Detestation of inconvenient views might be the involuntary homage of the afraid: The Lindiwe Sisulu debate rages on.

       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 detestations in a society whose impact might create involuntary homages for the low to consolidate.

The resultant diversity of outlook (as a result of unbridled and somewhat ill-informed detestations) on issues and matters that society has resolved en route to the confirmation of arrangements it would have agreed upon as the basic minimums of how it wants to govern itself, otherwise also called a democracy. It is often the interests of those that manufacture detestations that clamour to be the context of all contexts embodying active diversities in any political system, especially the undergirding political economy. It is the plurality of interests in the oneness of a sovereign and democratic South Africa that creates ambiguities of how individuals as sovereign beings should regulate their personal ambitions vis-a-viz the collective good of society as institutionalised in its constitution, organs of state, and various arms of state inclusive of functionaries operating therein. Therefore, choices about cooperation and confrontation in and about a democracy including the democratisation process are a function of the presence, or absence, and/or the nature of legal traditions a civilisation has or is establishing through a series of laws, such laws that should constitute the component of ‘law’, in the principle, ‘the rule of law’.

Notwithstanding it being a ‘crime against humanity, the Institutional traces of the apartheid legal system created confidence in the judiciary. Whilst the administration of Apartheid law on non-whites had its indignities, the law itself, because it was written for the ‘separate but equal in legal consequences all’, and would thus be adjudicated within a similar normative jurisprudence, it continued to display its majesty as law. Law, as a component of the ‘rule of law’ principle and its antipode the ‘rule by law’, never lost its capacity to provide equal protection to all citizens as well as being a pillar of what civilisations required to build a moral fibre of society. Being the basis for the establishment and creation of institutions through which conflicts of societal interests, including the condition of politics and opinion, will be registered, resolved, changed, reconciled, and maintained, ‘law’ as an institution has grown to be accepted as being more important than and to politics as it embodies state power and not merely opinion. Opinions about ‘law’, legitimate or otherwise, should be cognisant that the state itself, its legislative bodies, executive bodies, and its judicial organs, are themselves entities in ‘law’, and should thus be accorded decorum consistent with the legitimacy it enjoys.  

The diverse interests of society and authorities established to dominate the administration of laws in favour of those that can manipulate state affairs in their favour, has, as it does in and under any system, the capability to compromise the image of law to the extent that even those sworn to its upholding, protection and defending may, rightly or wrongly, perceive it as an instrument of keeping templates of socio-economic dominance intact, instead of it being a friend and protector of society. If for one reason or another, those with whom the judicial authority of democracy is vested, and in cases where substantial interests, such as the land question in South Africa, are involved, and only the interpretation of the constitution is the ultimate determinant to a solution or otherwise, the significance of the ‘judicial decision’ on a matter with political consequences to the standing and legitimacy of judicial officers will make them the subject as well as the object in the clash of interests. The rival interests that define the South African political economy tensions with unending calls for economic transformation, radical or controlled, have for a while received constitutional interpretations that are procedural instead of the substantive exigencies whose ignorance have to date choked social cohesion as social capital to undergird any conception of social compacting between the haves and have nots.

Whilst the country designed its political settlement through a process of shared interaction and consensus on the coordinative role of the constitution. In the political accord that facilitated the interim Constitution, it was easy to design a breakthrough process out of which a constituent assembly with a much more definite role of delivering a new Constitution could be delivered. The Constituent Assembly was thus given the task of establishing in ‘law’ and through the final Constitution a set of principles it would abdicate its power to once they are laid down. The principles would then ‘govern the supremacy of the Constitution as a sacrosanct value whose interpretation would be subjected for justification to either the authority of ‘the law’ or in instances the integrity of jurisprudence is in doubt the ‘values and ideas’ of judicial officers, who will be assumed to being independent. It is the ‘values and ideas’ of the judiciary that might be at the core of the Lindiwe Sisulu interrogation of the adjudication power that vests in the judiciary.

Whilst her interrogation is in perspective justifiable, it would be her carelessness in firing labels that lent her entire rendition reduced to a cover-up of insults aimed at generating one emotion or another to anchor what has now firmly fallen into the realm of 2022 ANC succession drama. In her article, now classifiable as a rant by a member of the National Executive, Lindiwe Sisulu, raises a Constitutional debate within a context of a South Africa that has reduced the essence of its freedom, liberation, and/or emancipation to interpretation by an otherwise multi-valued and poly-ideational cognitive legal elite mainly directed by a cohort of senior counsel that influence how disputes about our freedom are resolved or sustained. The idea of an independent judiciary as a dividend of the political settlement would have meant the legal ideation that will prevail is either an expression of the adjudication demands of dominant interests in society, or would have assisted in the creation of a climate of (legal) opinion in which socio-economic and altruistic interests could converge, and establish a doctrine of coherence.

In her arguably legitimate rant, which in itself is a manifestation of frustration by a liberation struggle activist who cannot reconcile the essence of freedom with its truncated scope to accrue to the poor and previously disenfranchised as facilitated by the very law that could justify oppression. In the article, however, there is no evidence of her attacking the correctness of the rule of law, nor did she show disrespect of the legality of our post-1994 law, its profoundly liberal character, but rather a resentful posture, if not detestation, of the morality of the rule of law if its expectation is that society must embrace how its procedural focus of restitution backlogs of the political settlement continue to defend the (pornographic) templates of socio-economic dominance. CUT!!!

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🤷🏿‍♂️Be ngisho nje