On 11 February 1990, South Africa, and the world witnessed one of the most epochal events in human history, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. This was the most symbolic of acts by the then apartheid state that they were committed to the irreversibility of a process to democratise South Africa. Walking through the gates of Victor Vester prison was a human being whose name evoked different emotions in a watching world. His walk to freedom did not only change South Africa's image of political reality, it represented the most astounding political shifts in the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
What followed was the redefinition of democracy in the sub-continent, where a society sat and agreed on the arrangements with which it would govern itself and relate to other sovereign nations. This agreement was chiselled as a legal expression of the political wishes of society as represented by political elites assembled inside the walls of Parliament as a constituent assembly. The legitimacy of all political claims and positions were codified into a fundamental human rights anchored constitution, which also defined all other principles upon which the rule of law would be triangulated against.
Represented in this constitutional construct was the power of mind change and the fracturing of belief structures by the ANC-led anti-apartheid alliance and the National Party-led status quo reforming alliance. Despite there not being an active combat war that would have necessitated a peace treaty, the coming together of the then contesting for power institutions concretised as a convergence point of that generation of leader's version of a South Africa beyond themselves. Posterity was represented, and the lusts of incumbency were disabled from both sides by the visionary leadership of both Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk.
To the same magnitude of change in global terms was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the acceptance by Mikhael Gorbachev that the closed system they had followed as the USSR was not functional, and living in a Zimbabwe that does not have Robert Mugabe as your President. The thought of a United Kingdom without Queen Elizabeth II is an equally unprecedented reality of change; the human mind might take a long to comprehend its arrival.
As these paradigm shifts get too challenging to navigate by humanity, the threats these pose to people's picture of reality not only get to be pathological but, in some instances, lead to mental derangement. The traumatic path the American right wing, especially its racial purists, went through about a Barrak Obama Presidency was reflected in the election to the White House of Donald Trump and the reaction that followed his loss of White House power to Joe Biden. In South Africa, we saw the storming of the World Trade Centre and the AWB-led invasion of Bophuthatswana in 19.. . As familiar truths get replaced by unsettling new beliefs, the extent to which the collective human mind embraces the change will be determinant to the reaction to it.
A drastic change, notwithstanding its correctness or legitimacy, can generate in society responses that might be insurrectionary to the extent that those who have a cognitive grasp of the change argue. Given that there is always underlying anxiety about the unconscious threat of change when a society is approaching a time in its history where there might be political or socio-political change to the magnitude we have seen, organisation must have leaders that can carry the nation along. There are signs in South Africa that what is fearful and less imagined in our democratic journey has arrived, and its scale is not noticeable to the extent it could be when it assumes a national character.
The successful posture in which the ANC has defined itself as being representative of aspirations of black people in general and Africans, in particular, is a positive anchor whose collapsing might evoke unknown reactions. As a country, we have seen how the 100% Zuluboy phenomenon has made it easy for a regional response to the arrest of Jacob Zuma for contempt of court to be insurrectionary in character. It would therefore be necessary for South Africa to prepare its society to undergo the possible, impending and potential change of a governing party at the national level in a collaborative way. In the academic media complex, the voluntary human custodial centres must start with political tolerance programs, all political parties must introduce opposition party politics as a compulsory module for all its activist members, and the public service should undergo training that attunes them to be about serving the government of the day, and most critically templates of the bureaucracy must start recalibrating themselves to serve society through public policy and not a political agenda.
The change that South Africa is about to an encounter, will be part of our historical growth as a nation. Part of the dialogue in society might require the deployment of the army to communicate how embracing such a change is a national security matter defendable like our sovereign borders. This would mean the South African National Defence Force should start a program of getting its soldiers to understand the relationship between their monopoly of state-sponsored violence and the constitutional democracy they are sworn to defend. The municipal elections outcomes, including in some rural towns, are sufficient evidence that South Africa is in the middle of a structural transition. The decline of service delivery in these jurisdictions is an indicator of creeping ungovernability traceable to the non-embrace of the new reality.
As a system, the state should start being genuine in how it prepares its bureaucracy to respect spatial power realities defined by political mandates. The interactions and transactions between organs of state should have as their ultimate objective the spatial expression of the national budget to determine the various corridors of development. The repugnance of national actions over sub-national jurisdictions and vice-versa should be mitigated by obligating organs of state to invest in intergovernmental relations as a public service competence with which the public service will be migrated to an emerging new normal of coalition governments. The entire system of Executive Authority, where it vests without being repugnant, would require a complete change in its philosophical conception. Assumptions made about South Africa's democracy, including ' governing until Jesus comes back', should be challenged until paradigms about political power and government power change.
It is an open secret that policy documents of the governing party speak of establishing a national democratic order. Some of the national policy initiatives have for a while assumed that all sub-national jurisdictions are or will forever be governed by them. A case in point is the plausible District Development Model, which has now met structural challenges where its political leadership cannot be from the national government but from a locally sourced political mandate. There is conflicting evidence why a wall-to-wall local government system, transaction-intensive as it is, is an enabler choked by a centrist posture of national planning centres. The singularity of the state within an arguable unitary state system is fast growing into an impediment of intergovernmental and intersectoral service delivery collaboration.
With these challenges, truths of an impending change, and acutely the almost loss of one governing party status in Gauteng, Western Cape, and close to ignoring KwaZulu Natal, the need for a mindset change in South Africa has arrived. Intergovernmental relations practice dictates that the change in political mandates in sub-national jurisdictions requires us to be scientifically arrogant in our demand for a mindset of governing a federation, if not a federal system. As the fiscus negotiates for influence in local government, sub-national jurisdictional politics negotiate for policy hegemony at the national jurisdiction. The extent to which the governing party has readied itself for this sophistication will define its capability to genuinely govern. Otherwise, they cannot want to maintain a system they do not understand. Whichever way the governing ANC views the system it presides upon as government; failing to reconcile with its federal character will be hazardous to whatever they want to believe it is (not). Believing that South Africa as a democracy has no federal characteristics is restrictive, and evolving out of that belief will not only come without a lost scientific reputation but might be bruising to an ideological posture whose practicality might be refuted by the constitution all have pledged to defend and uphold.
🤔We thinking about these matters at The Th!nc Foundation
This is th!nc provoking. Thank you Prof Mathebula. Hardie Fourie.
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