Hegemonic contests in the Movement. The future might benefiting.

     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 of blaming apartheid and establishing its own thesis of an African State became compromised within a vortex of an unending transformation paradigm. For anyone observing ANC politics, it would seem what has become normal of them, are the contestations of who leads it more than what is the content of a claim to be a worthy governing party. There seems to be no shortage of scandals to feed on the insatiable appetite of the establishment media to define South African politics on the content of what personalities do than what the organization they lead proffers as a unique value proposition to deserve our approval for them to govern. Whilst the Zondo Commission was a worthy intervention to foreground the extent of corruption that happened under our nose, the commission has failed to define what constitutes state capture in a South African context. It failed to triangulate the corruption challenge with the sociology of an African Political Economy. It failed to draw parallels between the profoundly communal character of African family systems and definitions of corruption, nepotism, and patronage. It also failed to give a genesis of state capture as a lived practice before the dawn of a post-apartheid democratic order. 

The battle therefore for the Soul of the ANC, the battle to craft a new way of living, the battle to determine what a renewed liberation movement should look like, the battle to define what constitutes a fair political economy, and a battle to shape how South African capitalism will be in relation to the conscience it must project, are what will define the hegemonic posture of the ANC beyond itself. It might be tempting to assume that ANC members are afraid to speak their minds on these matters. On the contrary, members of the ANC have for a while been remarkably sanguine about the future, even when their voice on certain fundamental issues is craftily suppressed by leadership by choking the policy-making character of the ANC, mainly through outsourcing thinking to highly paid think tanks and ideational institutions. 

The unprecedented increase of policy refugees within its activist members has been exposed by the flimsy way its members responded to the introduction of the alternative energy policies and how society responds to immigration issues. The stop-start policy posture of members of the national executive, almost bordering on a popularity contest about policies with far-reaching consequences like energy and immigration, has shown how branches of the ANC have lost the ability to influence it, save as rented voting stock at its various conferences. Becoming an ANC Conference delegate, especially where electing leaders or members of Parliament, is now a commodity, and a new variable of South Africa's political economy.

As the 55th Conference gets closer,  the reconfiguration of leadership contestation outcomes in sub-national structures of the ANC suggests that a generational shift is beginning to take shape. The ascending leadership cohort in regions and provinces is sending clear messages that the time for the Economic Freedom in Our Lifetime (EFOL) generation to lead South Africa has arrived, and plans to pursue their program will proceed regardless of the (often manufactured) economic consequences. To the EFOLs, most of whom are sufficiently educated and have been politically shaped in contexts where whiteness had lost its luster within the liberation movement and in society, the dismantling of all templates of economic dominance is both a generational mission and a patriotic duty. To them, the struggle for economic emancipation has just begun, and what is also on a growth trajectory in the opposition benches is a cohort of youthful politicians who have defined their right of existence on the basis of fracturing templates of economic dominance. Tolerance of the economic demographics has over time been seen as cowardice and a betrayal of the 'national democratic revolution' by this generation. It will not be surprising if the 'refrigerated' Gallagher Estate ANCYL Conference Resolutions which attracted a 'mosquito in a tent' characterization of the then President of the ANCYL, find their (belated and somewhat legitimate) way into the mainstream agenda of a renewed ANC. 

For many who pay attention to how EFOLs have been patiently waiting for their turn to lead, it is not hard for us to connect the dots from how some of them governed the municipalities they were in charge of, the state departments they were deployed to as politicians and bureaucrats, and how they have established their businesses outside the 26% BEE thresholds. The integration of schooling and the passing of the Township Economy legislation as well as the municipal level land release programs at Ekhurhuleni and Tshwane, are some of the indications of the ascendance of a new and apologetic generation in the leadership of the ANC. Whilst the hegemonic struggle to stop radical economic transformation by targeting individuals supporting it has gained traction beyond the 54th Conference, as a philosophy of governing for societal change, it has been embraced by EFOLs as a generation that understands how it could be implemented more than sloganeering it. For the post-55th Conference phase, EFOLs have left little doubt that saving or protecting the current economic structure takes a distant second to its economic transformation ambitions; this might include a potentially catastrophic posture of it having to be collapsed so that it can be rebuilt anew. 

