The th!nc Foundation

     The eminent promulgation of regulations to manage conditions of epidemics and pandemics without the necessity of declaring a national state of disaster has evoked many an emotion in society. Whilst these regulations are published for public comment with the possibility of them being amended to accommodate society's perspectives, the intent of government on this aspect is represented by its initial thoughts on how to regulate society. We now know what is in the mind of the state about us, on this specific issue. Comments on these regulations will be based on what is proffered as a departure point.     There is no likelihood of working from a clean slate, but the given slate is the thesis with which we can synthesize or antithesize.   Being law, these regulations are more about the legality of what the government intends to do to enforce what they have agreed is the public health intervention required to deal with the pandemic. At the level of regulation...

      Litigation of government decisions, the challenge of foreign policy, usurping of local government functions through court orders, blatant attack on non-racialism policies in education, the open establishment of parallel education facilities based on language rights and threats to secede from South Africa by the Western Cape right; there seems to be little hope of building a South African nation envisaged by its Constitution.   The relentless pursuit of narrow race defined nationalist reawakening through the courts and 'other destabilisation' activities point to a picture of a country hard at work to implode itself into an open racial conflict. Whilst the implications might look lustre it is the long term impact on creating South Africa as a nation that will rob future generations of the stability they would require to be competitive.  The use of the law to undermine a fragile democracy like that of South Africa has the potential of seeing the value of cour...

       In his address to ANC members in the Western Cape, President Mbeki said "the task we have set ourselves as part of the renewal is to strengthen the ANC so that ...it can play (the) role ... to help us achieve the changes that are required" . He went on to say "the identification of the problem, I think, means a commitment to address it and, necessarily, it means understating having a clear idea of what we are being factual about ...the very fact we identified this as a problem, it has to be addressed" . Institutionally President Mbeki asked this question “do we have the strength, the capacity and everything else to discharge that responsibility of the eradication of that legacy" . "Even the thinking, comrades, visualization and conceptualization of actions that need to be taken if we are saying we must eradicate the legacy with regard to education, what does that mean?” he continued. These are extracts of a former President of the ANC being drawn i...

  On Thursday, 17th March 2022, I went to an evening memorial service in honor of a Missionary, a sister to my pastor and General Overseer of the Association of Churches Ministers and Ministries Bishop Titus Sithole. The memorial was in remembrance of Pastor Robina Mowale.  At the service, Bishop Dununu Msibi was presiding over the service. He reflected on various scriptures and spoke to death in the context of the memorial service. The relevance of his preaching to the situation at hand blessed many who were in the service. In fact, I made the point of thanking him for the appropriateness of his sermon and how it has comforted us as a family around the GO and his immediate family and friends. What I want to reflect upon is the concept of death that his preaching became a revelation to me. As Bishop Dununu was preaching, there was a duality of understanding occupying my attention to the message God has put in him for us, and more particularly myself, on Thursday.  I had a...

On M arch 18, thirty years ago, more than 68% of white South Africans voted in favor of the abolishment of Apartheid and 'endorsed' the idea of 'freedom' for blacks thereby ushering the dawn of this specific democracy. Hailed by some as a significant day in the History of South Africa, it is to strategists one of the strategic moves white South Africa made to avoid entering a negotiation process on terms they would not have control over. Having successfully subdued, Nelson Mandela with a 27-year prison term, kept the ANC as an exiled liberation movement for almost three decades, prepared pragmatic templates of governing South Africa no right-thinking leader would oppose, built a sufficient buffer of a materialistic and non-ideological black middle class to sustain white supremacy, and consolidated all algorithms of an extractive and race-biased economic system no liberation inspired transformation software can fracture without the permission of the 'economic' es...

      There is no debate that the voter posture and patterns of subnational government voting represent the first phase of a broader strategy by the core of its support base to seek an arrangement where they are not governed by non-white and in particular Africans. Whilst on paper the Western Cape's governing party, the DA, policies represent the most liberal of all South African Political parties, its blend of liberalism is decisively drifting  rightward of the centre, with an interesting occupation of the centre by the ANC.  We also know that South Africa is not only in institutional and persons-in-front leadership disarray, and battles to consolidate its Constitutional democracy to be a fulcrum around which one nation could be built out of the apartheid rubble we currently are. In-party factionalism, societal sectarianism, general discontent with how the country is governed, a collapsing public infrastructure with energy security towering them all, glaring ec...

        When the 2021 Municipal Elections were finally announced, a new truth about South African politics started to paint itself as a new canvas to contend with. To some, it was a shock and frustration, to others a triumph of the sovereignty of the individual in all matters South African politics. To democrats, it was a manifestation of the true essence of people's power as expressed through the medium of a free and fair ballot. To the investor community, it was a manifestation of yet another milestone in the capacity of South Africa's democracy to withstand the disruptive implications of political power transfer as directed by voter preferences.   Out of the frustration we saw President Mbeki declaring that South Africa cannot afford not to have the ANC at the center of its politics, he went on declare that the ANC was too big to collapse, as a party, and I guess also as a governing party. The questions to be asked are, is Mbeki correct, what if the exit of t...

      Can we say the African National Congress is truly in decline as the once 'authentic' voice of the liberation promise for South Africans? Certainly not. Not if there is a growing confusion of its role as a post-Apartheid political party caught up in the narrow exigencies of state power contestation, and that of it being a custodian of the transformation objects the very state power needs to be repurposed towards. It is this confusion that can be ascribed, arguably, to the reemergence of familiar themes of race and class anchored human co-existence behaviors last seen during the heydays of Apartheid, notably by those that were legislated beneficiaries of the system. If the ANC's past and its enormous power to galvanize social forces against injustice is anything to take to the bank, any establishment that thrives on a political-economic system that perpetuates inequality would be in derelict to allow the ANC to return to its anti injustice unity days. The difference m...