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 into the organization because it is not only disintegrating but faces the prospect of collapsing into the dustbins of history. The African National Congress remains the single most liberation movement that led a global struggle to not only repudiate racism, but it has simultaneously dealt a lasting blow to unmasking whiteness as its operating substrate. Racism as a measurable condition was exposed, by the conduct of struggle the ANC pursued, as being symptomatic to the deeper problem of whiteness as its philosophical basis. The institutional design of the ANC during the liberation struggle days was that of positioning itself as leader of society, more than it is a bureaucratic machine to implement the very ideals it sponsored to society.
In the last decade of the 19th Century, the ANC got access to the utilization of the most active of agencies of The State, to pursue its ideals of a South Africa where there will be a better life for all. Whilst government changed hands, The State with all its inherent contradictions stayed intact, and in fact, became a template upon which any conceivable change of society had had to rely upon. How the ANC as the core catalyst of the change envisaged in society is run as an organization would have been one of the truest risks for the idea of Freedom it has sponsored to the South African society. Established to deal with the most war-generating grievance of land dispossession, and by extension exclusion from the political architecture of society, the ANC procured for enemies that would include its landowning members and future ambitious landowners. Its conceptualization of non-racialism and its political economy outcome of South Africa belongs to all who live in it would have attracted into its fold beneficiaries of Khoisan and BaNtuBlack land dispossession and political economy exclusion into its fold as members. The potential of such members becoming 'spoils of dispossession interest defending coalition' within the ANC has always been a reality the future would have had to deal with.
President Mbeki's call for ANC members to 'renew their thinking' about the ' very renewal' of the ANC as well as answering the question of whether the ANC has "the strength, the capacity, and everything else to discharge the responsibility" of executing the idea of Freedom it has promised its support. Answers to the Mbeki questions talk to the institution that the ANC is or should be. As apartheid was consolidating whiteness in South Africa, it was aware of its moral reprehensibility and knew that the success of the project would at some point in the future require a process of legitimizing the 'freedoms that all mankind' strives for, without vitiating gains that the status quo is all about. It is the sophistication of this whiteness project that positions a strong ANC as the cardinal enemy for its continuity.
Establishing moral legitimacy for ill-gotten gains of dispossession, colonialism, apartheid, and economic exclusion cannot succeed as a project for as long as the moral high ground that the ANC has gotten against race-defined inequalities exists. This, and if necessary, might procure as drastic measures as those that include imploding the country to manufacture a narrative that delegitimizes the ANC as leader of society. True to prediction, the ANC-in-government and now part of the 'ruling class', got assimilated into how a capitalist state operates and found itself working according to the wrongness of the system whose success requires certain aspects of our colonial past to be left intact.
Economic thinking, governmentality, the pursuit of political power through private sector funding, and sheer greed of the new cognitive and political elite would redefine the ANC 'society' it must now lead, post enfranchisement. As policy mandates drifted from the liberation promises made, the correctness of the wrongness in the policies the ANC began to advance grew in strength that the dominant in the ANC has invested the most energy in defense of the correctness of their wrongness. I think this is or should be the essence of the 'thinking' President THABO Mbeki is referring to.
Knowing that at any point in institutional renewal and development, human beings will start with some pre-existing customs that influence new departures, the question will always be, 'from which pre-existing conception of Freedom will the renewal Mbeki is committed to, do we want to influence new departures'. Being in a period of significant change, which might produce a distinct legacy, the ANC, and after finding itself having leapfrogged into an advanced constitutional democracy, needs to come up with a renewal program to hold its disintegrating support base. Such renewal will be incomplete if it does not interrogate the algorithms dominant in the operating system carrying our political economy, and by extension how we imagine ourselves as a nation competing with similar democracies that do not carry the baggage of dispossession assets now belonging to all who live on them.
Ours is a democracy whose economy enjoys success by turning its inhabitants into wage laborers. It is an economy whose core algorithms work when there is cheap labor, and unfortunately, history has manufactured a context where such labor is black. It is for this very reason that The State, as the foremost organized power in South Africa, exists as a centralized enterprise to serve a bureaucratic authoritarian economic regime, notwithstanding its sugar-coated rule of law leanings. For a while, it was the economic establishment that provided the bulk of governmental capacity. Capital has had control over changes in the conditions of persons, activities, and resources within the territory over which government as 'another' agency of The State exercises jurisdiction. It was, and still is, the collusion of capital and the state which provide an integrated measure of regularity and predictability for the whole of Southern Africa, a critical resources outpost. Class unity has in the aftermath of the 1994 breakthrough emerged as the most fragile resource for the continuation of pre-1994 political economy arrangements.
Renewal of the ANC will have to, and if this is the thinking President Mbeki is calling for, contend with the concretizing economic authoritarianism ably facilitated through a skewed rule of law and colluding adjudicating state power. The economic promise of economic transformation assumed in this context a state of being an independent, (made) conservative ideology, and a marginalized program of the less dominant within the ANC. Renewing the ANC should negotiate with an economic system that requires any governing party in South Africa a contractual obligation to coordinate cheap labor. Accepting the responsibility of state power undergirded by this economy might be tantamount to colluding with a growing global mercantile plunder, disguised as foreign direct investment. The pursuit of legal certainty, protection of vested rights, including dispossessed ones, the satisfaction of foreign investor rights, and elevating the centrality of colonial commercial law rights are additional areas the capacity of a renewed ANC should have a relationship with. Renewal should come along with the ascendancy of bureaucratic efficiency within the ANC so superior that those it deploys fear its accountability systems and thus mobilize alternative human efforts into making the ANC work. Not only should the social institution character of the ANC resonate with the normative demands of South Africa's acceptable national value system, but its efficiency of the organization should establish a path within which youth politics could orbit national politics.
Yes, President Mbeki, we miss thinking. Yes President Mbeki we are tired of an ANC whose growing policy wrongness is so correct to its leadership that it has become a new vocation for those that know little about the ANC to defend the correctness of the new wrongness. The growing labels of factions are in many ways about making correctness in the ANC wrong, and wrongness correct.
🤷🏿♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela, makwerhu.
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