The th!nc Foundation

    The South African liberation movement complex, historically led by the African National Congress (ANC), and the opposition complex which is clearly bankrolled by the economic establishment of South Africa anchored by an extractive capitalist class committed to protecting current privileges bequeathed to them by a history of dispossession, are embroiled in a political contest that might prove to be enduring.  Fears of what the contest might do to ordinary South Africans, as the momentum of the contest seems to be in favour of the opposition complex that is on a trajectory of government by a seats allocation criteria based 'majority of minorities', are starting to surface. In the past 14 years, in fact,  since the 'Polokwane pustch', a highly funded, cognitively resourced, and mega media systems backed consensus in cognitive elite and economic establishment circles has shifted decisively in favour of a more confrontational posture towards in-ANC supporters of 'rad...

       Our cultural fragility as a people will always be a function of whether it is built and/or based entirely on the memories of the elders whose eldership we embrace. When our tradition and humanity becomes our source of security and our being refuses to go the way of the mind, after it has been directed to volunteer our definition as people to cultural platforms that make us strangers, it is upon our manufacturers of narratives such as Power FM to recenter the living story of a nation through the prism of its icons. In the opening of The Chairman's Conversation, the construct of the program demonstrated that out of the ashes of a marginalised art, fire can be preserved for posterity's sake. Demonstrating that in his selection of The Chairman to have a conversation with, in this case Tatana Dr Khoza, Bhuti Mkhari foregrounded how less there is to justify his choice in his further selection of individuals to proffer preludes to the conversation. Almost like PowerF...

     For decades now, the world and humanity have known democracy not only in the Lincolnian parlance of ‘government of the people by the people for the people' but also as a construct whose optimal operation occurs when the government is constituted by those that garnered the most votes in an election, in short, the majority. Most political scientists and commentators rightly emphasize the role of the majority in the constitution of government after a free and fair election has been conducted and completed, but they often neglect to answer the questions of who is the majority, what type of majority should have the right to constitute a government, how is that majority reflective of the actual will of those that voted, and to what extent will a majority that constitutes a government enjoy the support and endearment of the electorate. A democracy requires therefore something simple, to become what it is intended to be, the will of the electorate, or people. It takes peop...

     The 2021 Municipal Elections have evoked all sorts of emotions, commentaries, analyses, and theories about the future of the ANC as a governing party. Ramaphosa in the process come out as one of the coolest of ANC Politicians. He wrapped his electioneering season by accepting a free and fair election verdict of the IEC and lauded the vibrancy and dynamism of South Africa's democracy, somewhat like saying, 'let us go back to work'. Fact is the ANC has lost significant executive authority in the country, the Metropolitan type. Vintage Ramaphosa started the 'negotiations' process to establish coalition governments where the ANC could and accepted the outcome where his overtures were rejected and or repudiated. At the opening of these negotiations it became clear that in almost all hung municipalities, the posture of opposition parties was 'either extort the ANC or don't vote with it'. The opposition complex prevailed in most Metropolitan municipalities...

   "Petropolitics is not the game of the faint hearted." The political economy of energy and OPEC is guarded jealously. It is fraught with dynamics that make it the subject of the rich and privileged. We have recently witnessed how, in the heat of global discussions and fight for dominance, members of the Cabinet of the Republic of South Africa were talking at cross purposes as if their political party, the ANC has no clear policy position on these matters. I am going to challenge your stand on environmental issues and call open Africa to lead the world by becoming thought leaders on the matter: not just decrease of greenhouse gas emissions. Africa has a solution which the USA and Western Europe will not accept because it will break the dominance of the UN by developed countries which use the promise of investment as a bait when mist of the money budgeted for developing nations never leaves the USA, European Union Offices and capitals of Western Europe. The solution is simple...

    In answering this question, South Africans should make honesty about what the country is going through, the context of all contexts.   To avert a further decline of South African livelihoods and the instability that has come with it, as seen in the rising crime rates, racial intolerance, vigilantism, and growing confidence of the poor to loot openly, South Africa's social partners should get into a 'beyond incumbency' dialogue, again, about the country's future. New risks, and difficult compromises, will have to be taken in the process. Continuing under the present firmament of government, State management, and management of the economy does not have any moral high ground, save that it is liquidating the corresponding correctness of what a constitutional democracy such as the one we have can deliver. The governing, economic, and political, elite should enter into such a dialogue having due consideration that South Africans do not subscribe to most of their way of se...

    The South African voter reacted to the lack of service delivery and the failed state at local government by voting new parties and the opposition, as well as abstaining from voting the governing ANC.  A casual look at the IEC published list of political funding also shows a decline, if not withdrawal, of donor support to the ANC, and a bold statement by some of the richest dynasties of South Africa that there is a change they want and are funding it. Society has shown its resoluteness in insisting that the ANC, and/or anyone that has their vote, should henceforth deliver on their commitments to build a South Africa promised by the country's Constitution. The governing party, even after repudiation by voters in several municipal jurisdictions, and especially the major economic nodal points, seem to be insisting on its version of understanding the South African voter and still force-fitting its factional choices of leaders that would have otherwise not made it if it was...

     I remember the march vividly. I was there with the marchers, with a few comrades, the late Stanza Bopape,     Akila, the late Cicerine Makhwere, the late Penny Mlahleki, Ting Ting Mlahleki amongst others.     It started in Mamelodi East led by the chairperson of the Residents Organization, Louis Khumalo. As it proceeded through Mamelodi West, many more people joined until they reached the Council Offices opposite where the Denlyn Mall/Shopping centre is, in Denneboom, at the entrance into Mamelodi.   The marchers were waiting to be addressed by the Chairperson, Mr. Khumalo, who had just mounted a huge pedestal in front of the entrance to the offices. There was heavy police presence as usual. Mr. Khumalo had just started addressing the protesters and reading the memorandum of demands when a few teargas canisters were fired into the midst of a peaceful crowd, which by this time , had settled down quietly to be addressed by the chairperson and, ...

On a fateful Thursday, November 21, 1985, South Africa witnessed one of the brutal massacres that decorated the being of a country called South Africa, in a township called Mamelodi. Then a nest of political activism that could have been the birthplace of the South African Youth Congress, which was launched in the Eastern Cape after a tip- off to the security police that Mamelodi was a designated birthplace, Mamelodi became a scene of an obscene massacre.   The massacre happened on the day a march organised by the Mamelodi Parents Association, led by Louis Khumalo, a local pharmacist, to protest the rising municipal rent, presence of the police and army in Mamelodi, restrictions placed on attendance of funerals, and all other conditions associated the then State of Emergency. The march was in the main by parents, 'children' were asked not to join the march as this would have irked the then Minister of Law and Order, Mr Louis le Granje. Le Granje was one of the ministers who has...

   According to Ken Owen who is a former editor of The Sunday Times, F.W. de Klerk was brought to the negotiating table by “the bankruptcy of a nation that had been looted until it could no longer honour its debts”? Owen goes on to argue that we “owe our liberation, really, to greed”. This is clearly true in part; however, liberation was brought about by a number of factors including internal and external struggle. Corruption, on the other hand, became the drug of choice for a regime intent on self-destruction". As you read further you might understand why Jewish journalists such as the late Allister Sparks and Helen Zille exposed Apartheid and De Klerk and discontinued after 1994.  It is in this context that we must comprehend that De Klerk knew that the demise of the apartheid government was inevitable and betrayed Botha  by announcing the release of Mandela, not because of his own wisdom but because his government was bankrupt as a result of looting and on the ver...