Generations that carry the demise of the liberation movement algorithms in current politics. 'Interests driven politics have arrived'.

   Generations and/or age groups are agents of social change and carriers of ‘intellectual’ and organizational alternatives to the status quo. Generations, especially youth, have historically been sources or practical agents of opposition, rebellions, and revolutions, interrogating existing and established societal ideas, and demolishing the status quo, mostly through the collective organization. As distinct members of society, generations are mostly glued to each other by their collective experience of history and/or its events and thus have a specific life chance to influence the outcome of ensuing periods.

In the continuum of human experiences, generations stratify in a dynamic way the distinct ‘age cohort’ experiences and package them into a ‘consciousness’, also referred to as ‘past memories’. Interior to this consciousness is the transmission of a common (political, cultural, economic, national) heritage in a continuously reflexive, interactive, and precarious manner. The context of ‘the transmission’ is conflictual and marked by continuous intergenerational changes, especially when the defined objectives of the founding generations are perceived as incomplete and/or inadequate

The demand by visibly recognized ‘generations’ to create a privileged interval that separates successive generations has been found to be responsible for the proffered way new generations embrace the heroism of past generations. As an observed practice in liberation struggle histories of previously colonized societies as well as global nationalist struggles, liberation founding generations will, and as a rule, show a reluctance to surrender their historical advantages to a rising generation, thereby creating lags in the liberation opportunity continuum. A condition that institutionalizes stalwardism as a purchasable commodity by those who would not prefer new generational missions to fracture 'the status quo'. The social capital returns associated with such continued heroism create within society histories that are attached to individuals and the cohort they belong to in ways that ‘others’ everyone else in the liberation narrative.

In its periodization of a generation, OECD submits that a generation typically lasts between 22 and 30 years. South Africa had its democratic breakthrough in 1994, after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990. This makes the born free (or liberation kids as some would prefer) generation of South Africa to be arguably between the ages of 28 and 32. A child born in 1990 is now aged 32. In generations theory terms, what happened since 1990 shaped a generation purely based on its experiences as juxtaposed against its expectations. The only lived experience this generation know is that of off-statutes apartheid, with inside social tradition racism, and a black government that was generally treated with standards of established democracies that have a national-interest-defending history. 

In matured democracies (or strong states), this generation would have been trapped in some conscripted patriotism development programs including military enlistments. At worst the curriculum would have landed this generation into a national consciousness level that defines true South Africanness beyond our unfortunate racism-characterized past. The idea of freedom would by now be beginning to be independent of the baggage theses about just being South African. 

The liberation movement and not its political party character would by now have been carved out of history for future generations' sake in respect of understanding South African leaders in a context that is not converting classrooms into election campaign units. Generally, history would occasion a cooling period after a conflict era before the reasons for the conflict are taught to the next generation in a 'standardized' way. In South Africa, there had been various reasons for this assignment to be difficult because its conflict only had South Africanness as a victor, and its liberation movement and adversaries have found themselves in a compromises quagmire whose anchorage remains established institutions of leadership that created South Africa.

The stubbornness of systems and institutions has made the deinstitutionalization of government practice and its accompanying statism difficult to repurpose away from what it was designed for. The liberation idea is in essence about the deinstitutionalization of colonialism and apartheid whose outcome is the institutionalized and dominant political economy as well as the established templates of economic dominance some in the country still see as fruits of decades-long hard work by generations before them. 

As the economic system is dependent on entrepreneurial innovation supported by prudent policy making with the sovereign objective of empowering its defined citizens first, the majority of corporate citizens, or businesses, have inherited a business system that can only be productive when the apartheid ethos of business growth is intact. The resources industry, mining to be exact, is structured in a way that makes it still dependent on the migrant labor system, and gradually absorbs foreign nationals as indentured labor even in secondary industries to South Africa's primary industries. The liberation movement, which at some point in its 110-year history, started to be about the liquidation of statutory apartheid, went into a negotiating process that successfully worked at removing statutes that made apartheid workable and is still institutionalizing the idea of liberation beyond the evidence of no apartheid laws existing. 

