AKUSAFANI: WHAT THE ANC SHOULD UNDERSTAND AS IT GOES INTO ITS BI-DECADE RETREATS

         The African National Congress was formed in 1912 by a cohort of middle and land owning class including educated native Africans in the geographical space then called the Union of South Africa. Educated in foreign universities and some coming from Royal houses, they came together to establish a native national congress of Africans that would stand in to articulate the interests of Africans in a 1910 established constitutional democracy which excluded natives, save for their indirect representation through the sloppy Cape and Natal criteria vote. It became an organization of deputations to the British Imperial center and in some instances multilateral bodies such as the League of Nations and later the United Nations. 

At inception, the ANC was an organization that believed in the integrity and benevolence of a progressively liberal British Empire that was struggling to reconcile its intents of being in hegemonic control of global liberalism and the real benefits of pursuing Rhodesian-type colonialism that was ruthless in contexts where the mercantilist and extractive economic interests of the Empire were concerned. This belief system would later define its decline in respect of staying a mass-based organization, save that the British Empire would be replaced by foggy resident and global capital interests euphemistically called investors or the market, as some would want us to say, (white) monopoly capital.

The ANC grew to become the foremost hegemonic organization in articulating the unfairness of colonialism and its later adjunct Apartheid. Through its various documents, notably the African Claims and the Freedom Charter, it adopted after the historic 1955 Kliptown Congress of the People, the ANC liquidated the moral basis on native exclusion in both 1910, 1961, and 1983 constitutional arrangements on how to govern South Africa and build it as a nation-state. This repudiation of native exclusion, with its apex of success being the declaration of Apartheid as a crime against humanity, came through a struggle system that started as a single organization-led process and grew to become a movement of civil society organizations beyond the limitations of the ANC as an organization.

It is this feature of the ANC being accorded the right, if not privilege, to lead the liberation struggle that earned it the status of a liberation movement that this rendition will meander within. After crafting the African Claims Document, which was followed by the authoritative Congress Youth League's Program of Action which coined the (Political) Freedom in our Lifetime slogan, the ANC occupied the vacuum of being the legitimate voice of native Africans, and expanded it to an 'all those who live in it' but in agreement with the Freedom Charter, interests. Consequently, it remodeled itself into a Freedom Charter pursuing leader of society and the 'National Democratic Revolution to establish a 'National Democratic Society liberation movement. 

The growing reality of the struggle against colonialism and apartheid being a multi-racial enterprise, coupled with the ANCs then ambitious non-racial dream of South Africa, earned the ANC to be accorded hegemonic dominance of the volunteer-led process that produced the Freedom Charter. It would be the non-nationalist preamble of the Freedom Charter which declared that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, which progressively enrolled into the liberation movement civil society organizations onto the Freedom Charter centric intents of the ANC. 

This construct of the movement included the establishment of Umkhonto we Sizwe as a structure that was for all legal intents and purposes outside the ANC and yet established to pursue its intents through military means including guerrilla warfare. In addition to MK, the movement was expanded to cement a 'revolutionary alliance' with SACTU and the CPSA both of whom were later renamed SACP and COSATU. This movement snowballed to create other loose alliances with civil society movements that agreed with the immorality and crime against humanity nature of colonialism and apartheid as twin systems that limited the potential of South Africa into being accepted as a member of sovereign nations of the world. Of cardinal importance is for the ANC to know that the appeal of the Freedom Charter promise for all South Africans, including those that would have consolidated their dispossession gains in law, which would find itself as part of the law a future rule of law will be based in, was responsible for its growth as a multi-racial movement.

It was only when an Oliver Tambo-led ANC embraced the strategy of being hegemonic in the struggle against apartheid and allowed nodes of leadership against its workability that the ANC became a magnet of one of the world's greatest movements against a system to a level that apartheid as a concept became a permanently abhorred system by humanity. The Movement attracted practically all aspects of human livelihood into the struggle system in ways the apartheid state could not stop it, but only find a way to negotiate the survival of apartheid gains as it surrendered to its pressures.

