For a while, the South African thinking and ideational community has been debating, including in muted tones, whether the stubbornness of the economy to grow sufficient enough to allow new and historically excluded entrants is responsible for calls that the transformation which has happened was not as radical as expected. This conversation, which was supposed to have been given attention during a Ramaphosa presidency, was muted by the break out of the Coronavirus pandemic and the factionalism which has choke ideation within the governing party.
A wave of opposition to any attempt at concretely interrogating the structure of South Africa's political economy by 'funded' civil society movements took root. The sum impact of such an orchestration has to date been the separation of the substantive issues of 'radical economic transformation' from it being a governing party policy issue to its classification as a sponsored communication strategy, apparently by a hired messaging company, to protect advocates of RET against corruption and state capture charges levelled against them. Just as the debate of the inclusion of blacks on terms that were (then) articulated in the 1955 Freedom Charter silenced demands of liberation from apartheid, the muting of the substantive issues of economic transformation has created a loose economic liberation movement short only of leadership to mount an alternative and revolutionary wave of opposition to the economic status quo.
This is unfortunate because South African (monopoly) capital has a formidable track record of engineering political solutions when tensions emanating therefrom threatened the political economy basis of doing business. Visionary, notwithstanding their profit and somewhat extractive mercantilist intents, interventions that included funding expeditions of thinkers and activists to dialogue have been epochal and determinative of the 1909 National Convention and the CODESA negotiations outcomes. Just as the outcomes of these interventions were a consequence of managing the survival of a classic liberal order which stands on the pillars of electoral democracy, free-market economics, rule of law, independence of the courts, and the pursuit of human dignity; there should be principles that address the historical basis of demands for radical economic transformation as genuine manifestations of the pornographic inequalities in the South African society. There is an omnipresent temptation to blame the ANC-led liberation movement for not prioritizing economic transformation in the thirty years it had a hegemonic advantage over South Africa, but the truth is that the sophisticated way in which the South African economy is integrated into global financial markets creates invisible authority structures whose permission to fracture the philosophical basis of managing the economy is difficult to source, including negotiating.
On the other hand, and more acutely within the liberation movement complex, it would seem as a society and/or nation, we are suffering from a severe case of residual elitism. A condition where the governing party and economic establishment as well as ruling groups that have shaped in particular historical circumstances, meet particular sets of challenges and opportunities, and who find it difficult or impossible to adapt to new circumstances and to change so as to meet new challenges and opportunities, are disinterested in true and newer politics about the runaway inequality threatening the entire edifice of our democracy. For advocates of radical economic transformation and critics of (monopoly) capital's power, the best way for capital as one of the substrates propelling inequality, is for it to retrench itself from first the internal factions characterizing the liberation movement as well as resourcing state quo defending civil society movements, and at best serve as an off-politics distant balancer of its pure commercial interests.
The benefit of this posture would certainly be a condition where capital would be given its own spheres of influence to package as a contribution to the chronically elusive social compact South Africa is seemingly failing to craft and sign. Whilst this off-politics distant balancer posture might in itself look unreal as a prescription to the reality of interests as a currency of politics, it will be the true nature of economic power capital commands that will be determinative of what the social compact will be about devoid of tempering with the power of independent investment choices capital will vehemently fight for. It is true that South African capital has grown in an apartheid cushioned context where benefits of a free market economy accrued to those that were freed to participate, including by law and the coercive power of the state. It is also true that the collapse of the liberation movement complex's high moral ground and thus hegemony over public policy has weakened the power of social compacts because social partners are operating with a profound trust deficit. Instead, the collapse of the liberation movement complex's influence, because of civil society's combination of power and democratic beliefs has made the country attractive to those seeking security, prosperity, freedom, and autonomy; as endeavor to change the economic status quo by the governing party would require recalibrated definitions of 'transformation' outside the 'national grievance' rhetoric whose appeal got liquidated as the moral high ground collapsed. Capital, which by the way now includes dynasties within the membership cohorts of the liberation movement, is, therefore, an imposing hurdle if not an obstacle to a governing party seeking to regain its lost influence, with which to meet obligations that define its path to continuity or extinction.
With its obsession to not want to be overtly too powerful as a liberation movement out of a conflict with a colonial settler adversary, and has had to contend with a divided society of the economically dominant wanting to regularise the moral correctness of their spoils of conquest, what obtained in the rest of Africa became a testament whose evangelizing obligated capacity to airbrush some of its comfortable rhetoric. The design of a constitutional democracy to mediate these ideological tensions within a movement whose history dictates it having dated radical economic transformation but ultimately married gradualism as a logic of economic reform. In its infancy, the governing party, chiefly driven by the logic and exigencies of holding the state together, entered into international treaties and acceded to implementation instruments that fit what they defined then as being key to independence, democracy, and affluence. CUT!!
🤷🏿♂️A ndzo tivulavulela, mi ta mpfampfarhuta n'wina
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