The outcomes of the November 2021 Municipal Elections, unprecedented as they have been and still are, might have brought to an end the transformation rhetoric as a currency of the South African voter market. When the fourth decade since Nelson Mandela was released began, relations between South Africans were essentially closer to a level they had been before 1990. A divided society along race identifiable inequality contours, a declined role of the liberation complex as a leader of society, a rise of non-racial economic right thinking cognitive elite, a governing party that has hollowed out its support base through 'reported' acts of voter confidence liquidation practices such as state capture and corruption, a rise of an opposition complex with a perceived racio-liberal mindset hellbent on undoing post-apartheid gains that have accrued to the non-white, and mainly African majority, and a populace that has assumed a central stage in the public power mandating contestations defining South Africa's politics. By the time South Africans voted in the 2021 municipal elections, they seemed to have been liberated from the post-liberation rhetoric, and focused on what is or has been the service delivery track record of those they vote into public power wielding offices. The organisation capacity and social movement machinery of the 'transformation rhetoric' machinery had over time been repurposed to be inimical to the interests of the liberation movement complex to the extent that it served its elites and not the proverbial 'our people'.
The division in society about the liberation complex as a continued leader of society had been overcome symbolically by the collapse of its moral high ground to govern, and literally the compounding revelations at the State Capture Commission and other investigations findings about its leaders. The internal factional battles, a collapsing public infrastructure, chronic load shedding by ESKOM, a jobs-shedding economy that is no where near recovery in real terms, a growing non-racial brain drain, and a loss of confidence in the ability of the political system to stem the tide, are part of a collapsing system.
Meanwhile, the relative decline of South Africa as a strong state with a requisite monopoly of state violence to fight organised crime, efficient border control and management, prosecution outcome based policing and investigation, and a national interest guided state security management system, has become a towering feature of failing state apparatuses. The rising pressure on a 60 million population based budget by a illegal immigrant propelled population growth, growing trade deficits occasioned by structural inefficiencies impacting on the gross national product such as energy supply insecurity, and the declined confidence of the core capitalist class in the capability of the state to initiate a miraculous economic recovery plan is a compounding factor to the relevance of the transformation rhetoric as a program of the state.
The post-CODESA social compact era seems to have also collapsed, absolutely. The NEDLAC process that kept social partners in the reconstruction and development program and economic development agenda focused, has not only lost its lustre to inspire confidence, but has collapsed as a economic transformation agenda setting institution for the country. The watering down of the civil society sector through the constraints imposed on international donor funding flows has not only shaken the essence of nation rebuilding and reconstruction to its foundations, but has reduced South Africa's non-governmental thought leadership capability to ashes. The state became its own NGO sector, and lost the voices outside itself for far too long to recover. Alternative thinking, or rather civil society voices, could only find expression when it is presented in a opposition mentality mode, otherwise it attracted a 'counter revolutionary' title for the thinker, if it came from friendly formations. Lately the label has become RET forces.
By the end of the first decade since Nelson Mandela was released, President Mbeki led the charge to focus the South African investor beyond the limits of his/her sovereign borders. The liberation dividend was expanded to see the entire continent as an investment renaissance project. A New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) was signed as a in-Africa multilateral framework within which investment into the continent would be regulated, if not facilitated. Undergirding NEPAD would be a 'Black Economic Empowerment Program' that progressively opened up space for the 'new bourgeoisie', potentially a 'black industrialist class' to be part pioneering the 'new economic trek' further north. Democratisation of corporate boards and rearranging the demographics of brand South Africa Incorporated as a investment value proposition was also a salient social compact deliverable to make the expanded economic opportunity cake reachable to all. The prospects that regional integration of public infrastructure and other related matters would open the continent's economy to both new and old players without curtailing the immediate growth ambitions of local entrepreneurship and pure human innovation.
Whilst these NEPAD initiatives were important to the continent, their greatest assumption was a cognitive readiness of a historically 'closed and race-defined economy' to see the opportunities beyond the narrow 'laager' and 'morakeng' lenses that choked the opportunities. Black Economic Empowerment was seen in salary and management advancement terms. The unfortunate 26% stake threshold created a race to the stake that left the 74% to be the new 100% few would dare to aspire acquiring. The transformation rhetoric started to take more and more a racial slant than a new opportunity creation posture. State Financing institutions started to measure their performance in how many of the 26% they bought than how many 100% 'black owned businesses' they had created, especially with a expanded market north of the Limpopo River.
The governing liberation complex became in these contexts a change agent whose actions, either negative or positive, would have the greatest consequence to what South Africa ultimately becomes. They had already loosened the psychological barriers imposed on an otherwise limited in economic visioning black majority onto the most strategic of state assets with which the economy could be commanded to higher heights. Through its rearrangement of the demographics in state owned entities, it put the biggest of state owned entities budgets into the hands of a new 'political elite' without a defined 'national interest'. The socio-political about the change of 'elites', predominated the modus operandi of most SOE's as manifest in the growth of the corporate services divisions as compared to that of core business, the result of which was the establishment of the biggest engineering consultancy sector in the past two and a half decades. The skills creation prowess of SOEs declined or grew commensurate with the management bias at the time, the managerial quotient of SOEs started to surpass the apprenticeship and related quotient the SOEs were in fact supposed to develop; the resultant maintenance induced disintegration of infrastructure is evidence enough.
