The South African politics and political analysis academic media complex is faced with the intricate question of what would constitute a centre of politics. For a while, the battle to dislodge the ANC as the context of all political contexts, given its historical advantage of successfully leading the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid alliance, also called the liberation movement, had seemed an impossible task. If the key resource to wrestle out of the ANC its legitimacy to lead society based on the adopted constitutional values at the CODESA settlement, the ANC might be firmly standing on shaky ground. The legitimacy to govern is fast becoming the basis upon which becoming a governing party in South Africa is anchored. History, nostalgia, and no-impact rhetoric can no longer define the political legitimacy of any party, but a demonstration of capability and capacity to lead a sophisticated world top 30 economy is the new criteria.
If service delivery, maintenance of public infrastructure, reducing poverty, dealing with runaway youth unemployment, reducing crime rates, guaranteeing energy security, and managing the immigration challenges are what will define who ultimately gets to govern South Africa, only a coalition of policies from various political formations seem to be an answer. No single party has a demonstrable track record, in practice and what they profess, to decisively deal with these matters.
If the government's track record is to be considered as what will provide an edge towards 2024, the Zondo Commission Report, the clumsy way the energy crisis was dealt with, the gerrymandered runaway inflation, and the rising interest rates provide no hope for incumbents. This is notwithstanding the plausible track record in social grants, massive low-cost housing roll-out, no-fee health and education, and the general democratisation of livelihoods through the cardinal freedoms of speech, assembly, association, press, and conscience.
Thinking of political power in South Africa regarding its source, legitimacy, or otherwise misses the fundamental way the predominating political parties are redefining the nature of politics. Service delivery anchored politics will not only recalibrate how political parties and coalitions collaborate to govern but also redefine political collaboration itself.
In the pre-1994 era, South Africa, which had the status of being a coloniser of a special type, and thus less expected to follow the drastic neoliberal measures imposed by the IMF, political power could be responsive to the development needs of the country. Public infrastructure investment was broadly defined to include human capital development as part of such an infrastructure. Teachers, nurses, police, and public service workers in the support side of the Public Service, were in that model seen outside the IMFs concept of supernumeraries or non-core. This might be why public sector training and development was such a significant expenditure of the government and providing answers for the many training institutions to anchor the supply side of a development focused, albeit with racism as its dominant vector of justification, apartheid state.
The then state, although opposed for its apartheid policies and consequently faced economic sanctions, proffered its development objectives by, amongst others; investing in SOEs as commanding heights of the economy, guaranteeing energy security as a condition for industrial development and output, expanding the state security apparatus through massive investment in the armament industry including conscription of youth into the national military service, building a strong policing force, introduced currency controls to safeguard the rand from volatilities the state has little control over, and putting into the economy a subsidy system that cushioned commerce and industry against the wrath of foreign currency induced inflation and other exogenous shocks which would have choked an otherwise economic sanctions fighting development based economy.
Not in the purview of the anti-apartheid struggle proposed policy alternatives was the growing interest in how a post-apartheid South Africa would continue pursuing the developmental state agenda of Apartheid South Africa with an expanded scope big enough to include historically marginalised blacks and Africans in particular. As post-apartheid South Africa started to mature into an elections contest and constitutional democracy-based state, policies of political parties began to be filtered through the political economy prism legally allowable in terms of the constitution and the (neoliberal) principles that ostensibly undergirded it. The consequence was not only a mandate drift of the liberation character of the ANC-led alliance as the nexus of reconstruction and development-based politics but the shift in how its internal democracy continued to be the substrate instructing the context of South African politics and political economy.
Riding on apartheid South Africa's public infrastructure investment development templates, the post-apartheid state rolled out the most elaborate low-cost housing program, electrification program, no fee education, no fee health system, and deregulation of its financial services sector to allow for the now costly floating currency. In this commendable developmental state policy courageousness, the post-apartheid state entered into international treaties that restricted it from continuing spending on public infrastructure investment with native definitions, but only according to global governance institutions' standards and restrictions. These included less spending on public service expansion and, in the long term, started to undermine the templates of creating a developmental state inherited from the apartheid state. International debt reduction and low inflation targeting policies began to choke the developmental state agenda, with public infrastructure dilapidation due to high costs of privatisation and outsourcing being corrosive to state budgeting objectives. Public service costs increased as the physical count of public servants decreased to meet structural adjustment obligations the post-apartheid state had signed up to. In education, in particular, the higher education restructuring reversed even the Verwoerdean benefits to Black middle-class creation through bush teacher training colleges and urban non-residential university infrastructures such as Vista University and Technikons.
