The liberation struggle in South Africa has had vaguely defined ends if the core policy documents instructing the outcomes attained at its 'breakthrough' moment in 1994 are anything to go by. Incubated in one of Africa's foremost liberal democracy pursuing political parties, the ANC, the negotiations settlement outcome reverted to the 1912 consensus of a Wilberforcean Liberalism character and a Garveyist posture of freedom by those that established it. Its roots are unquestionably liberal and somewhat congressional in approach to politics. Revolutionary rhetoric came as a response to a deaf and racist 'liberal' autocratic order. The struggle settled as a constitutional democracy pursuing establishing a 'national democratic order. The colonial construct of the state stayed intact, and the legal edifice which instructed both colonialism and apartheid is still in place save for a higher legitimacy it got out of the settlement. The templates of economic dominance justify the economic policy trajectory. In essence, what justified the rebellion against the status quo is, in systems thinking parlance, very much still intact.
The success of the 1994 breakthrough and the 1996 settlement is also an outcome of the efficiencies that kept the unwanted pre-1994 systems working. The rebellion against past systems has at best awakened the conscience of the system to the legitimate demands of those excluded in past settlements, yet did not materially alter how the system works, save for its readiness to be repurposed to deal with grievances that led to it being rebelled against. Whilst the liberation struggle was a series of different revulsions against successive infringements of inalienable rights to all, there had been complete and spontaneous loyalty to functional aspects of the rejected system. The exigencies of establishing a values-based society within the non-black beneficiaries of the then colonial and apartheid state could not seal off the logic of social values being rules of conduct implicit in the rejected system, albeit they offered hope of creating universally acceptable ones.
Because the struggle was about the denial of rights which others had, it follows that what they had represented what was wanted. The power complexes that sustained the rebelled-against system were the prize of the politics about change, save for how that power would be allowed to respond to the (equity) demands of the struggle support base. As the knowledge base about the nature of formal political power and the monopolies it comes with increases, so does the consciousness of the new political elite grow on how power can be a 'political economy' driven resources distribution tool. The contest for resources easily replaces the pursuit of a just order, as the struggle for liberation angled before. What became apparent after the CODESA settlement is that South Africa as a State was not the reason for the struggle, but what informed how the State was governed was the source of rebellion. More like a condition where a slave opposes a person as a master but not as a human being. What the constitutional settlement seems to have succeeded in doing is to record into posterity the repudiation of Apartheid as a system, and it does not seem to have dealt with what its consequence represents.
If indeed a rebel is a person who says no, a rebellion is a means by which a person protests against conditions s/he is in; the state within which Black South Africans found themselves represented what needed to be protested against, but the metaphysical condition that apartheid left blacks is, as a condition, would have established a need for a rebellion against the system and its consequences. Rebellions or revolutions are about changing conditions when being a rebel inside a rebellion is limited by the individuality of consequence, whence at settlement negotiations, those with power to lose strike accords with those who might be at the helm of lost power. In such contexts, the established convention is to elevate the settlement to be about common values as the basis to recalibrate conditions which necessitated a rebellion. Humanity's comprehension of each other relies on values as the currency of interaction. The aspiration of order, not restitution, comes through the defence of values, and accumulated resources become critical in altering personal consequences for 'deal makers'.
The concept of justice and fairness during a rebellion is based on the principles of justice that the rebels have modelled the rebellion to be conducted and ultimately be about. The defence of injustice by those the rebellion is against is equally based on the principles of justice that they, sometimes modelled as being correct. Depending on the command each has on the institutional power undergirding what would anchor the aspired order, generally necessitated by the legitimacy of arguments at a time of settling, it will be the system that will guide, if not structure, the outcomes of the settlement. Ideals of freedom after a rebellion will be realised once the system has embraced the new context as a way of doing business. Naturally, there would then be contradictions of what justice prevails; in substantive forms, those established in injustice would use their command of system and procedural power to postpone, including thwarting, the inevitability of what would substantively be just if the reasons for the rebellion were acceptable to all inside the settlement.
The ultimate of a morally high grounded rebellion against injustice to the magnitude which apartheid was, is 'the justified claim of a desire for unity against the economic or otherwise dominance of other because that would represent the incompleteness of freedom. Suppose systems and the procedural power of those established in injustice refuse to recognise their obligations to realise the substantive aspects of freedom. In that case, those in charge of the political systems will not recognise the necessity to respect whatever procedural power dictates as a condition of civility. In this context, those that must establish a new order become rebels with a monopoly of political legitimacy. While rebelling against establishes you as the centre where power resides, continued occupation of the centre stage without recalibrating templates of dominance into templates of collaboration would make you a candidate for extinction than for transformation or reform. This is "a polemic animated by a desire to conquer."
In South Africa, the struggle against apartheid, like many other revolutions before it, ended in the reinforcement of the power of the state. In fact, when the Mandela leadership cohort of the ANC insisted that the apartheid Parliament must legislate itself out of political power, by adopting an interim constitution, they confirmed the omnipotence of the then existing to usher in a new purpose from within an ascending active agency, a non-racial and democratic government. The resultant position, not change, of the state in this equation, which is a logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, alien to what the struggle rhetoric might have been about, remains the condition the new government must work within. That the state was founded on terror and dispossession of the majority, indisputable as it is, requires a sense of commitment by those ascending government power offices to make peace with the order established.
Policymaking is a toll order in a context where policy efficiency becomes a tool for the continued dispossession and marginalisation of those you purport to have liberated. Whilst it might make climate change sense to decommission coal power stations, it might not make economic development sense to wipe out the whole coal mining industry and its multiplier effects. It might make sense to auction spectrum rights in a normal economy, but it might be a form of injustice to do so in an unequal economy. And so on. The conundrum of public policy making is entering a phase wherein a new generation of leaders will ask what freedom is that does not include the means to live it. What state is this which cannot calibrate the commanding heights of its economy? What state is this which is not protected by all generations of its youth into posterity through military conscription or equivalent? What state is this with a weak public education system? What state is this with a national security management system that can't protect its public infrastructure from pilferage by 'enemies of development.?
In a context where some in the political coalitions contesting for political power openly declare that on whose behalf should the economy be protected, it is clear that the rebellion is still on, yet somehow managed by those that should establish a new order. Until an announcement is made that the National Democratic Revolution is over and the time to establish a National Democratic Order has arrived, transitionocracy will reign. The prevailing ideational turnover rates will assume hockey stick character. CUT!!!
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