ON RENEWAL: QUESTIONS ON POLITICAL EDUCATION

       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 societies, the dominant education system works to produce mandarins associated with a nationhood under construction. Great nations, or rather political projects, such as the global liberal order, cultivate the type of individuals they want and turn the influence space to be predominantly their potentates. A successful political school program should target the predominance of those politics in how the country imagines itself culturally, economically, and how it argues its justice as well as the rights it accords to society. What becomes political common sense should have graduates of the political education school as substrates. The 270 000 members of SADTU cannot not be graduates of any hegemon.

It is however becoming clear that the fault does not lie with membership, but with the leaders and/or leadership that is seemingly unable to tap on the diversity of its members, especially the representative perspectives they supposedly always carry on behalf of society beyond them. A closer look at leaders institutionalized at various levels of the organization reveals that a growing number of them don't recognize the profound differences between the various constituencies of the very membership they lead. Some, and maybe the reason it has become easy to form a faction these days, don't display any knowledge of how to manage the ever-present tensions associated with being a member of a political party, or simply not doing so. This has over time ostracised the ideational of its constituencies, the best ideas go unnoticed, and as a consequence development suffers. In fact, its best have deserted it at a time it needed to consolidate it political power beyond the rhetoric of the struggle against apartheid.

Interventions to help leaders reclaim the resource members of the organization should be deployed more as a system than a collection of clichés demonstrating command of leftist nomenclature. The ANC has through its documents to the 2022 policy conference identified as core to its renewal strategy political education of its cadres deployed in government, as human organs of state. The questions that arise out of this noble intervention strategy are,

1. What should be the content of this political education?
2. How much of the content should be about the history of the struggle?
3. Who, and this is a sensitive question, in the leadership should attend the political education classes, given that barriers to entering leadership structures of the ANC, save for years in the organization, are compromisingly low?
4. How much of the political education should be about mastery of the South African Constitution and its philosophical foundations that are clearly at variance with the dominant rhetoric of the ANC?
5. Should political education shift aspects of its curriculum to include or make way for content such as strategy, attributes of leadership, and critical skills such as public speaking and policy analysis?
6. Is the political school about hegemony entrenchment, or does it mean anything goes?
7. Apart from politicians, how is the political school used to contest hegemonic space with what mainstream education of society in key resource distribution disciplines such as public affairs, public administration, economics, and political economy, as well as political science? A 'developmental state' construct adopted by the ANC will not survive if the supply side of economists is 'neo-liberal' economics?
8. How do political education influence supply-side institutions, critical to these should include interrogation of how the independent jurists are produced?
9. Has the curriculum of the political school dealt with the reality of coalitions? Does it capacitate graduates on how to focus on the service delivery needs of its core constituencies where the ANC is on the opposition benches?
10. How is the curriculum integrated with 'national interest' defense through party political interests? Can a graduate of the ANC political school clearly articulate what is national interest? Can such a graduate identity policies of the ANC and all other Political Parties that are in the nation's interests?

The renewal process will make sense to the extent that it communicates with the future of South Africa. It should be anchored in an ANC philosophy its members and leaders can apply to any context. If I am a member of the ANC who is an engineer, its developmental aspects should be instructed to my civil engineering prowess, equally if I am an architect my conception of low-cost housing should reflect the 'security and comfort' objects of the Freedom Charter. Renewal should impact the form of work. This goes into business and entrepreneurship, investment decisions, industrialization posture, and international trade partnering. CUT!!!

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