Few policy issues have attracted more attention in an ANC Presidential term than the challenge of protecting the post-1994 gains, as in a Ramaphosa term. The African National Congress has, and through struggle and sacrifice, sponsored the idea of freedom for the majority of South Africans, most of whom are Black, and African in particular. The ANC has also abrogated to itself the mandate of sponsoring the creation of inside-the-constitution institutions that would protect democracy in case they lose voter support; values and norms with which any future government will be held accountable; and created a legal and/or rule of law edifice that would guarantee the certainty of stability for a free and open market economy to thrive, without vitiating the interventionist role the state should play when necessary. As a consequence, the Constitution of South Africa emerged as a bedrock upon which its democracy could be imagined and lived.
The pulse, practice, and model of democracy the Constitution establishes, allows for the will of its voters to regulate how public power is borrowed to political parties and individuals, as well as how it could be withdrawn at five-year regular intervals. This means an order is in place and Pretoria benefits as a result of the foresight by a cohort of leaders that agreed on this Constitution as the country's playbook for democracy.
Notwithstanding, the sustainability of the post-1994 order, now seems to be in question within the ideational enclaves of the very ANC, institutional, individual or otherwise. Aggrieved voters and supporters of the ANC have withdrawn their votes from the democratic system, euphemistically called voter apathy, and some even went on to vote for other, and new parties. This is attributable to the economic and social price society seems to think they are paying with the continuation of an ANC government in its current form. Compounding this reality is the unclear position of the current ANC leadership on what role they see the ANC playing in the changed circumstances. Circumstances that procure for less liberation rhetoric but action to change the templates of poverty, unemployment, and inequality. More acutely, and within the ANC, the growing grievance is the apparent disillusionment of confronting the templates of economic dominance established by colonialisms South Africa went through.
The ANC's playbook of politics has for a while been about restitution and transformation to levels where its inaugural policies on these matters became victims of its transformation rhetoric. This has made the ANC, through the leaders it deployed into government, a substrate of transitionocratic government that a force or movement of change implementation. Whatever its views about South Africa and its history, the ANC-in-government has an obligation to establish a nation out of the rubble of divisions dumped on its lap by South Africa's well-documented past. It would thus be foolhardy for it to hold on to rhetoric that arbitrarily excludes, and yet operates with a democracy playbook that normatively includes, lest it becomes democracy's most significant risk and liability.
ABOUT THE NEW DEMOCRATIC ORDER
The current order in South Africa is an outcome of a process managed by an existing state. A state with sovereign borders, a command of its monopoly of state violence and power, a state with a judiciary, and most importantly, a state whose 'new order' was orchestrated by a bureaucracy focussed on avoiding disruptions to the certainty of doing business with South Africa. What was at issue when the state was undergoing a change was how its most active agency, the government, went about purposing the state. Utilising its legislative and judicial arms, the state aimed to exclude the majority of its variously defined citizens.
As an order, this democracy sustained its respect for the separation of powers and introduced an independent judiciary, as well as making the Constitution the standard on which the ultimate of all judicial adjudications will be based. The executive authority of the state continued to vest in the President as the apex of politics' highest price, control of the government, and by extension, influencing the state. Access to government control has, according to the arrangements by which South Africans agreed to govern themselves, been codified to be through political parties and lately individuals too. Therefore, the importance of political parties, and for the purposes of this rendition, the ANC, making this order, despite being arranged as a neoliberal playbook by its supreme law, functional, is non-negotiable.
As a collective, South African political parties have influenced almost every aspect of the new democratic order. They have provided platforms for diverse views about being South African to find expression and opportunities to be tested with citizens. Despite its history of dispossession, conquest, and thieving, the instituted rule of law stands as towering insurance for any restitution or restoration to be facilitated in and through law. This has created dense national networks and ideation institutions, activists and experts that are all clamouring to create a society where justice today should not manufacture injustice tomorrow. The rules of political parties are thus obligated to reinforce the established democratic order.
The consensus of building South Africa in the image of its constitution requires, therefore, a normative environment that limits, if not obliterates, the insatiable appetite to be arbitrarily prerogative by politicians. The rights-based culture the Constitution advocates for citizens is assumed to have been first embraced by political parties in how they conduct their affairs and treat membership. Freedom of expression should translate to members within political parties being able to express their views and preferences without fear of being labelled or otherwise. Freedom of association with a view or tendency within a political party should be allowed to the extent that it does not result in undefined disrepute or otherwise. The ANC would be wise to inculcate the values and rights the country's constitution guarantees first within its ranks.
The post-apartheid democratic order has proved to be remarkably stable and recalibrated the idea and experience of freedom in society. Whilst this was true for all South Africans, it would seem in certain political parties, the ANC as the dominant one, it occurred through the incorporation of two distinct and not compatible contexts. One celebrated the freedoms that the new democratic order proffered, and the other restricted these freedoms to those in its membership that should, in effect be its models. The agenda of protecting human rights, fostering democratic decision-making and practice, promoting an open society where the power of price determines value and utility, and generally good government, assumes a normative exemplariness equivalent to what those that lead expect from society, and from within its ranks.
Until the revelations at several judicial commissions of enquiry and hearings of institutions established to defend the new democratic order, the normative grading of the governing ANC has taken one of its serious knocks. Post-apartheid restitution euphoria that has somewhat allowed unbridled crass materialism to be mistaken for a variant of defining the newly found freedom and democracy, became a big discount factor to the ANCs credibility as of today. Society glossed over acts of corruption, leaders seemed to have given some form of break to social norms as people in positions of trust became conspicuous in doing most of wrong. This situation settled into some culture, and somewhat disabled law enforcement to go against the grain.
The question is, what should be done? Can this order last? Should it last? What should give? Are there tribes already that have coalesced around these traditions and rituals?
Stable orders rest on the pillars of balancing political power and the shareable values that society can advance beyond morass. In respect of shared values, it is clear, though difficult and tough, that the post-NASREC context was at least brave to pierce out the parse of pain society was going through. Whilst this bravery is to be applauded, its selective application indicates a will trapped in solidarity with tradition.
Political power as a function of creating a stable order will always be dependent on the social literacy of society about the value system it wants to bequeath future generations. The values that the new democratic order procures will always be in variance with blatant centralism, democratic or otherwise. Until the second half CUT!!!
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela nje
🤷🏽♂️Be ngisho nje
🤷🏽♂️Ek praat maar net
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