ANC renewal should be about more. The policy space is open for thinkers to move in

     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 its benefits to society are a reserve of members of the ANC, albeit consequential to citizen livelihoods, given the arguable nexus of politics the ANC has for a while been, they should not tone our contexts.

The nation requires more the renewal of its institutions of leadership for it to thrive, than the consolidation of a ‘tribe’ to be its perpetual and sometimes toxic substrate of politics in which it is no longer interested. Inside the ANC, Ramaphosa has got to return to the leadership model that Oliver Tambo entrenched to re-earn the shrunk ANC status of leader of society on matters of the immorality of racism, poverty, sexism, and colonialism as a chauvinism. The political tribe the ANC has grown to be with striking distinct phases defined by the chiefs in charge has been ephemeral with consequential losses to the moral high ground it established through struggle and sacrifice.

Considering how the anti-apartheid struggle was executed and continuously optimized to meet the changing geopolitical interests characterized by Cold War priorities, the invocation of the ideals of the Freedom Charter as the actual ideal Nelson Mandela was prepared to die for in the dock, should more and more be the promise for all who want the legitimacy to govern South Africa should be allowed to also lay claim to. The wrong choice of wanting to make the attainment of Freedom Charter objects a strictly ANC affair should at best be abandoned, and at worst be subjected to a rigorous and consequential review process, as it has to date reduced its noble character as a national liberation project. Our liberation ideals are gradually becoming victim to the mistakes of the pyrrhic victories of its leadership for the Presidency of the country.

Believing that when the Freedom Charter declared that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people", never envisaged the ANC as a potential candidate to govern on a will which is no longer of the people, is yet another wrong context the renewal process does not seem to be honest about. The brute fact is that the ANC might soon no longer have a right to claim the very authority it struggled and sacrificed for bequeathing to South Africans. The moral force of legitimacy the ANC commanded for as long it was a custodian of the Freedom Charter was so strong that it started to believe the Charter cannot be imagined outside it as an organization.

Attributed to a cohort of leadership visionaries that were under the stewardship of Nelson Mandela, an immediate successor to the legendary Oliver Tambo, the Freedom Charter went into the constituent assembly constitutional writing process as the ANC's best ever contribution and will of a testament to South Africa’s future generations. It dies into the Constitution as it fertilized the rights-based traditions our constitutional democracy prides itself with. A casual look at Chapter two of the Constitution makes it clear that upon adopting the country's Constitution, the responsibility to implement the Charter became that of the State, and through practice and behavior, the ANC would have to henceforth earn voter confidence to claim its charter as a state program. In fact, the Constitution prescribes that the State (and its organs) must respect, protect, promote, and fulfill the rights in the Bill of Rights, all of whom have integrated the Freedom Charter promises as a legal construct of being South African.

Inconvenient as this might sound, the repudiation of the ANC at the polls from 2014 to 2021 at all elections has been a gradual stripping of the ANC of its right to monopolize its claim of the Freedom Charter, otherwise adopted at the Congress of the People in Kliptown where the ANC was a constituent part, which later pursued its acceptance as representative of the liberation aspirations of all South Africans. The 1996 Constitution became not only a game-changer for the country but also a shift of the templates of legitimacy to claim a monopoly of what is good for ‘the people’ whom the Freedom Charter spoke about pre-the-1996-Constitution. This has unwittingly fractured the ANC as a party contesting for a right to stay relevant, it's now comical claim to be the only custodian of the Freedom Charter promises.

Renewal of the ANC will thus be both hollow and incomplete if it does not get into the deeper meaning of what has the ANC become after bequeathing the Freedom Charter to South Africans through the Constitution. Given that democracy is the arrangement with which society has agreed on how to govern itself, South Africa’s Constitution and a coterie of laws that were enacted to expand further on what the Constitution provides, have created legal frameworks with which systems and structures of society will be carried through time. The renewal process should thus emerge with an ANC that inserts the common interests of society into not only the behavior of society members but that of ANC members themselves. If it is renewed as an institution of leadership, the ANC should continually be seen to be establishing futures for the South African society, in accordance with its declared purposes and founding values, out of whom the normative reasons we call ourselves a nation are based upon.

