In his 2022 January 08 historic ANC annual state of the liberation movement speech, President Ramaphosa said
"The movement must, therefore, undergo a fundamental and lasting process of renewal and rebuilding if it is to remain the effective and trusted agent of change. This change must find particular resonance in how we muster the capacities of the state to improve people’s quality of life; how we unite all social partners in pursuit of economic reconstruction and recovery; and how ANC deployees in government creatively, consistently and with integrity address the needs and aspirations of the nation. We must therefore intensify our work to restore the relevance, capability and credibility of the ANC so that it continues to be an effective force for transformation. The lodestars of our journey of social transformation are to be found in the Freedom Charter and our country’s Constitution and the plans developed over the years to attain the lofty ideals they espouse. That is what defines the movement’s unique relevance in the current age."
The ANC is in the throes of a political emergency. Our addiction as South Africans, and some of us as its card-carrying members, have led to a runaway decline of effective civil society response to its failures using the legitimacy of what it stands for as a liberation movement. There is a slow death of questioning the leadership of its mandate drift from an ANC whose interests are about the liberation of South Africans. Our depredation of what a constitutional democratic order expects of us as citizens and then members of the ANC has jeopardized the continued legitimacy of our post-apartheid claims as a society.
Given the implosion of the ANC as an institution of leadership, it is not shocking that organs of state as institutions of societal leadership are beginning to fail in their repurposed role of transforming the fault lines of apartheid colonial domination of a few in the economy. The post-apartheid period, and it must be mentioned, with its successes comparatively speaking, has tinkered at the margins of what still needs to be done if templates of economic domination remain the target for a new economic order to emerge in (South) Africa.
Although capital and the governing elite are weaving a social compact to genuinely and without compromising exigencies of sustainable economic growth and slow down the cadence of widening socioeconomic inequality, with a race vector, emerging evidence suggests that there are no guarantees those with economic power will live to pledges and commitments they are making. The facet of comfort by those that apartheid advantaged is fast emerging as a strategic area to be defended as a civil society reality to be foregrounded in its present character independent of whence it comes from.
Sovereign individual rights, particularly when enshrined in a Constitution, obey no history rules. Neither do they succumb to the demands of a past the present can move on without? Individuals have been organizing themselves around the consequences of politics on them as individuals in the present context. Civil society movements have been established to aggregate the scale of discontent through the selection of individual cases with higher degrees of litigation success, thus establishing sediments of precedence a new and post-apartheid jurisprudence cannot ignore going forward.
While South Africa is a sovereign state and a legal persona, its citizens have, in the process and through legal finesse, become sovereign individuals whose rights have created attractive jurisdictions through which the legality and legitimacy of public policy can be subjected to a battery of tests in its independent judicial system. As own imperatives seem to be gradually juniorizing the power of the collective, the paradigm of sovereign individual rights is settling as an undergirding socio-judicial expectation the cognitive legal elite will find peer legitimacy to lead the system with.
The emerging context of policy, in a background where history has put some in a precarious state, the disappearance of the societal tensions that must give way for social cohesion, cannot result in moments where universal reconciliation can guide nation-building. The restoration, rebuilding, and renewal of the social relevance of the liberation movement will not be as easy as we desire for it. The root of our policy dilemmas as the ANC is when our quest for the 'transformation of society' becomes the sole objective of our entire policy edifice. The resultant fear of a return to apartheid colonial-era lack and oppression emerges as a weapon in the hands of political mavericks and dubious characters masquerading as bulwarks against this potential.
The NEC January 8 statement suggests that "the movement must...undergo a fundamental and lasting process of renewal and rebuilding if it is to remain the effective and trusted agent of change." This statement translates into a need for a new order, and the pursuit of order is a function of equilibrium and legitimacy.
WHAT EQUILIBRIUM?
Equilibrium in respect of dealing with the conflicting interests of society in establishing an order with which the emergence of not resulting monopolies that a state will always possess could be used to defend. As humans agree on the arrangements to govern each other, they will create an equilibrium upon which they will work within such arrangements to define how they protect the cardinal rights to private property ownership, freedoms of speech, association, assembly, conscience, and expression through the media. These rights are, in most instances, related to accumulated power or newly attained power for humans to strike a fair balance of access to adjudication power of the state unless the right to legal representation is accompanied by a right to be funded to afford such representation. The equilibrium an order requires will also have to be a function of everyone having a right to political representation, and everyone has a right to nominate or be nominated into positions of politically representing others.
