The governing African National Congress refers to the 1994 political settlement as a 'democratic breakthrough' rather than a year of liberation. In government as a governing party they celebrate 27 April as Freedom Day. Such is the depth of uncertainty on the meaning of South Africa's political settlement to those that have ritualised it as freedom when there are deep outstanding issues the agreed arrangement still needed to address. Collectively, the liberation movement complex still sees South Africa as being in a National Democratic Revolution continuum towards a National Democratic Society, a posture that gives credence to why the revolution is supposedly incomplete.
The ideological fissures that this continuum and declared state of freedom create, speaks volumes of how the incomplete revolution and transformation of society through state power has made the governing alliance to be ideologically vulnerable. As various in-party factions scramble for the control of the ideological or otherwise destiny of the ANC, those that get lost in the vortex of contestation have since become suitors to the left of liberalism, and by default new allies to right of the ANC as the governing party's opposition complex. The efficiency of liberalism in capturing the undecided middle class has in fact been able to harvest from within the governing alliance complex those who got enrolled to the comfort of a market economy driven economic system that guarantees equal opportunities without equitable outcomes. Many are now firm believers and defenders of liberalism and neoliberalism, and yet still sticking to a leftist posture and nomenclature to be nostalgically relevant.
Given that unbridled capitalism will always have as an outcome vast inequality and the entrenchment of acquired privilege, irrespective of how pornographic poverty in society is, the concretising South African liberal order has as its momentum, capitalism. The contest to stem the tide of a runaway poverty and its known adjunct unemployment, has ignited a discourse on the nature, form, and character of the political settlement that led to 'freedom' or 'democratic breakthrough'. These debates happen inside the governing alliance complex, and have to date created a divide of those preferring a gradualist and reformist process that carries along the economic establishment and its powerful global networks, and those advocating for a 'radical economic transformation'. Whilst there is an argument that the outcome of both approaches might be the same, the reaction to the radical transformation advocates by the economic establishment has created a suspicious attitude towards a reformist approach. The divide has since grown unrepentantly wider.
This divide has left the governing alliance complex as an institution divided against itself. This divide has found its most acute of expressions in how the governing elite in the national executive of the country, and those in its in-party national executive committee relate and/or agree on what should the content of government policies versus socio-economic challenges diagnosed at party level be. Since the adoption of the 1996 Constitution, a neoliberal playbook, the governing alliance complex has been defined as consisting of those who make up the executive authority of government (as vested in the President of the Republic, Premier in provinces and Council in municipalities), and those who make up the in-party executive authority (as vested in the top six and Office of the Secretary General).
As chance is as relentless as necessity, this dichotomous relationship between the NEC and the National Executive has for a while been dependent on the pleasure and prerogative of the President of both, on how the two worlds hold to a common agenda. This situation established in South Africa a dual state, one that is normatively etched on the constitution, and the other trapped in the prerogatives of the governing alliance. As these divisions expose a normative and prerogative challenge to the governing alliance complex, the impact of fights related thereto were affecting government in the same areas. Organs of state got drawn into this divide, some were actively used to fight the prerogative power of the party with their normative public power principles. Underneath the hardening views about the use of organs of state to deal with in-party squabbling lies deeper and older antagonisms towards the state.
In the eyes of those hell bent on the pursuit of 'transformation of society' resolutions of the party, the most significant threat to the attainment of resolutions is the unbridled interference of organs of state that are otherwise sworn to protect and defend a profoundly misunderstood Constitution. As the governing alliance complex is preoccupied with its internal fights, those that its policies threatened their livelihoods and hegemony have unleashed an ideological campaign to rid the educated sections of its support base of the mindset of being pro liberation movement ideals, fearing the possibility of an alternative party, and worshiping the accumulated political capital gained through years of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles. An exodus of the middle class has in fact begun, they went into the voter apathy crowds, and with Herman Mashaba's ActionSA in November 2021, we saw some moving in his influence ring, and many might follow in 2024.
