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 liberation is possible without a clear victor of the
struggle, whence dubbed a miracle. Parties to the settlement accord chiselled
into the Constitution not only their unified hopes for the future but also
their memories of their past and, thus, how they would deal with restitution
without creating new victims.
Each participant in the negotiation
process made a 'separate contribution' of 'democratic practice' into the common
pool with a determination to preserve its identity. This has made the process
more dependent on the statesmanship and leadership of those who led the country
than the substantive issues that might reignite the need for conflict,
including the economy and land. The heritage of South Africa's past became a
feature in its troubled present; without it, it would seem the future became
bleak.
The compromises that came with the
constitutional settlement (especially by a liberation movement whose prize was
the inheritance of state machinery it hoped to repurpose for its emancipation
ideals) enabled advocates of 'apartheid' to recalibrate it into 'class
apartheid', where non-whites could be included into spaces of privilege as a
class. The process would be indoctrinated into being friendly to ideals that
restored the context of coloniality as a function of being integrated into
global north markets and the establishment of a legal system that protects gains
of conquest without denying new and non-white entrants space to be
post-liberation conquerers to the extent that the establishment is not conquered.
Consequently, the liberation movement
would have to be gradually converted into an instrument that facilitates
society to embrace the emerging order, essentially liberal in character and
left in rhetoric. The softest of its landing would be to position it as a new
centre from which a new right and a new left are to be defined, devoid of race
as an analysis vector. The liberal rhetoric, a natural left of a dominant right
in South Africa, was thus positioned as the centre through constitutional
design and consequent lawmaking.
To anchor the new centre of South Africa,
thereby shielding the natural 'non-racial' right, the liberation movement saw
its cream of thinkers being bought into ideation spaces modelled to defend the
Constitution as the basis of being at the centre. Working within the
Constitution, the dream of transformation started to fade, and pragmatism
dictated to the liberation movement's leadership that the 'apartheid friendly
or created economy' can only be reformed if a normative path expected by the
Constitution is followed.
The new centre became an easy target to
weaponise against a constituency whose support for the liberation movement is
more nostalgic than cognitive. Members of the liberation movement started to
focus on the false economy of procurement, whose currency became patronage and
ultimately corruption and its adjunct state capture. The rest of the real
economy was left to pre-1994 owners of the means of production and the
instructing value chains, including the influential financial services sector.
The new political establishment was kept at the new centre, and its 'capital'
became public policy influence. Its capacity to grow is limited by the review
power of an off-the-shelved cognitive legal capital required to argue in a
'supposedly' independent judiciary.
The decline in the rigour of the liberation
movement's policy documents and debates, which undergirded policy conferences
became early indicators of the liberation movement’s 'mandate drift'. As a
liberation movement, the ANC has cornered itself into a condition where the pursuit
of its ideals about South Africa is being liquidated by its current performance
as an institution of leadership. The collapse of its systems and heritage as a
political centre out of which post-apartheid South Africa could and was
imagined has left it vulnerable to bullying by faction-based consensuses whose
origins are no longer its basic units of organisation, its branches.
Its mandate of being a people's parliament
has been hollowed out by the 'new people that have become available to the
highest bidder beyond conferences that chose delegates to its national elective
conference. The slow but certain deprioritisation of its policy conference
looks like a process designed to avoid knowing what members of the organisation
want out of it. The liberation movement is being reduced to focussing on
'personalities' as embodiments of its policy stance.
What is emerging as a possible way forward
is that the ANC now needs to review its original mandate and how relevant it is
to a post-1994 political context. They are now the centre, the system, and the
establishment. 1994 should have by now represented a particular milestone and
destination on its 'national democratic revolution to establish a national
democratic society'. This milestone meant a need to recalibrate the character
of the ANC as a governing party against it as an institution with a liberation
mandate. Its language and rhetoric should by now have embraced the state and
its active agency government as an 'our' factor. The normative demands of the
new constitution should be working the most inside it as a governing party. Its
adherence to the rule of law principle should be beyond reproach and exemplary of
the tilt.
The truth is that for decades, the
liberation movement of South Africa has struggled to establish a non-racial
order to replace one anchored on an extractive economic paradigm that was both
colonial and racist. With conquest successes over natives in South Africa, an
order with hierarchies of control and dominance was created. It became a basis
or vector of reform and transformation, a 'normal' unless the conquered
decisively reconquered. The order the constitution makes (which establishes a
state 'organised around market exchanges and private property; the protection
of political, civil, and human rights; the normative superiority of representative
democracy; protecting the sovereignty of the individual; and the supremacy of
the constitution and the rule of law) assumes a level playing field and ignores
the conquered status of those wielding a majority vote.
As a result of irregularities of the
playing field, the post-1994 constitutional order has increasingly been coming
across as one that now favours a diverse array of illiberal forces, including
past economic status quo-defending civil society bodies that reject (radical)
economic or socio-economic transformation wholesale, as well as reactionary
populists and conservative individuals who position themselves as protectors of
so-called traditional values and national culture as they gradually subvert the
liberation promise the very constitution espouses. The roots of this
sophisticated opposition to the mandate of the liberation movement are
structural, whence they possess a capacity to effect mandate drift through the resources
they command. CUT.
🤷🏿♂️Happy Saturday Makwerhu
🤷🏿♂️A ndzo ti tsalela shem
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