In economic contexts, society should, as far as possible, establish equilibrium points, either at the apex or acceptable benchmark levels at which humanity can exercise free trade, which includes the right to price the value of commodities with which exchange of ownership and use can occur. The aggregation of value should be left to an uncolluding environment where price-setters will be disciplined by the relationship of quality, value, and choice. It is the equilibrium point at which these variables operate that the fairness of an economic system can be experienced by those with a monopoly of satisfaction as expressed by buying and preferring to utilize to the exclusion of available alternatives. Whatever unit of exchange, its value will have to be dependent on what anchors it as part of an agreed arrangement as juxtaposed with its ability to attract equivalent value when weighed against values of other units in sovereign spaces whose arrangements define their order. As value becomes a cross sovereign jurisdiction matter, new equilibrium points with which a balance of value and quality is to be sought will self-create within principles that would have been set for all to aspire to reach them. The ultimate test of the fairness of such an equilibrium will be how practical and trusted an agent of change is, resulting order to the expectations of humanity.
WHAT LEGITIMACY?
Legitimacy as a function of the pursuit of order spawns interesting parallels between what should be legal and what should be legitimate. This is because arrangements, once established, can be legal and yet illegitimate. For instance, the fact that apartheid was institutionalized through a legal process that set it as a legal system in terms of the arrangements that had control over state monopolies did not make it legitimate as a human construct to foster good relations and social cohesion. In fact, legal as it was within the halls within which its adjudication was subjected, its impact and reach to humans could only earn it the status of being a crime against humanity.
Legitimacy is, therefore, about the normative context within which arrangements that society agrees to govern itself. It concerns itself with the extent to which there is recognition by the public of any authority, whereby such authority will derive power through consent and mutual understandings, not coercion. In its advanced form, legitimacy, especially when it is constitutional, concerns itself with the acceptance that an exercise in power is justified and therefore authorized, either implicitly or explicitly, by society at large.
In establishing legitimacy, for the ANC to extend its renewal and rebuilding benefits to the society at large, it should work on the legitimacy of its internal arrangements with which its members have agreed to govern themselves. This means it should be a concentrate of the normativeness it expects society to operate within. For instance, its genuine commitment to the opening clause of the Freedom Charter that 'the people shall govern' can only be demonstrated when it lives up to a sub-contexted equivalent of 'ANC members shall govern the ANC.' What this translates to in practice will discipline its members wherever they end in pursuit of public power or create a new order to ensure the people govern in the same way they govern their organization. In fact, it can be argued that how it has governed itself over the last 28 years is manifesting in how it governs society.
This legitimacy can be stretched to include all other internal organizational excellence aspects of the Freedom Charter and institution-building aspects. The questions now asked include 'are the doors of learning and culture within the ANC itself open.' Is the ANC an organization of all those that have joined it, black and white, and that no leadership can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all its members; that its members have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty, and peace by a context of government founded on injustice and inequality; that our organization/movement will never be an embodiment of prosperity or freedom until all its members co-exist in brotherhood, enjoying equal organizational rights and opportunities; that only a democratic in character and form leadership, based on the will of all the members, can secure to all their rights of membership without distinction of color, race, sex or belief; And therefore, we, members of the ANC, black and white together - equals, countrymen and brothers - adopt the spirit of the Freedom Charter we claim to be working within? And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing neither strength nor courage, until our movement is a reflection of the democratic ideals set out in the policies we adopt for society.
Suppose the lodestars of our journey of social transformation are to be found in the Freedom Charter and our country’s Constitution and the plans developed over the years to attain the lofty ideals they espouse. In that case, it follows that its renewal should mechanically be about modeling itself as an embodiment of what these documents, particularly the Charter, stand for. What it promises society should first be seen in how its members experience it within it. The legality of its actions should be referenced to the extent to which it lives up to the country's constitution. It cannot be an ANC government that loses almost all cases in the Constitutional court and only gets away with murder when it acts unconstitutionally in sub-national jurisdictions where it is the governing party. It cannot be acceptable that wherever there is section 100 and 139 in whole or parts declared, the ANC is the governing party declaring on the ANC as the governing party. It cannot be correct that the ANC cannot manage its credentials at this advanced stage of the fourth industrial revolution.
If these persist, the ANC, as leaders of its members and those in society who still see it as their leader, will resemble the proverbial Rabbi of the Zionist faith preaching why pork should not be eaten at a function where pork meat is served for lunch. Tšeo, ke go tsena Moria ka kolobe o le lebone. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela
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