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 new relationship with Capital could only have meant its readiness to meet certain conditions of engagement, most of which would be in variance with its 'bias towards leftist thinking, in an economic right context. Capital or big business in South Africa is part of a global ideological complex whose success has to date included the erosion of sovereign nation-states, and by extension national movements, and replaced them with multilateral technocrats armed with policies on how to be compliant with the world order. Cardinal to creating conditions to make mega profits is to convert, almost at the level of demanding ideological repentance, the governing elite to embrace the world order's imagination of democracy, economic policy and reforms, and austerity measures that generally reverse the tide of human development.
Having inherited a nationalist economy that served a narrowly defined nation, the quest to transform such an economy would have not only meant changing its templates of dominance but doing so with due regard to its dualist extractive nature. The South African economy, like most of its colonialist and mercantilist counterparts, is by design geared towards serving the extractive economic ambitions of colonial aristocracies. The 1910 whites only political settlement, and later the 1961 democratic breakthrough out of being a vintage British colonial outpost, truncated the flow of extraction and replaced it with a 'brokerage state' that created new value chains that allowed local capitalism to thrive as a sub-structure of its commonwealth big brother. This sophistication was guaranteed through the continuation of the legal system and establishment of laws with which future governments will be directed to rule by or be subjected to the rule of such laws. Aptly characterized as colonialism of a special type, the duality of extraction meant the colonizer, local or far away, would have to be protected by the government as representative of capital's interests. The sovereign is in this case the brokerages that sustain the colonial character of the economy.
To anchor such a sophisticated system, nodes of sovereign systems are created as multilateral bodies pursuing the same policies and systems. Nation-states, and their movements, become in this context spaces within which sovereign individuals live, thus making these states constituent units of a sovereign international system that respects no national borders. Membership in this system has to date been through acceptance of its understanding of what democracy and economics are all about. The Constitution that a post-colonial state ultimately adopts is the single most tool with which membership in the system is guaranteed. The human rights system advocated by these constitutions is one which makes the currency of rights supersede the historical context, for instance property right recognises the right of or to title as the right is applied before it factors in how the title was acquired. What the system anchors as templates of dominance and continuity are the established inequalities that society enters the 'new equality spaces' with. Protecting this new 'equality space' cannot include equity of outcomes, and yet very uncompromising in the protection of the cardinal freedoms of speech, association, assembly, conscience, and press. Conduits to these freedoms are in themselves sovereign to the national system, and thus regulated in jurisdictions the sovereignty of the property owners have embraced as centers they would subject themselves to their authority.
The question thus is, what then is the balance of forces for free states. What is the emerging meaning of freedom in a globalized world? The 'incarnations of colonial masters' that come as standards, rating agencies, market forces, and protocols, have all given former colonial societies a modicum of sovereignty whilst they are in fact about eroding the very ritualized freedom. It is almost impossible to imagine that an extractive economy like South Africa can co-exist, with its templates of economic dominance intact, with the idea of freedom that its historically oppressed sections of society imagined. In fact, it is unrealistic to expect the material beneficiaries of the erstwhile dispossession-based economic system to understand the new rights outside the prism of protecting accumulated benefits. That being the case, the (im)plausible demand to rights, as they obtain to live circumstances, gets in the way of how (the South African) society should go about trading its benefits and new gains for the sake of its stability.
In these circumstances, what has been celebrated as freedom and liberation can easily develop into a fantasy for those who are inside the liberated space of others. Only when the liberation of those the template of economic dominance has classified as the labor pool does not interfere with the established order, will they be allowed to fully preserve their freedom as they imagined it. Capitalizing in an economy assumes the freedom to exploit with a conscience. However guaranteed equality may be in a democracy, instead of contriving it for a county's citizens, state institutions should rather set a target of minimizing inequality. This is a domain in which an elaborate social security system becomes an obligatory safety net for those outside the race to predominate society. The current in-constitution ideological infrastructure, which presumes the pursuit of equality as an obligation of the state, has to date served to allow the historically strong and endowed, to re-emerge with clever narratives to justify their hegemonic hold on South Africa's destiny. Commensurate with the rise of inequality is the rise of the hypocrisy of the social conscience of an otherwise extractive economic system.
That South Africans have gone through April 27, 1994, is indisputable as representing the on-your-marks starting line of franchise-defined freedom. This freedom underpins the reigning economic order and system. The undergirding basis of the very freedom has for a while been appearing to be mythical as the historically oppressed were surrendering their legitimate claims to what defines their liberation, land restitution being cardinal. The review of the content of this freedom can only occur when an opportunity to define a new liberation presents itself. The global order rearrangements underway, which might yield a multipolar global governance system, procure from South Africa a positioning to lead Africa's entry into these global power centers or nodes. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️Yiii, a ndzo tsala bakithi
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