It is the location of the ANC inside the country's constitution that should instruct its renewal. The normative ANC which appealed to the global community, contrary to what many within it want us to believe, resonated with a post-cold war liberal order that was obfuscating a retreating socialist order liquidated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a rise of State Capitalism in China and a consolidating Tsarist Russia with a socialist conscience. Renewal of the ANC, as we have observed, cannot be confined to dealing with the demands for high degrees of prerogative government based on in-party arbitrariness, but should be expanded to be about the value system the ANC brings into the new locus of its being, the country's Constitution. The constitutional state that has been formed should be predicated on the ascendancy of in-ANC bureaucracy befitting a modern society, and largely based on a general acceptance of superior efficiency. A renewed ANC should display form and practice that make society, especially its members, believe that as a bureaucracy in politics and about politics, it should always strive to outperform human efforts that try to derail it from being a party located in the normative co-ordinates the Constitution expects of all that dare call themselves South Africans.

 How the ANC advances its integrity management system, how it organizes its criminal justice system, how it advances issues of economic justice and equity, how it defines the national interests of South Africa to instruct its diplomatic relations, and how it structures its preferred education system to create a better imagination of the future by the next generation should be key aspects of its renewal. In fact, the renewal should be so value-laden that a common firmament on South Africanness is established for others to complete about who can best implement the Constitution. What has led to the ANC's decay was its inability to locate itself inside the Constitution it has fought for its existence only to continue operating outside it. For a while, the ANC was known for its mass character, the armed struggle, the underground structures, international solidarity, the tripartite alliance, and at the tail end of negotiations. These have all been executed, save for the alliance. The question is what has theoretically replaced them to pursue a beyond anti-apartheid cause if it is not following the ideal of the Freedom Charter into the Constitution and according to its normative demands.

There is no doubt that the horrendous revelations of the Zondo Commission have dealt a blow to the normative uprightness of the ANC in society. It has engendered a sense of unity in the opposition complex to agree on making society imagine its future without the ANC. Coalitions of minorities have been able to create a majority of minorities which feeds on the sensationalist reportage of what is in the Zondo commission report, most of which still need to be investigated further, notwithstanding their making the ANC be in disrepute, a sub-context prize of the politics at play. The aggressive response of those cited in the report and similar processes have seen a resurgence of some correctness of a Special Type propelled by loopholes in the democratic tradition of the ANC. Integrity questionable individuals are in ascendance to the detriment of the normative space the Freedom Charter has located itself, the Constitution, and its demands of the rule of law including its supremacy.

The collateral of this state of affairs might be, rather than this renewal riding on a new paradigm shift towards building a normative state, the pursuit of factional victory might exhume a post-Polokwane context where the anti-corruption drive pursued by the Scorpions became a casualty of regime change with disastrous consequences to the us body politic. Counterproductive policy positions might emerge as policy conference resolutions and could be argued as a form of renewal for as long as the is majority consent by the minority that would have met. Polokwane as a decisive flection point in the institutional development of what the ANC has become is now an unfortunate pre-existing custom whose relative force of success yielded the consequential Zondo Commission, which might influence the envisaged renewal departures. ANCness should not be undermined as a potential dredge into which the renewal process could be stuck. Like any political tradition, it is also a set of deeply rooted, historically conditioned attitudes about the nature of politics, its self-abrogated role in society and its shrinking polity, how it believes it is a proper organization, and lately how it is imagining itself beyond its current crisis as it applies itself to challenges, teaches its members at political schools, and preparing itself to be studied by future generations for its contributions to the history of South Africa.

The easiest way out of this mess would be for the President to think of a less punitive way of implementing the recommendations of the Zondo Commission. However, the locus of our liberation promise is etched in the normative demands of the Constitution, and any tampering with the rule of law would repudiate the entire edifice of our order as a sovereign nation. Only a posture for pardoning once the law has taken its course could reduce the impact of consequences. Corridors of amnesty for those that are already serving sentences, including getting the judiciary to be business-like in case disposal might be a new national emergency to propel us into a stability mode beyond how corruption has disrupted us.

The President might want to also focus on the persecution of private sector corruption. It cannot be true that the scale of corruption that Zondo found cannot have as casualty a big company in the private sector unless we are in an oligarchy. Many in society are beginning to be skeptical of the calls being made by the Zondo Commission recommendations, this is seen as a scheme of a powerful cognitive legal elite that has never hesitated to exploit the less powerful when their interests required it. It is quite true that some from within this elite's hedging is driven by their own economic and elite ties to an agenda with other prerogatives. CUT!!!