Leaders of the movement that have not been 'radical' in the eyes of a mega funded academic-media complex and economic establishment got rewarded with legitimation that made commitment to true policies of the movement a risk to their post-political office livelihoods. This led to their worldview and affinity to core mandating social bases changing, and they started to pursue policies that started to look subversive to resolutions of the governing alliance complex. As the movement demanded continued loyalty to its policies, the absorptive power of state institutions, and the decades long ideological dictates which established them, became, to an otherwise unsuspecting alliance leadership, a new policy guiding centre. To mitigate the risk of losing in-party appeal and support, leading minds of the party were also co-opted into the bureaucracy without a clear plan on what the bureaucracy should be used for in advancing transformation of society objects.
With the election of Ramaphosa in 2017 and 2019 respectively, the struggle to centre the policy direction of South Africa in its political settlement produced constitution had been decisively won. The perceived poverty of political support the Constitution had from the governing liberation movement complex would in a Ramaphosa Presidency be a thing of the past. With the Presidency firmly in the hands of a pro-capital faction of the liberation movement governing complex, the most difficult of pieces for the puzzle that had begun with business funding Darkar safaris to meet the liberation
movement, government in the hands of the liberation movement, had come to the party. With the media, a fluid jurisprudence based judiciary, and a economic status quo defending capital, as well as a tacitly pro-capital government, a cocktail for a turbulent in-party ideological contestation was served. As the liberation movement faced this turbulence, time and momentum were on the opposition complex's side.
The context within which Ramaphosa assumed office represented a decisive break from known traditions of the movement. His, was a funded campaign to take the helm of what was then, and arguably still, South Africa's nexus of political life, the ANC. He took over an organisation that was, and reportedly so, ravaged by scandals of corruption and state capture. A country whose economy was experiencing investment strike, high unemployment, deindustrialisation, collapsing public infrastructure, and shrinking consumption base and thus a less in value market. This could only have meant aspirations of an increasingly devastated middle class were also waning. With rising standards of living for the historically advantaged, a sense of collective victim hood was also settling.
The ascendance of Ramaphosa, despite the questionable numbers with which he won the in-ANC leadership contest, came through as a promise to usher in a context where state-capital trust deficit would be reduced to mitigate the runaway investment strike. The intensity at which the contest for leadership was fought, and the staked that seem to have been at play, seem to have choked efforts at building unity of purpose in the liberation movement complex, and instead unleashed a cannibalist political co-existence amongst erstwhile comrades. With the fading away of party eldership, and a cohort of stalwarts that took a incumbents-type position on the raging factionalism within the movement, factions of young new leaders occupied vacuums of leadership that still required wisdom of time conceptualised solutions.
As government consolidates power conferred to it by the Constitution, the power of the party that was on the rise has concomitantly been declining. The pace of social change and evolution non-liberation rhetoric politics is so fast today that political parties find it more effective to market a brand than to fixate on the grievance features of South African politics. Time for the liberation movement complex to view its brand as the architecture of the philosophical concepts that serve as the roots of its reason for existence, which can include the promises it makes to society and its ethical standpoint, has arrived. It should in fact, create brand architecture by making emotional points of connection and societal value foundational to the ways voters experience them as a better livelihoods proposition. The must therefore merge the movement's core values, with the founding values of South Africa's Constitution, generally tethered to emotional states, such as a better life for all. The era of making empty promises on any matter, internal or external to the movement is over, all of the movement's systems should in essence embed its brand with purpose.
As the country's new politics stop glamorizing radicalism as a silver bullet to South Africa's woes in favour of a long term and reformist approach, and seek to establish a 'genuinely all who live it' society, they do so by re-conceptualising their brands, and embracing an ethos of societal sustainability. As we saw in the municipal elections, when more parties started to invest in matters of service delivery, the governing alliance needed to upgrade its brand image to include more conscientious, empathy-driven values that better align with shifting societal values. The contradiction of wanting to stay a liberation movement when they are in control of state power could only mean that the state would now be enrolled as a partner or catalyst in the revolution. Can a governing coalition be in a revolution against a state it has a full mandate to repurpose. CUT!!!
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo tivulavulela
🤷🏽♂️Be ngisho nje
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