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% secured of a Ramaphosa continuity, whilst the regional expressions at numerically strategic regions of the ANC tell a story of contestations that are pronouncing the depth of resourcing Branch delegates rather than content commensurate with voting. The thrust of debates about the content of being ANC has for a while been choked by a reduced to no sharpened discourse on policy at strategic centers of influence the ANC commands. Discussion documents that are released for discussion and possible rebuttal by branches are presented to society as established consensus and positions. The structural deficiencies of branch meeting quorums and credentialing have choked the capacity of those who could argue these policies, thus making the heritage of policy development the ANC has built to be weaponized against the real intents of being ANC.
What has compounded this policy poverty at the Branch level is the dearth of shop steward council-driven policy debates that COSATU could fund thus sponsoring content into ANC conferences and policy consultation processes. The ascendance of the right within the left of South Africa as a consequence of the dominance of a liberal-left influencing the policy environment has rendered traditional ANC policy-making to be a domain of funded cognitive elite structures, most of whom are rented rhetoric shapers with no prospect of policy and doctrinal shifts to templates of economic dominance established. The structure of the economy, in the main monopolistic and somewhat oligarchic, has started to replicate itself in areas of human ideation and social imagination of being South African. The predominance of a manufactured politico-cultural majority is so strong that right-wing racist demands have mushroomed to levels where civil society movements are emboldened to believe in the return and display of apartheid symbols as legitimate artifacts of a rejected past, crime against humanity. The quest to cleanse apartheid through the prism of history, and thus build avenues to position its aspects as pockets of heroism and undermining the legitimacy of those that repudiated what it stands for, is a dividend of a lost rudder by those that led all ideation towards the emancipation of humanity against a racist construct South Africa's past was.
The content of negating this past has for a while been undergoing a process of sanitizing its basis of legitimacy such as land restitution and all its attendant meanings in the economic domains of South Africanness. The national grievance of land has now been pegged with conditions of the use of land, its productivity, and lately its value to those that currently own it. The moral turning point of the content of being ANC has been the discovery of intellectual atrocities inflicted on society about the need to genuinely open a conversation on the structure of the economy. Without vitiating the legitimacy of development through growth discourse, ideation spaces have been starved of the alternative voices of growth through development as these would outrightly discount any notion of selling state-owned entities that have an economic commanding height role in comparable democracies.
Amongst the shocking atrocities that South Africans on the periphery of mainstream economic activity has been the hockey stick growth of informal settlements, at last count the ministry of human settlements counts 2400 as the number of informal settlements, and urban. Through the land and breadth of the country, squalor, and conditions of serfdom, define day-to-day existence. The protest economy, which might be characterized as steam outlets to avoid the possibility of a full-out 'Arab Spring' that might force a convention for the economic transformation of South Africa, is on a growth trajectory. Despite the misery of just being South African on the periphery of the country's economics, the 2022 December Conference of the ANC preparations has to date not started to churn out hope that the Conference will make a difference.
The Mpumalanga and Eastern Cape Conferences have come and gone. What society knows about them is who got elected. There was never a moment when the national discourse was about the content those that won represented, save their importance as persons to the agenda of the form the ANC should take. Whilst the content of just being ANC will not remove the growing political despair taking root in South Africa, its neglect might well be the accelerant of conflict and instability, and place a burden to respond on civilian institutions, a context that might erode the legitimacy of the state to manage the liberation promise the Constitution has at least guaranteed. Populist chauvinisms that manifest themselves as campaigns like 'operation dudula', will attest to a truism that 'whilst democracy is very good at resolving policy issues through the minority's acceptance of the legitimacy of majority decisions, it cannot resolve irreconcilable differences between large sections of the population concerning their basic demands for a better life for all. The rise of economic right-wing thinking within the governing alliance, as manifest in the policy turn on the strategic importance of State-Owned Entities and an unexplained aversion to legitimate left thinking of development exigencies of South Africa, is starting to blind them of the existential dangers of economic inequality. This will make them, if they are not already too deep therein, betray vital national interests and doom the liberation movement to eventual political extinction; signs are there.
With the renewal, rebuild, and consolidation of the democratic gains theme, the question is what are those gains that must be consolidated, and who has gained from the democracy. If it is a renewal, what is to be renewed, and if it is rebuilding what has broken that needs rebuilding. As rebuilding starts, there will be new frontiers of engagement with those whose interest is the demise of the ANC. It is inconceivable to imagine a South Africa which is united on the need for a stronger and resilient ANC. This would mean the most optimistic of its scenario planning would have to factor in the risk of relapse to corruption by those that branded themselves as to its enemies. The true test of its resolve lies in how it behaves when it has the allocative power of state resources.
The general awareness of those in the leadership of the ANC is of such a nature that no pragmatism will make them so meek that they can't notice the path of betraying vital national interests they have seemingly chosen. Due to this historical awareness, and many in society still believe it is resident amongst its leadership, ANCness has illustrated in the past how interest in 'the people', 'national interest', and 'properly defined and purpose-driven elite interest' can provide a basis for a determined effort to take the country on growth through development path which beat the drums of reconstruction and development. Unless otherwise advised, ANC leaders do not have the capacity to betray those they lead. The December 2022 Conference should be about the betrayal of the nation's development agenda or prosperity for a small tribe of betrayers. At the conference, we will assume that the tribe that needed to go is gone, let the new tribe not betray democracy. Otherwise KUYAFANA. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️Xivandza-nyongeni...
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