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 in contexts where social or political change would have happened.
The question is how accurate is this call for South Africa to imagine itself beyond an ANC government, and what that imagination might come with in the assignment of establishing a cohesive nation founded on the values espoused by its Constitution. Having declared itself in policy pronouncements as a biased force of the left, the ANC would have, and by commission or involuntary, seen the state as a theatre within which it could establish government as a active agency under whose guardianship a new political estate would be established. In this construct, "not only will the best talents, but eventually the entire complex of social prestige and status, as rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities" in society, be 'deployed' to the primal service of its hegemonic interest, and by extension the society it then claimed its leadership. At its zenith, this construct should have led to a condition of society in which the bureaucracy alone would remain an active element of socio-economic and political life.
What this design of a post-apartheid political trajectory missed, is the truism that what preceded the CODESA settlement was more of a social revolution that had as an active agent the "spiritual transformation of a society that was degraded, both as beneficiaries and victims, by a political elite driven by interests that never had South Africanness as a beneficiary. The capacity therefore of civil society to tolerate society's obedience to government and political construct that lack the legitimacy of being based on the will of 'the people', has been reduced to non-existence, whence voter response and apathy had one of the fasted repudiation results to a post-liberation party.
It is the assumption of longevity by those 'deployed' that might be a nest of the chaos Tembe cites in his rendition. The institutional edifice advanced by a profoundly liberal South African constitution directs behaviour that creates natural variances between towing the party line as an organ of state and when acting as an organ of the party. The accountability systems that the two worlds demand from practitioners of politics have to date demonstrated to the ANC how easily its pursuit of party objectives with state machinery required a higher order sophistication than the one whose cost are in evidence through voter behaviour, and a generally hostile relationship with the criminal justice process.
Tembe's scenarios show how the internal decays of the ANC and how the various factions react thereto, are a liability to it being able to relate with loss of power in a way that would allow those that have it to exercise it. The incapacity of its influential leaders to accept defeat internal to the party is an indicator of how they might react to loss of state power. The collapse of systems in Tshwane, arguably in the hands of the DA, might be traced to bureaucratic indifference to new political masters, and thus choke the local state to utilise the new 'municipal government' for service delivery's sake.
Yes, Tembe is correct, South Africa might be in for a chaotic transition, if the ANC does not fare well in the next general elections. Inconvenient as this subject is to handle, there is a need to start thinking about it. The national security apparatus should start developing national security risk scenarios. The financial markets should start resilience simulations to create landing cushions for our global markets vulnerable currency and financial services sector.
As he concludes, this is not history repeating itself, but a new generation taking over from where the previous generation abdicated. I conclude, the genius of a Constitutional Democracy lies in its capability to transition power without stopping the day to day livelihood of society. Anything to the contrary is a reflection of hypocrisy in those that should hand over power. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️A dzo hlamula loyi wa Ka Tembe
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