The th!nc Foundation

        The African National Congress, ANC, is not getting the best out of its otherwise loyal membership. This is a message which the unending contestation for leadership, that has trapped the ANC in a whirlpool of elections at all its sub-national structures, is being communicated. As the organization wrestles with the complex challenges of giving direction to a still divided, conflict-prone, and socially incoherent South Africa, it has its members, who are supposed to be the substrate of what it stands for, as its most intense management area.   The centuries old principle of deploying into the public service individuals that ultimately become mandarins of an obtaining hegemony has in the process become one of the liabilities consequential to the incapacity to get more from its members. In established democracies where there is a thesis of the state based on a hypothesis that asks questions about the originative historical background undergirding those societ...

       Undoubtedly, South Africa  is on almost autopilot mode when it comes to how society is being led. It has one of the most liberal Constitutions, where every human act survives the wrath of state law enforcement agencies if it can be able to be argued as a human right.     The bare-knuckle politics of fighting for the control of the distributive prowess of being in government have attracted all breeds of leaders into the vocation of politics, and it would seem the gangster breed is becoming hegemonic. In their design of the current Constitution of South Africa, its founding thinkers positioned the judiciary to be an independent arm of the state. This arrangement established the judicial platform if it does not get corrupted, as one with which the civility of how as a society we contest for predominance over others through the use of the law, a core substrate of the rule of law as one of the values undergirding our society.   The transformatio...

         It is clear that a new centre of politics has emerged in KZN. This centre will undoubtedly redefine the substrates at both the Policy and Electoral Conferences of the ANC starting next week. The singing about Jacob Zuma at the KZN conference has made it clear, and unequivocally so, that how Zuma was treated, correctly or otherwise, is a serious provincial grievance.   The seems to be a message that the province was profiled through his person not to emerge. The realities of leadership transition in the province, manifesting as the disappearing into old age of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the death of iSilo King Goodwill Zwelithini, and the recall of Jacob Zuma, have propelled a need to be inward-looking in that province. How these regional challenges impact the governing ANC is a subject for another day. What this rendition submits is, The RET forces betted on Nomusa, and she lost badly. Sandile Zungu read the signs and opted not to have his percei...

     A South African academic writes that "the use of metaphors and parables remains one of the greatest assets in the African education system. Supported by a rigorously used system of storytelling and use of symbols, metaphors have for centuries provided indigenous scholarship about and for African civilizations. The intellectual resilience of African wisdom cues and philosophy endowed idiomatic expressions have not only served as repositories of community values but also anchored a normative environment comparable to recorded philosophy of other civilisations. The use therefore of metaphors creates for society a rather neutral platform to reflect on itself in relation to presented phenomena". In fact, we can escape the challenges of having to be real, by the cliches that metaphors can be. Orwellian literature has been able to assist society reflect on itself through the metaphorical use of animals in a fictionalised story, animal farm. Round the fire stories by elders ...

       In its year of renewal and rebuilding, the ANC is mired in a leadership crisis. It has just emerged out of a punishing and reputation liquidating, on live television, state capture commission of inquiry. The commission report points the most fingers at its leaders, past, and present. In this whirlpool of commission reports and whistle-blower revelations, its last man-standing network of individuals was found wanting in the procurement of PPEs. Its 'clean leader' is remonstrating  with the reputation liquidating PhalaPhala theft of money in the closet.   Facing the possibility of losing state power in 2024, the ANC is on a back footing process of building new alliances that do not display any principle. In a growing absence of or gap with its core constituency, the land dispossessed and historically excluded from the mainstream economy, as a governing party it had to assume the role of protecting one of the active agencies of the state, Capital. The n...

      The in-ANC factional rivalry is, unfortunately, maturing to levels where fighting against each other is fast becoming the politics of being ANC. For as long as it existed, the liberation movement has been about addressing the national grievance of land dispossession and all that goes with it.   The liberation struggle as a system took such a long time that being ANC seems to have as a requirement, the existence of some adversary as a member mobilization fulcrum. The idea of being a government others will challenge has over the post-apartheid years been received with mixed postures, the main one being to still continue seeing the State, of which you are in charge, as the institution to antagonize on behalf of the very people who mandated you to use it for their development. With the State having become a worthy adversary to mobilize national will and cure the country's ailing social cohesion, the ability of the liberation movement to operate beyond the rhetoric ...

     I met Tito Khalo as a colleague and friend in 1993 when he recruited me to come and join them as a part-time lecturer at Setlogelo Technikon, now part of a Kader Asmal Policy merged Tshwane University of Technology. I knew him as a student at the South African Institute of Public Administration, headquartered at PREMOS in Pretoria West. He was the coordinator of the evening classes and a taskmaster with pedantic prowess that made all of us focus on the little things that matter when you are a lecturer.  I went on into the public service under Dan Mashitisho Gauteng, director of Local Government, where I was appointed Deputy Director of Local Government Research. At a conference to develop a Gauteng Local Government Research Agenda, organised with the HSRC's Democracy and Governance Program under Bertus de Villiers and Jabu Sindane, he came as one of the leaders in the Public Administration discipline. He introduced me to other qualified persons like Mr. Malete...

       The exposure of the PhalaPhala farm cash-in-furniture theft confirmed what has long been apparent; the anti-corruption and anti-state capture-based narrative New Dawn presidency was always at the risk of collapse unless it defined its own thesis of existence. The character of the governing party is never to be a stakeholder in architectures or systems set up by others, and neither are its alliance partners who have always supported its policy development prowess during and after the anti-apartheid struggle. The governing party has a historical mission of dealing with the national grievance as the fundamental source of many of South Africa's problems, and no antithesis would last in replacing this mission.    The Arthur Frazer grandmaster level chess move, the least common checkmate, and its implicit support by the veterans complex, some sections of the business community, or rather mainstream South African establishment, has intensified the search fo...