The quest to balance personal wealth aspiration gaps with 'national interest' determined socio-economic gaps towered by demographic inequality sponsored a tolerance of 'gravy train' character success of new incumbents, with devastating repercussions to the youth's view of hardwork-based success. As ascendance to higher corporate positions in South Africa gained momentum, its misdiagnosis as a liberation struggle dividend for the ascending black middle class, seemed to have created a 'liberated zone' of elites who lost the capability to question and/or peer review each other's unexplained wealth explosion. Courageous individuals and civil society organisations labelled the context as that of 'crass materialism', 'a hyena state', 'an oligarchy', and ultimately 'corruption and state capture'. Like the proverbial cold blooded frog in a cooking pot, the historically poor found themselves in a cooking pot of corruption where the undetected and yet corrupt became the most vocal against what they had perfected to a level where condemning corruption amounted to a 'Damascus of a Special type'.
The consequence of the double standards has been the outpouring of opposition mindsets from even the traditional support base of the governing liberation complex. Predictably, the opposition mindset targeted the transformation agenda and all its legitimate rhetoric to a point where advocacy for '(radical) economic transformation' got equated to thievery than an aspect of the liberation promise as entrenched in the 1996 Constitution. New causes that muddied the 'transformation agenda' got incubated into new political groupings that disrupted the ideation of economic reforms envisaged by the economic sub-texts in the Constitution. Despite the missteps associated with gaps of direction and focus from the liberation complex's leadership continuum, it was increasingly becoming clear that it is not the only source of the new winds of change influencing the transformation pathways South Africa needed to follow. A new generation of looking at society for what it is more than what it has been was in ascendance in most agenda setting influential platforms created to deepen the freedoms of association, assembly, and press. Global competitiveness, whose benefits were gadget accessible, defined new trajectories of liberation not as a thesis of post liberation dividends, but dividends of sheer competitiveness with counterparts and peers in comparable democracies and economic size globally.
The influx of skilled immigrants to take up positions in an increasingly sophisticated economy started to dictate fresh approaches to change than what the 'transformation rhetoric' was fixated upon. The collusion of mega media systems and narrative setting agencies to foreground the importance of competitiveness found fertile ground in the archaic patronage based empowerment schemes associated with post-liberation reconstruction and rebuilding; the consequence was the unfortunate twinning of status quo challenge with corruption. The successful positioning of the rule of law, without questioning the basis of such laws, allowed jurisprudence etched on a condition of coloniality to prevail as the foundation of adjudicating an otherwise hostile to economic transformation legal edifice. New and aspirant intellectuals got entrapped into a discourse whose basis pursued a set consensus with marginal shifts on the degree of variance from a liberal centre now contested for by a 'so-called force of the left'. The race to the centre by new political formations has grown to become a new restraint to think left, but more and more think right of the left with necessarily leaving the established centre.
Whilst the transformation rhetoric was necessary to galvanise society into a radicalised mindset about the undesirability of the post-1990 socio-economic status quo, almost everything in South African society seemed to have discouraged and inhibited movement towards a more dynamic, market-oriented economy. At the time of the opening up of the political space for all to participate, the economy was more of an oligopoly than what pundits would have wanted us to believe. The 'green contracts' in state owned entities were more of a 'in-private sector' central economic planning and thus discouraging to any efforts to increase 'outside of green contracts' production, efficiency and growth. The transformation narrative that followed the 1994 franchise-for-all-based democratic breakthrough confirmed that for the stability of the new democracy, material incentives are needed and yet were still lacking in an economy whose success was still dependent of a subjugating and extractive economic system.
To meet the objects set in the transformation rhetoric that followed the 1994 breakthrough, the economy had to be calibrated as one poised "to produce the goods that will serve as incentives to produce more, enterprise, flexibility and decentralization ... and yet centralization, rigidity and uncertainty prevailed" because it served oligopolistic appetite the undergirding economy was all about, whence transition to oligarchic behaviour by political elites could be so easily facilitated.
The central planning posture of the transformation rhetoric from within the liberation complex was sufficient enough to begin an economic reform program "with an inadequate understanding of how a market system works, and yet reliant on an "overwhelming state ownership of the means of production and a one-partied-multiparty-state." These would in time be a perfect cocktail to establish an oligarchy undergirded by a cognitive elite consensus that had tentacles through to the adjudicative prowess of the state, notwithstanding the independence of a non-independent jurisprudence based judiciary. What the transformation rhetoric might have ignored is that as societies grow and develop into new modes of democracy and government arrangements, it is not just modes of governing each other that change. How people ideate about and of themselves also changes. "Attitudes toward time, toward achievement, toward authority, toward one's self and one's future will all be associated with the new context", and if the transformation rhetoric or narrative is static, it might overtime be a victim of a new change momentum". Unless transformation beneficiaries start believing that "their situation can get better before they will work to make it better", it is easy for the transformation path, no matter how noble its intents are, to get derailed in favour of a 'beyond transformation' status quo entrenching context.
Given the concentration of economic ownership into few hands in South Africa, and a growing concentration of politics into the hands of a select cognitive elite, as well as the abrogation of interpreting the constitution to a court of not more than fifteen individuals having to make judgements out of arguments from senior counsels that are a fraction of the populace, "it is not clear that genuine transformation could have been achieved under such craftily established conditions of elite centralisation". Those that drive the economy are actually drivers of the market system, their decisions, primarily etched on what incentivises them, profit, will only yield to a transformation agenda to the extent that it expands the incentive to be involved, otherwise any endeavour that truncates what is negative to their incentives becomes a fundable enterprise. CUT!!CUT!!!
I am also not sure what I wrote, but it is written and can't be deleted or ignored.
🤷🏿♂️A ndzo ti hleketela hi khisimusi bakithi
🤷🏿♂️Be ngisho nje
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