The year 2021 marks the 25th anniversary of the South African Constitution. It is also a year that marks the ushering in of a South Africa with an overall support for the African National Congress that is now below 50% of the voters that cared to vote, and a worse 70% of people that are either apathetic to its democracy or lost confidence in the impact of voting on their lives. Without doubt, the events that characterised South Africa for the past 25 years represent a chapter in its history wherein we saw the rise and decline of ANC hegemony, and a resurgence of liberal democracy at the centre of South African politics to a level where the ANC can now be arguably characterised to be a 'form of right' in economic thinking.
Since 1996, with the adoption of the Constitution, all fundable politics and public policy could only be justified within the ideological parameters set by the Constitution. Reference to the rule of law meant laws made out of the doctrinal dictates of the Constitution, and by extension only adjudicatable through jurisprudence that is not in variance with what the Constitution seeks to achieve with society. The mandate to govern the ANC's obtained from South African citizens became a new terrain of 'struggle' about how to adapt to the modernity demands that have convulsed the ANC's ideological world. A clash of in-ANC tendencies, euphemistically referred to as components of a broad church, have pitted 'interests' chasing factions against each other to levels where the liberation promise got dismembered into 'persuasions' whose construct lack ideological content.
Central to these in-ANC convulsions is the struggle over the future of South Africa's political economy through the resources distribution prowess embedded in the control of politics' ultimate prize, government. Fundamentally the ANC emerged out of the 1996 Constitution negotiations settlement as an outsider to the political economy complex whose reach has thus far demonstrated a sophistication ordinary members of the ANC are out of depth to interact with. In fact, the ANC has for a while been a reluctant and reactive participant in the shaping of South African political economy, and thus its core and strategic drivers. Whilst its policy rhetoric has pronounced 'at' and not 'of' or 'about' the political economy, it did so in a context that casts its constituency as either victims or passive onlookers, notwithstanding their access to the political power and capital to recalibrate the templates of domination.
As the in-ANC policy egg dances were happening, those in command of systems and templates defining to South Africa's political economy, started to settle into the space in a way that consolidates their version of economic transformation. As variants of what this transformation is, and should be about, were negotiating for space in the 'broad church', strange 'creeds and breeds' of transformation leadership developed along 'self-interest' agendas. A tyranny of corruption as an outcome of this confusion engulfed the country, and the ANC as a brand was appended to this dysfunctionality. Corruption became a currency with which the gamut of transformation could be traded with the quest and pursuit of legitimacy by ANC leaders.
The 2021 Municipal Elections outcomes should thus be seen in this light. South Africa's economy is driven in the main from the eight Metropolitan Municipalities, and several of the 'secondary cities'. In real terms the experience of government by an economy is always primal in the local sphere of government. It is in local government that most licenses and permits are given or executed. Development, especially built environment, finds visibility and expression through the cities that a society or democracy builds. Human livelihoods are regulated at the local sphere of government. Society judges its government through the efficiency of municipal government. Losing political power in these Metropolitan Municipalities, or rather economic nodal points, is the beginning of an end to any hegemony, and those that have been rising are in essence busy taking over; NO AMOUNT OF SPIN DOCTORING CAN CHANGE THIS TRUTH.
The dualities that characterised South Africa have now come to define electoral support as a manifestation of how people experience government. The urban voter, who has an intense relationship with service delivery issues of water, electricity, waste removal, clean parks and surroundings, crime, and several others, will be differently agitated than a rural voter where nationally mastered services mean more to them. To this effect ESKOM load shedding cannot be innocent as a catalyst to the outcomes, the first target of Mandela's armed struggle was ESKOM pylons, a strategic target for any guerilla warfare, and a multi-pronged 'warfare' is underway, the generals are diffuses into all camps. The loss of support in the urban areas, and the non-voting of those in the urban space and yet not affected by these services, that the ANC and democracy suffered, is a truth those celebrating the hollow victories of having gained additional support on an otherwise shrunk voter base should not undermine.
Whilst these dualities could be argued into reasons for the November 1 voter behaviour, there are truths the ANC should face about itself.
- The corruption narrative is still appendable to its senior leaders, despite the inability of the NPA to successfully prosecute
- The state capture revelations at the Zondo Commission de-campaigned the edifice of being ANC, even if there is not guilty verdict in sight
- The selective way in which law enforcement agencies deal with corruption by and amongst ANC leaders and members is busy confirming the duality of justice that has for a while had race as a vector. In this instance it seems to have assumed a house nigger vector.
- The administration and management of the ANC has been deteriorating to levels where trusting an organisation that can even pay it employees with government is a risk that require no sophisticated cognition to see.
- The reactive manner in which the ANC has abandoned its tried and tested cadres, who are the most EDUCATED in who, what and how the ANC works, for people who have degrees from institutions that are colluding in the problematisation of majority governments and somewhat the true transformation future true ANCness represents
- The inability of the ANC to be deliberate and honest in protecting South African citizens from all forms of foreign threats including foreign nationals taking jobs that could be ring-fenced for South Africans.
- The incapability to weed out of the ANC the criminal element that has taken over it basic units of community mobilisation, branches.
There are other truths members of the ANC can mention that require of it to deal with its renewal. The November 1 outcome has, and indisputably so removed ANCness as the centre of crafting a new South Africanness, but instead put adherence to the values undergirding the country's Constitution as the new hegemonic centre.
The opportunity to coalesce with other parties provides the ANC with a chance to build a 'United Democratic Front' again to deal with socio-economic challenges of South Africa. The pornographic inequalities are just to real to make this front impossible to build, in fact the new majority of combined majorities was able to get municipal electoral support because they genuinely spoke to what causes these inequalities and community discontents.
Facing these truths would require a leadership that will not hide itself under the rubble of the collapsed support and rationalise how it should survive as persons instead of focusing on how the country should survive the incompetence to grow and develop our competitiveness as a nation-state. As a South African poet wrote to power,
'O President My President
Our fearful trip has begun
The democracy cannot weather these cracks
The prize we sought is diminishing
The grave is near, the hymns are sung,
Our people are crying for your leadership
While poverty is wrecking our social fabric
But O anarchy, O anarchy, O anarchy
On the stairs of your high office
Where on the deck my President lies
Falling and focused on political enemies’ beds,
O President My President, rise up,
And hear the cries,
Rise up- from you leadership is sought- from under yourwatch
the State is failing
The procession to bury our hopes is marshaled by anarchists,
The mass graves are filling with youth dreams
From you we are expecting leadership and
direction
From your party we have lowered our expectations
Our eager to be the best we are is waning
Hear President, dear leader,
The turmoil beneath your eyes
It is what doomsayers about Africa have predicted
It is the trip we dared not to travel,
On it you are falling and becoming cold,'
Yes, TRUTH is not NOSTALGIC
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo tivulavulela
🤷🏽♂️Yiiii
Comments
Post a Comment