistent in demanding equal franchise for all. In this process, it accumulated all that believed in such an equality and its overarching principles of non-racialism, non-sexism, and prosperity for all. Within all known -isms and ideologies, the moral appeal of the principles the ANC stood for, gave it a hegemonic advantage over the politics of South Africa, especially as an outside-of-government coalition.
The moral reprehensibility of apartheid as a system of government and a social engineering ideology positioned the alternative that the ANC, arguably the leading liberation movement then, presented as a value proposition for a better South Africa to be beyond reproach, in hegemonic terms. This accounts for the global anti-apartheid movement that grew to be representative of all race-based chauvinisms humanity face everywhere in the world. The capacity of the ANC to delegitimize what is reprehensible grew into a value system South Africans would master and could muster if similar conditions re-emerge.
The 1994 democratic breakthrough defined a new era for the ANC. An era into which they would be government. This ushered a dispensation where individuals leaders of the ANC that went into government became organs of a state they had spent their youth and productive live plotting to remove or otherwise. In the new role, they could only act in terms of the public power resident in the offices they occupied. It would be the law that defined their organ of state status that rule. However they wished, they could not rule by law but would have to subject themselves to its rule and finality in any situation requiring arbitration. Any conception of hegemony over politics now required calibration to attune to a condition wherein politics could only be as good as they are lawful.
In this circumstance, the use of public power started to grow in its dependence on the quality, caliber, and capability of those occupying offices with public power. The policies of political coalitions (otherwise also called political parties) would be used to facilitate citizen support for that coalition to have access to a constitutionally define public power, and as organs of state, acting within the confines of what is legislated or allowable by law. These translate into a transactional relationship with a society based on what the law would permit in meeting commitments made as legitimacy to access was negotiated with citizens, in their role as voters.
Once legitimacy to exercise executive authority over the state is confirmed through the swearing-in of individuals that assume an organ of state role within government, their discretion over the allocative power they now possess becomes a measure through which their ability to be reborrowed the power for a further term is determined. The executive authority borrowed to them can only last for 5 years, and yet the public power they assume lasts for as long as the arrangements with which society has agreed to govern itself are in place, and not changed. It is the institution of government with public power that accommodates individuals who come into it on the basis of some borrowed time and opportunity that gives cadence to a democracy. It will be the discretion allowed in law that defines the time the individuals, as organs of state, spent on a defined public power, which will advance society along its civilization continuum.
The 2016 Municipal Elections outcome has not only redefined South African politics but has had a major impact on the hegemony of the ANC over our politics. The ANC was for the first time treated as a political party contesting for the legitimacy to use the public power defined in the Constitution. Society responded to its overtures on the basis of how it experienced its discretionary use of what was lawfully allowable. The bread and butter issues of human co-existence accompanied voters up to the ballot paper. The behavior, habits, and values of individuals the ANC deployed as elected organs of the state became determinate into how society understood its role as voters and affiliation to its historical hegemonic leadership in matters of an equal franchise for all.
The reality of incumbency as a government stripped the ANC of the comfort to point at the state it had control over its largest agency, government. For as long as the rhetoric of invoking the impact of apartheid could stay relevant, the ANC mined the opportunity to unsustainability levels, yet convention has it that blame is finite as a resource to political legitimacy preservation. Whilst South Africa has not reached state failure levels as a nation-state, most of its local state jurisdictions have reached state failure levels, and their failure has increased the fragility of the nation-state. The reaction of voters in the urban spaces of South Africa should be read as the beginning of a movement seeking a redefined hegemony over the politics of South Africa.
In his attempt to respond to this shift of support for the ANC, as manifest in the main by voter apathy and opposition party voter support growth, President Ramaphosa diagnosed corruption and state capture as the core motive force driving the concretising trend. Plausible that as it may be, it would seem it only served to confirm what was in doubt by society, and may have catastrophic implications for the ANC as a political party. What has been accompanying the 'we confess' phase of the ANC at a judicial commission of inquiry, has been the service delivery failures that were, and unfortunately so, propelled by the COVID 19 pandemic that found the ANC not ready to meet its demands of our efficiency as a nation-state.
There is therefore prevailing consensus that the ANC might have reached the end of its hegemonic influence over our politics, it must now earn the trust of society through what it can practically deliver to it. The youth bulge that is characterising voter support requires a 'nostalgia-less' leadership and value proposition. Concealment of sheer service delivery failure and absence of a plan on how to get out of the morass facing the nation-state under the heap of corruption and state capture will not bring clean water to the Hammanskraal community.
South Africa is suffering a severe state capability deficit, a government-private sector trust deficit without which only smash and grab private sector investment will happen, and a baggage of the past that weighs on the nation's ability to see the country as belonging to 'all its citizens'. We are fast losing time to emerge out of the pandemic as a ready-to-roll nation. Voters will on November 1, 2021, have their say. VhaNu va ta ti vulavulela.
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela
🤷🏽♂️Be ngisho nje
🤷🏽♂️Ek praat maar net
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