The th!nc Foundation

The invasion of Ukraine marks the end of a World Order many of us only know and believe in. The convulsions that the American-led World Order are experiencing in almost all facets of human life and existence threaten Americans and go to the core of the Americanism with which we have learned to imagine our world and civilisation. The pole position of the American dollar as a symbol of global economic power, notwithstanding its hollowed value by the USA's runaway debt owed to China, is facing its most consequential challenge when America is Presided by its most fragile, physically and otherwise leadership. As a leader of the liberal order, America focussed on the deployment of its hard power in areas where it knew it would have operational excellence advantage and deployed its rather condescending power of economic sanctions in areas it 'dangerously assumed' its way of life and trade were the lifeline of those societies. The rise of 'independent economies', some of ...

The establishment of South Africa as a non-racial and non-sexist democracy was an artificial creation of a state. As a result, this involved bringing together antagonistic forces whose vision of South Africa required a shared and collective reconciliation with its dispossessor and dispossessed past. The diverse interests and expectations of the future by those negotiating a settlement procured societal patience to allow time before the promise of liberation could be on the horizon.  The present, which should anchor stability, is largely overshadowed by a reality of a past that has become a background of permanence to showcase inequality. This is more of a legacy issue than a function of how politics evolved since the democratic breakthrough of 1994.    The adoption of the Constitution in 1996 was not necessarily the end of separate development, nor many quarrels about the race-defined political economy issues of South Africa, but merely an attempt to experiment if liberat...

          In theory, a country like South Africa should possess a range of state power management tools for its success and global competitiveness; a sophisticated leadership cohort and a Cabinet team of long term thinkers and scenario planners, an intelligence service that insulates the country from unscrupulous fishers of state influence, a political party (ANC) infrastructure and system which the national interest would have shaped to rally its members behind the vision of South Africa as articulated by the preamble of the Constitution, and strong state machinery with which its bureaucratic leadership could use in defining into posterity South Africa's legacy amongst peers. The country should have the might of the state as an institution to pull through its vision. But to anyone paying attention to how South Africa as an institution of societal leadership in the last 15 years has fared, it is obvious that its cohort of leaders, notably in government, had been...

       The African National Congress is an organisation divided against itself. Since it has become a governing party in 1994, it has been defined by ideological differences on how to deal with economic transformation, tensions of leadership succession after Mandela and beyond, and generally acute contestations on policy direction the ANC should take on many an issue. The exodus of its leadership into public service positions in organs of state created an abnormal state-party dichotomy which sharpened the questions of who governs the state; the party or elected representatives. The current President Ramaphosa is no stranger to in-ANC succession contestations for one position or another. The first senior position he held in the ANC, as Secretary-General, was wrought all sorts of contestations and conspiracies, most of whom confirmed him having been an inconvenient inclusion into the leadership establishment sooner than some would have anticipated. He would later be 'd...

    For much of the first fifteen years of post-1994 South Africa, the leadership of how its democracy was established captivated the world’s imagination. Other countries looked on enviously as South Africa became the beacon of hope about the possibility of a successful democratic order based on universal principles of good government as manifest in free and fair elections, the supremacy of the Constitution and the rule of law, an independent judiciary, unfettered operation of a free market system, and guarantee of the apex human freedoms of association, assembly, and speech, including movement and property rights. South Africa was vaulting effortlessly from the status of a nation mired in a race and class-induced conflict into one that was rising as an open society filled with the hope of a better life for all. Anchored by the reconciliation dividends of the inaugural Mandela Presidency and a Kofi Annan-led United Nations Organisation's commitment to nurturing an African succ...