The brute truth is that as a United Democratic Front against Apartheid was formed, and it subjected itself to the hegemonic leadership of the ANC as leader of the liberation movement, a belief in the power of civil society movements took root. South Africans became, in real and practical terms, part of a global phenomenon that brought no mere adjustment among states but a novel redistribution of power within states, markets, and civil society. This phenomenon of national governments not simply losing autonomy in a globalizing world and economy, but sharing powers—including political, social, and security roles at the core of sovereignty—with businesses, international organizations, and a multitude of citizen groups, known as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The steady concentration of power to determine the destiny of society, or outright claim to be the leader of society was being eroded and replaced by the growing sovereignty of the citizens to let whoever claims to lead society earn that right by what they deliver. 

As 1994 dawned, the triumph of the human spirit against apartheid was celebrated and chiseled into a constitutional democratic order that espoused values within which the interest of a civil society-driven and monitored democracy could be guaranteed. This meant that state power and all monopolies that a State has over its citizens could be refereed by a rule of law based independent judicial system capable of overriding decisions that might arise out of the tyranny of majoritarianism, which is the ultimate prize of one person one vote. The absolutes that may have instructed in-struggle rhetoric where everything political or of political economy value lies within the hegemonic control of a majority governing party, is not only dissolving but instead being challenged by a progressively sophisticated civil society movement power that may even reverse the gains of the liberation promise purely based on the legality of their claims.

"Increasingly, resources and threats that matter, including money, information, pollution, and popular culture, circulate and shape lives and economies with little regard for political boundaries. International standards of conduct are gradually beginning to override claims of national or regional singularity". These matters have fractured most of the liberation movements' relationship with post-1994 power to levels where South Africa is on a precipice of becoming not only a weak state but a failing one without it being a failed state. The energy insecurity which is a function of climate change global policies the ANC might have not seen coming is one example of how the civil society character of the liberation movement has been captured away from the movement as it flirted with the largesses that come with power.

This rendition is about warning the ANC about the ideational expectations that the new reality has on its bi-decade conferences that are coming. The ANC should know that "the most powerful engine of change in the relative decline of states and the rise of non-state actors is the computer and telecommunications revolution, whose deep political and social consequences have been almost completely ignored. Widely accessible and affordable technology has broken governments' monopoly on the collection and management of large amounts of information and deprived governments of the deference they enjoyed because of it. In every sphere of activity, instantaneous access to information and the ability to put it to use multiplies the number of players who matter and reduces the number who command great authority". If their conferences recognize these realities, they will know that their policy conference and resolutions emanating therefrom will define their relevance to society. This should instruct the quality of delegates and ideational leaders it deploys to communicate their policies to an otherwise not desperate for an information society. The ANC itself should know it is a precedent of how a non-listening state or government can be rendered ungovernable through a network of cooperating civil society movements if a decision for that government to go is made. As Desmond Tutu said, 'I am warning you, the ANC should go into its policy conference and National Conference with its highest SOBRIETY.

What then should the ANC understand, amongst others,

1. The ANC is the governing party, it has State Power to LIBERATE South Africa. It cannot be a LIBERATION MOVEMENT against itself. 
2. They no longer have hegemonic influence over the dominant civil society landscape
3. They are bruised by the Zondo report and its available live broadcasts which will re-emerge as national elections approach 
4. Their obsession with leadership contests without telling society what those leaders stand for has eaten at their credibility 
5. The service delivery record is becoming a liability as public infrastructure maintenance is exposing government ability to reverse the decline 
6. The discussion documents, some, are still etched in nostalgia than practice.
7. Unless it addresses youth in its language it must be ready for a revolution beyond its conference 

CUT!!! CUT!!!

🤷🏿‍♂️Se ha vhula manje, swilo swa onakala...