These matters were raised in policy conferences of the ANC needing policy change. The ANC responded by adopting resolutions that purported to address the anomaly only to be rhetoric limited to the progressive institutionalisation of the ANC as more of an NGO out of which government can make a choice of what policies it adopted they will consider implementing that it being a governing party. In fact, the national executive, as the country's executive authority, operated on policy playbooks the ANC, as the governing party, has to continuously readjust to avoid mandate drift embarrassments. Conferences of the ANC started to grow into liberation struggle policy promises editing spaces or developmental state nomenclature revisions to suit demands occasioned by the depth of neoliberal thought the executive authority centres of the country find themselves in. Since then, conferences of the ANC have grown to be about who gets elected with clearly defining for what specific purpose, save for the 'uzobona phambili' culture that has left its leadership capturable once in executive authority positions.
As heritage, ANC conferences, including how they are synchronised with the national elections of South Africa, should serve as primaries out of which society has no more than twenty months to decide on the value proposition the ANC proffers to be borrowed public power. In the twenty-eight years that the ANC has had the privilege of presiding over the borrowed public power, it cannot claim that it now enjoys the support of the majority to continue presiding over that power. The shrinking urban support of the ANC, and growing voter apathy, notwithstanding it being an international trend, and the growing coalitions of minority parties into the influential majority of minorities are interrogating the extent to which the ANC is still a nexus of our politics deserving our attention to its primaries, or conferences, so to say. While these primaries are questionable to the very members of the ANC in respect of how delegates are commoditised to vote for funded slates, the policy analysis question is who then funds the policy trajectories that have for a while been edited away from being about African Claims in particular.
The ANC heritage as a liberation movement, at least in how the mass democratic movement of the eighties institutionalised it to the internal front against apartheid, has been democratic in the Lincolnian parlance of the government of the people by the people for the people. As a political party, the ANC has no heritage to boast about; instead, it has been establishing a practice of not being about the interests of those that vote it into power as a party. Unquestionably, it is challenged in finding a balance between its liberation movement character and elections contesting party to preside over a state with an establishment that funds its economic interests. How this convergence of its characters ultimately turns out will define its resilience beyond the challenge of losing political power it is facing. Honesty to what it can truly deliver to South Africans, and not its members, will undoubtedly reduce the growing perception of it being disingenuous with the valid reasons its conferences have all of a sudden been about who gets elected.
The shift from an institution of leadership to organisation breeding leaders to suit funded interests has been subtle but possibly corrosive to scale where its primaries are now classifiable as delusions of some undefined grandeur. Just as delusions of democracy tend to reflect and reinforce factional divisions in a democracy, they may confound the liberation movement ANC, creating a false consensus about what is at stake and concealing underlying organisational fissures until it is too late. In Thabo Mbeki parlance, "the ANC is too big to collapse", notwithstanding that South Africa might have matured to be resilient enough to be threatened by a coterie of less than one and a half million members of the ANC into collapse.
In its own parlance, "amandla a se masebeni', the ANC, when going to its ultimate of primaries, the 55th National Conference, should do so understanding that 'amasebe a se bantwini'. As they wrestle in their organisational mud, they should know that the public is fast determining its own, and somewhat sponsored, criteria of how it will henceforth borrow political parties 'public power'. Clear in this developing criteria is that borrowed public power and ethical service delivery are cybernetic systems, too. The public will put in the requirements its lived experience of load shedding, joblessness, state capture, and corruption as Zondo managed its narrative, immigration control and management, collapsing public passenger rail infrastructure, crime, and many other service delivery challenges this rendition can not mention herein. The most potent feedback they have thus far received is the 2021 election outcome. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️Delusional, aredze, wa twa!
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