The interesting thing about post-conflict liberation is that although everyone agrees there should be the transformation of power relations in every aspect of society, very few, including those who take charge of power, decide on what should be transformed and to what end. What the struggle or war of liberation defined as 'freedom' is often not a subject of consensuses reached when the settlement is codified into an accord. The context of freedom becomes contested as its facile use might erode gains made. For this reason, there are instances in which the strengths and influence of acquired political power are ambiguous; you can cite the stop-start decisions about transformative industrialization in South Africa. There are also instances where the executive authority constituted as the prize of politics is being put to the test by the civil society litigation induced overreach of an otherwise on a rule of law understanding leaning curve judiciary, you can site the misinterpretation of the right to property clause in the bill of rights and the land expropriation process for restitution.
South African constitutional democracy has mediated society's concept of political or otherwise power away from its traditional interpretation as the right to force others to do what those with executive authority would, and out of prerogative, want, but rather imposes a normative obligation on authorities to co-exist with the right to seek recourse. In a rights-based democracy, we enjoy, the convention is to measure the might of checks and balances on the potential of abuse of all power, including the fairness of competing monopolies in the economy. Like in any liberal context where the normalization of the playing field assumes equality of those undergirding power substrates, norming variables will at best be partial and at worst biased, thus perpetuating the system's inequality gap tries to close. The chase of equity targets becomes a casualty whose manifestation is not in the purview of those with the executive authority to effect change. As despair about the efficacy of the rule of law and constitutionalism is questioned in respect of its capacity to influence the outcomes of an equal opportunities dispensation, leaders of society, state and non-state, will be tempted to take risky actions, all in the name of wanting to bring about transformation.
In this vortex, society turns to raise from amongst its leaders those who seek to see beyond context-defined hindrances and focus on the calibration of systems to generate a new context whose outcomes will be established templates of equality. As a core virtue, strategic patience defines these leaders. Post-apartheid South Africa remains surprised at the mushrooming of civil rights movements led by beneficiaries of the apartheid system in material and advantage accumulation terms. The litigation victories registered by these movements have created discontent about the capacity of the constitution to protect those in a post-liberation democracy, which would have been expected to be on the receiving side of restitution. The unfortunate consequence of this trajectory of civil rights movement victories is its entrenching perception that the in-constitution liberation promise is out of reach for those who cannot bring their equally legitimate cases of exclusion of the advantaged that others are similarly defending their rights to. As pessimism about the future grows amongst those with limited access to the power of the courts as a terrain of the struggle for economic or otherwise justice, so does the optimism of mavericks and anarchists grow that through some form of insurrection, equality might emerge.
Executive authority power is, unfortunately, the currency of change and transformation politics. The extent to which those with discretion over executive authority determine the ultimate reach of such power to those structural issues that define the templates of dominance in any power-wielding system. Ideological activists or individuals that master the art of using systems to either recalibrate what existing templates will at all material times produce have in the design of the South African constitution been successful at infusing patience in the system but failed to equally include algorithms with which the impact of inequality could be managed not to threaten the entire system. Trapped in the syntax of the legal system, the interpretation of who has the power to do or change the fortunes of society is the new and real threat to the democratic order South Africa's constitutional democracy is still threading.
There are conflicting perspectives about the nature of our democracy by leaders. Their focus on electoral power has made them lose focus on the centrality of the social power that undergirds any democratic order. That it is the lights that switch on when in demand, water that comes out of the faucet when required, public transport infrastructure that facilitates human mobility, and an economy that absorbs new entrants into the vital labor market is what the unique perspectives of power have airbrushed. The obsession with the configuration of political power to limit its ability to truncate the extractive character of the political economy seems to have captured the private sector's creativity away from investing in the self-sufficiency, if not the sovereignty, of the economy at the alter of preferring foreign direct investors. The concept of South Africa belongs to all who live in it; its essentialism, the power relations it should produce, the sovereignty, and security dilemmas that accompany it, is a variable of patriotism very few in the economic establishment have embraced as a business practice and thus instructing to their business decisions.
The general influence of strategic networks has in South Africa matured only to build a firm and economically illiterate political capital, which has over the years grown to become the most significant liabilities of South Africa Incorporated. Because economic networks are part of inheritances, common purpose social networks, value chain-based relationships, and production-based peer reverence, it is challenging to create them. Building fit-for-purpose organized business chambers, strategic think tanks, institutions of specialized economic leadership, and coordination of a national pattern of economic thinking requires more than just political capital but intellectual capital with which the soft power of society will be felt beyond its sovereign borders. The ability of disadvantage to persuade advantage to seek similar ends would in South Africa require the exiting generation of the advantaged to bequeath to prosperity. The self-reinforcing power of volunteers bequeathing advantage to posterity by recalibrating systems and templates of economic dominance will make it difficult for the business system to challenge The leadership that is required for this task is one that is not stuck in the 'ngoku firmament' but one that is focussed on the long run.
History would be correct if it judges the march towards December 2022 as having been futile if it did not deal with how political capital has flipped itself as a liability on the balance sheet of South Africa Incorporated. The brute truth is that South Africa is in a crisis; its leaders have potentially stopped thinking about it thirty years from today. This state of affairs should not be the reason not to pause and project beyond today. While the crisis can domesticate thinking, it will be how thinking domesticates the opportunity to extricate humanity from the very problem. CUT!!!
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