The th!nc Foundation

For nearly thirty years since the ANC was unbanned and Nelson Mandela was released, the ANC has been seen as an essential leadership institution, with minimal competition in shaping South Africa's transformation agenda. Society largely agreed, especially because of the visible leadership qualities of its representatives and the institution it projected, which it indeed was at times. However, after about fifteen years post-unbanning, particularly since it diverged from traditional leadership selection and succession practices, this consensus started to weaken. Gradually, more voices began to call for developing alternative ideas to reduce the country's reliance on the ANC as the primary source of reasoning for national transformation and nation-building. Recognising social capital's role can inspire the audience to see collective effort as vital for renewal.  These were the initial steps toward advocating a strategy of restraint, as the nation began emphasising the promise...

  In his rendition that 'transition to a non-ANC government will be chaotic', Tembe raises the possibility of a national coalition government taking over the management of state affairs, come 2024. (  https://www.kunjalod.co.za/2022/01/south-africas-transition-to-non-anc.html?m=1 ).  He paints, and instructed by recent voter behaviour, a scenario where the strategic provinces of Gauteng, Western Cape and Kwa Zulu Natal might be under a non-ANC led coalition government. If we accept that ideation generally masks interests, we can presume that intellectuals, in interpreting social or political phenomena will tend to adopt a posture that filters facts out of rubble to sharpen contradictions not in the obvious purview of society. Tembe's submissions, which might in essence seem to be condemning, already, the ANC to a particular sieve of post-2024 South African history, he might be demonstrating the necessity of intellectualism in the supervision of how society imagines itself...

  It is not hard to understand why ANC members dream of a future defined by a commitment to its policies rather than personalities that lead or should lead it. As the succession battles continue to grow, and as extreme incidents of factionalism become more frequent and harmful, the current efforts to move beyond viewing the ANC as a conduit to state revenue-related largesse appear woefully inadequate. Adding to the frustration, the battles for the soul of the ANC are alive and well—and as fraught as ever. South Africa is in the throes of a full-fledged leadership crisis, person-in-front or institutional, with an economy that faces one of its most difficult challenges of recovery. Party stalwarts and die-hards are starting to question the suitability or otherwise of the current leadership to take on the challenge, whence it is not uncommon to find nomenclature to the effect that ‘the tribe must die, for the nation to thrive’ from amongst its trusted cognitive elite. In fact, a forme...

     The 2017 in-ANC elections outcome, to date the most marginal    post-1994 or as a governing party, changed how the ANC relates to and with its members, policies, and the society it once had a legitimate claim to being its leader. The outcome has sharpened the use of words such as 'factionalism, factions, sell-out, counter-revolutionary,, neoliberal, white monopoly capital, radical economic transformation, and insurrection in most in-ANC discourse. The use of terms in an organisation is the best representation of its emotional state, how members develop a nomenclature is a function of where the organisation is and can in future be. This has also drawn attention to the decay or absence of both person-in-front and collective leadership in the ANC. The 2021 Municipal Elections, which exposed the depth of disgruntlement in the ANC by the influential urban voter at South Africa's strategic economic nodal points, confounded hope that the ANC-as-an-institution coul...

        The definition of South Africa as a country and society cannot be complete unless the prevalence of diversity as a phenomenon of human activity is accepted as one of its givens. Its diversities are mainly characterised by the physical features of individuals that make up its society. Rainbowism, as advanced by the late Archbishop Emeritus of the Anglican Church, Desmond Mpilo Tutu, was much about the country’s ability to keep its distinct features and yet collectively be projecting the beauty of being definable as one. It is the diversities of condition, opinion, and inequality of access to the political-economic power in society, including rainbow types, that provide high-definition properties to whatever is deep-seated as difference and grievance. The contours of difference and diversity mainly manifested as social rank, wealth status and thus affording to buy influence, race, religion, caste, and proximity to the adjudicative prowess of the state create de...

    The ANC succession debate is with us. Again, it is dramatic and seems to be promising a new telenovela after one that starred Deputy Justice Raymond Zondo. The 2021 municipal elections have given the nation a trailer of how South Africans can behave with regards to the ANC as their governing party, in the next general election. Notwithstanding, the results have only reduced ANC seats in municipal councils without removing the ANC from its arguable position as the nexus of politics and the political economy in South Africa. In-ANC succession debates and battles have for a while become news and vectors of all discourse political in South Africa, particularly all its elective conference years since its unbanning. The question of who succeeds Ramaphosa as President of the ANC is as important as who succeeds him as President of the country. 2022 is to Ramaphosa a mid-course review and correction year if we have accepted that in the ANC to serve two-term as its President is a gi...

   In his treatise on 'The Future of Roman-Dutch Law...', and as cited by Meierhenrich, Albie Sachs submits that ' "when Mandela made his famous denunciation of South African justice at his first trial after his capture, he did so with an elegance that enriched the patrimony of English usage in South Africa and, utilizing the principles and procedures of South African law to the full, he turned Roman-Dutch Law into a weapon of attack. His basic critique of the legal system was not that it was Roman-Dutch Law but that it was racist. Thus he did not object to having courts with trained judges, to written laws, to defense and prosecution of lawyers doing battle with each other according to defined procedures, but the fact that he felt he was a black person in a white person's court; the laws were made by the whites and administered by the whites in a courtroom that breathed the atmosphere of white domination, and this should not be so" .   Mandela was reflecting ...

      The succession debate is with us again. 2022 is officially a in-ANC election year, primaries of the real 2024 battle for governing South Africa have begun. Compounding this season is the compressed backlog of regional and provincial conferences that could not sit because of the 'social distancing' COVID19 imposed on political activities. Trust accounts for those that want to support particular list, and hope to be sealed by a Justice Mlambo judgement have opened. The battle lines are not yet drawn but are somewhat visible even on water surfaces.   The annual January 08 ANC pilgrimage to one province or the other has come and gone. The President of the ANC has said his sayings, the rhetoric has been the same, the ANC is still in a National Democratic Revolution, it is still fighting state capture, it is still the force of the left, and it is still pursuing a radical socio-economic transformation path. Its elected Secretary General is still on suspension, the Com...