Unlike the 1990s ANC leadership, the political freedom in our lifetime (POFOLs), which had to negotiate a political settlement when the Liberal and Neo-Liberal hegemony was in ascendance and the global power complex was dictating what 'acceptable democracy' is or should be, EFOLs are ascending when the global world order is redefining itself with the possibility of the 1996 Constitution being obsolete, should a different global power complex be chosen as an ideological safe haven. The success of state capitalism in China and somewhat Russia, the growing confidence of the Global South that privatisation of state-owned entities as a condition to be favorably rated for global debt purposes is on a retreat, and the triumph of Russia and China to establish alternative global trade switching platforms and thus replacing the dollar as the unit of currency, will embolden EFOLs to understand their transformation ambitions in a global context.

What EFOLs might have to focus on as new policy trajectories to squeeze out of the 55th National Conference will be what defines them beyond their Gallagher Estate Conference Resolutions as ANCYL leaders. For South Africa to become a serious player in the global economy and geopolitics, the EFOLs should emerge out of the Conference with resolutions on the following, as the minimum success they could have made,

1. Energy Sovereignty: This means a right to define how South Africa generates its own energy. Affordable, green, and safe energy should be high on the agenda of South Africa, this might have to include serious consideration of nuclear energy as a base load guaranteeing path. The country needs to redefine its diplomatic relations on the basis of its energy security needs. Its proven coal production prowess should form part of its national energy interests and be managed out of the extractive mercantilist economic paradigm that informed its colonialization. Once a policy firmament is defined, only then can the private-sector-led energy mix be allowed to thrive or otherwise.
2. Industrialisation Sovereignty: This means a right to define how South Africa industrializes. South Africa has been assembling automobiles for a while. It should thus be ready to produce its own brands of industrial products related to this industry. An audit of lost industrial capabilities should be made and a resuscitation program is started. The Rail revitalization program should go hand in hand with locally produced rolling stock manufacturing. The now almost disappearing defense industry should be revitalized and its inherent innovation character be used to propel defense industry-led growth.
3. Food Sovereignty: Food production should be classified as a national security issue. The country's total food production output should have about 60% of it is 80% of our need, thus leaving the 40% to be for export and emergency need. A patriotic pact with the Afrikaner Agricultural Production Complex, which has mastered this aspect, needs to be signed. Whilst that industry should be restructured and transformed, realism should direct how the economic center relates to it, and a new square meter to agricultural produce measure should be introduced to propel vertical farming as a risk mitigation strategy against long drought periods and climate-change-related risks.
4. National Sovereignty: There is a need to focus on the Sovereignty of South African Borders. National conscription should be considered. The regional economic interests of South Africa dictate a need for a strong army. There are many other advantages of training through a national army.

These are just but a few interventions the EFOLs can at the least focus on. Ther should however be a strategy to enroll the still influential POFOLs who will in all likelihood be defensive of what they had thought, almost 20 years ago, would be a lasting solution and pact South Africa needed. The genius of an ascending generation lies in its ability to give comfort to an exiting generation that things will not disintegrate after it has left. 

It will be important for EFOLs to realize that, 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 generally marked by continuous intergenerational changes, especially when the defined objectives of the founding generations are perceived as incomplete and/or inadequate.

POFOLs may not be ready to easily accept any notion of defining their, and truly so, glorious contributions to South Africa’s liberation to where it is, as incomplete and/or inadequate. A reality that explains mandate drifts in how forward-looking policies are getting new nomenclature, and how the historic UDF-type mentality is still believed to can truncate a maturing, albeit ethically worrying, party political system of public power procurement and management.

Properly deconstructed, the POFOLs as a generation, have the inherent capability of revealing the secrets of history, particularly in respect of all changes the liberation movement underwent. It is in the fabric of the internal organizational processes, especially in matters of leadership, succession, ideology, and politics, that membership is able to discover the rhythm of its own history and development. EFOLs can therefore not exist as an autonomous phenomenon unless there is an intergenerational interaction with a defined in-ANC social and political structure that has a history based on a particular continuity; a condition that typifies the actuality of generational responses experienced in most successful organizations beyond their conflict phases. The future we all seek, might be benefitting. CUT!!!

🤷🏿‍♂️Ndzi ta ku hini, ndzo tsala