Whilst the 1982 to 1994 generations of youth have defined as their mission economic freedom in their lifetime, the seems to be in the same generation an economically endowed cohort of youth from the same era that has a generational mission to defend the gains of the apartheid colonial economic system in their lifetime. Herein lies the advantage of a constitutional dispensation whose lawfulness is etched in the defense of sovereign individual (human) rights as they are being violated. With a full generation already in place since 1990, the historical disadvantage that is only protected by its recognition in the constitution is waning to levels where the very idea of liberation is receding to the background of priorities as the nature of true politics starts taking center stage. The convergence of the establishment interests is redefining rules of resources competition in a way that re-advantages those with historical wealth irrespective of how it was gotten, for as long as its lawfulness can be protected within the reigning rights system. 

The relevance therefore of liberation and liberation movement rhetoric has for a while been systematically declining. The Constitution which has now become the arena within which the liberation idea could be played is the new playbook for any order to take and find root in South Africa. The Bill of Rights has swallowed almost all clauses of the Freedom Charter that its celebrations will be a cultural affair whose correctness is to direct society to its entrenched status in the Constitution, anything beyond that will be nostalgic. The edifice of being or having been in the liberation movement or struggle is slowly but surely becoming a relic of the past unless invoked by the ritual of state funerals as liberation struggle 'heroes' meet their natural demise. 

The liberation movement, as abstracted in the ANC as its last relic, in the form of a political party has been the target of all that wanted the political power it has, the moral legitimacy to establish an alternative to what apartheid made of South Africa, the international stature it has amassed as a leader of a movement that repudiated colonialism and its adjuncts of apartheid and whiteness, and its leadership in the affirmation of the continent to be truly liberated. In this target position, its enemies were more ideological and hegemonic. Its errors of judgment, most of which indicated its loss of focus on its role as leader of a liberation movement, were packaged as a failure of what it represents that that of the individuals who committed the error. The first salvo was to extricate the Mandela legacy, to legal details of copyrighting and trademarking the Mandela surname, out of the ANC. The second was the attempt to muddy the Thabo Mbeki HIV-AIDS discourse, which latest scientific evidence is starting to suggest consistency with what he proffered as an argument then, as a context of ANCness because of the near pandemic proportions of deaths South Africa and Africa experienced. A third was the successful equating of Jacob Zuma era 'still to be proven' corruption with ANCness to levels where brand ANC is suffocating within the delegitimization rituals performed through inconclusive commissions of inquiry reports. 

In this vortex, unfortunately, what is certain is the start of the inconvenient end of the liberation movement. The declining electoral support of the ANC since 2014 is a sure sign of its impending demise. Projections have always been that it will lose its governing part majority status in 2030 as its incapacity to carry along a new generation of youth, including the self-inflicted disbandment of its youth league, is taking shape. The loss of majority status in Metropolitan Municipalities, the major economic nodal points of South Africa, the highest tax-paying communities of the country, and the highest concentration of the urbane middle class is the loudest indication that the sophisticated in society are losing confidence in the ANC as a political party, evidence of it losing a leader of the liberation movement status has no empirical measure. 

Sadly, the ANC does not seem to be having a succession plan and internal stability to withstand the onslaught it is operating within. It is a compromised entity with no 'real and deliberate' in-house council of elders with requisite values to mentor and impart to the next generations of leaders. Whilst it has one of the most capacitated and experience endowed cohort of elders, it would seem its elders have established themselves into a self-legacy curating coterie of sovereign individuals nostalgically focused on the self, and are no longer about the collective and 'we the people'. In its upcoming conferences, the ANC should be honest to itself, and decide if it wants to be a leader of the liberation movement, assuming the liberation struggle is incomplete, or it continues on the path of a political party whose rules of engagement might not necessarily be always about the liberation struggle but the interests of those funding its primaries and national elections. CUT!!!

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