The th!nc Foundation

      Oftentimes humanity goes through relationships that generate enduring affection, esteem, intimacy, trust, and feelings of safety around other humans. Upon landing on earth, through parents, particularly our moms, we arrive at humanity's primary reception committee, and when you are fortunate you find the reception committee in its ideal completeness, with both your parents being there to usher you through to other humans. It is in this primal space of reception that we learn to later differentiate family from acquaintances, associates that include neighbors, classmates, colleagues, team members, and so on.   In this process of differentiating we realize that there are those amongst this maze of relationships, we will accord the special status of friends as we go through phases of growing and maturing. Our giving of the title of friends will either be informed by the utility value of the relationship, the pleasure we derive by entering into that friendship, and/...

         In explaining the importance of a trust relationship, a South African scholar tells of a story where a child would jump from an elevated position into the arms of a parent because the child trusts that the parent won't shift or fail to catch him or her. Similarly, continues the scholar, if the child grows into a teenager and the parent asks the child to do a similar jump into the arms of the parent, the child who has become a teenager has information about himself or herself as well as about the parent that will be factored into what decision to take with regards to jumping.   The teenager knows its weight, and can measure the capacity of the adult to withstand the weight in motion, in free flow, and subject to the rules of gravity. The risk of injuring the parent before itself is what will determine whether the teenager will jump or not. Whilst the parent might be nostalgic about being able to catch the child in previous jumps, the child, and with...

     When dealing with non-state, or non-governmental corruption, including state capture, the South African academic media complex, its analyst community, and policymakers are typically employing a vocabulary or posture of non-engagement or outright silence. On the contrary when there are similar, or less impactful to the economy corruption stories, involving state functionaries, mainly black, and acutely Bantu-Blacks, a vocabulary and nomenclature of conflict-catastrophe-apocalypse is employed. These contradictions, if they are not a deliberate blight on the race-inspired hegemony theatre propelled by a monopolized media culture power, are foregrounding the control of national narratives as new battlefields where the war for the soul of South Africa would be won or lost. The corruption and state capture armageddon presentation of South Africa to the world, especially where it involves its governing class or elite, is already eating at whatever is left of investor conf...

        The African National Congress, as its name says was conceptualized as one of the most institutionalized responses to the institutionalization of imperialism and colonialism into a constitutional construct. At the turn of the 20th Century, and after a brutal non-black war about who has the right to have hegemony over the emerging need for a State to be in charge of legitimizing dispossession and codifying its lawfulness to be settled by courts, the decision to exclude Africans was responded to by establishing the African National Congress. The idea of self-determination of Africans found an institutional home, the nodes of African power and authority, including influence such as churches, were collected into a Native Congress whose inaugural reach was regional, non-sexist, and transcending tribal divides the were institutional reception structures of imperialism and colonialism. Conceptualized through the youth imagination of young men like Pixley Ka Seme, and...

      Branch delegate purchase at conferences, manipulation of credentials at conferences to engineer election outcomes, funding of slates by the criminal underworld to create a better political environment for its existence, dearth of policy discourse at sub-national conferences, prerogative or arbitrary disbandment of organizational structures such as the woman's league, conferences that convene only to elect personalities to positions with no prospect of knowing what they represent, there appears to be little to no hope in bringing order into Africa's oldest liberation movement, the ANC. The often-depressing stories about what is happening inside the ANC paint a picture of anarchy, disarray, disorganization, and leadership decay in what is, arguably South Africa's dominant nexus of its politics and political economy. This does not only have grim implications for the ANC alone, but broader ones for the continent, SADC, the economy, and most decisively the stability of a...

      The resurfacing of urine and urinating at yet another of the historically white, and exclusively Afrikaner University, is a coded message about the maturity of our social cohesion if any at all. Watching the video, listening to its content, searching for condemnation from civil society movements that have lately clamored for the moral leadership of South Africa, and experiencing the mixed feelings of urine and urination with the urinated and made to consume urine being BantuBlack evokes all sorts of emotions. The gut from which anger comes has since the breaking of news been negotiating with the logic of forgiveness for a generation whose whole life should only know non-racialism and equality of all, under any circumstances. Theuns du Toit, an Afrikaner boy in his early twenties, admitted at what is arguably one of the bastions of Afrikaner and Afrikanses-led intellectual institutions, has once again brought the spotlight on the fallacy of outside household social...

       In December 2022, South Africa will emerge from one of its consequential in-ANC elective conferences, the 55th National Conference. At stake will be both the form and content that the ANC will take, with Ramaphosa's bid for a second term representing the ultimate of its contested form, and radical economic transformation representing the extreme of its contested content. To the Ramaphosa continuity brigade, the form that the ANC will take is paramount, and to those wanting to truncate it, their claim is that they are more concerned with the content of what the ANC ultimately becomes. The contest is thus both ideological and structural, albeit without a scientific basis for the former, and a strong resources backing for the latter. The prize of the current political phase of South Africa is commoditized around the office of the ANC President.   As of the end of May 2022, the form of the ANC in the provinces of Mpumalanga and Eastern Cape had been about 55%...

    It is inevitable that wealth and power, the motive force for most tensions and conflicts affecting humanity, are moving away from their dispossession-determined locations in South Africa. The apartheid colonial order is giving way to one increasingly crafted by a new cohort of self-determined and purpose-driven South Africans inspired by the possibility of a non-racial and pan-African future. At issue is to what end and direction the great turning wheel of defining new economic commanding heights of Africa are taking us. Can an Africanist order emerge to set up new conditions of engagement that the world should negotiate its space to be accommodated? Doubtful Thomases about Africa argue that the new African renewal will not look better than what we know about the African Continent but will be worse than its present squalor. With a perfected experience of failed states, there is a general belief that the super efficiencies represented by the new movement of innovative Afr...

      The booing off the stage of Ramaphosa in Rustenburg is a paradigm shift on the scale of a head of state recall we saw in recent times. It was the dignity of the Office of the President that was also booed, by supporters of a governing alliance whose mandate to govern comes from a majority that is not its members. Just to put matters in perspective, President Ramaphosa is a creature of citizen votes when he acts as head of state. Granted, his protocol posture in Rustenburg was that of the leader of the ANC in a rally organized by the alliance, but this was billed as the official mayday rally. How Ramaphosa, the President of South Africa, responds to how he was treated, will be determinative on how he assists society into a pattern of relating with its government purely on the basis of what that government does for the nation, as opposed to a relationship it has with its own party factional carry-ons. The renewal of the ANC-led alliance theme, its challenges, and it...

     For a while, the politics of South Africa have been in an antithesis mode about almost everything. The last time we were in a thesis mode as a society, it was about what should our democratic future and order be. This was a time when we innovated what is arguably still being referred to as the best constitution of its times. In fact, we crafted for ourselves a vision of an open society for all, the supremacy of the Constitution, a government based on the rule of law, and a society in pursuit of both equality and equity with non-racialism and non-sexism as cardinal demands for our fragile social cohesion. With these values and principles, we were poised to construct a thesis of an African state imagined not as an antithesis of a colonial state but one that would be organically African. In its opening, the RSA  Constitution recognizes the injustices of the past; a perfect subject for the new government could have established a judicial commission of inquiry to inv...