COMRADES: OUR WEAKNESSES ARE MORE ABOUT WHAT IS OUT THERE THAN INTERNAL

       In the aftermath of the 54th ANC Conference in NASREC, and since Cyril Ramaphosa has ascended as President of the ANC, the South African democratic order has for a while been defined by resurgences of in-ANC factional fights. Firing the first salvo to the rivalry was the then Secretary General, Ace Magashule, who, at a rally, declared that the term of office for a President is five years. The statement drew one of the boldest factional lines in ANC history. 

The ANC, its factions, alliance partners, and leagues were drawn into a large-scale palace conflict that made it difficult to believe integrity management policy interventions, such as stepping aside, were politically innocent of their true intentions. A context where the anti-state capture and corruption program of a Ramaphosa presidency had been pitted against the RET forces, most of whom were 'visibly' charged, developed and polarised what may have otherwise been a noble policy intervention. Amid this factional volatility in the ANC, a recalled 'popular' immediate past President, an ascending president with the lowest margin of winning votes at an ANC conference post-1990, and an orchestra of corruption revelations at the Zondo Commission, a cocktail for the weakest ANC presidency was prepared and served. 

The growing inability of a Ramaphosa presidency to limit the threats of his losing rivals, the challenge of being a President with a Top Six that was the most divided after an ANC conference, Ramaphosa's leadership would have depended on the extent to which his proven, and beyond ANC, support by society to pursue whatever policy trajectory he wanted the ANC and country to follow. Whilst the social stability beyond the in-ANC turbulence was an asset to him, the turbulence would be one of his lasting liability to secure a return as ANC President for the second term.

Often overlooked is the power of the ANC NEC in policy support to those deployed in government, the ultimate of party politics. With the transformation deficits South Africa's democracy has accumulated over the three decades of ANC government, the risk of rejecting the unfolding democratic order at the altar of legitimate concerns about the economic and socio-economic transformation progress is a sitting powder keg. The economic establishment, mainly historical, with ascending fragments of black elites into the establishment's ranks, has entered the transformation deficit discourse by trying hard to lay the blame on the governing elite, the NEC. 

The consequence of this has been a decline in confidence in the NEC, except those aligned to the Ramaphosa project, with an answering decline in confidence in the private sector as an honest broker regarding addressing the economic transformation deficit. With time running out to start a national dialogue whose outcome should be a social compact, populism and social polarisation might overtake the need for a stable democratic order in favour of a conceptually revised radical economic transformation program. 

The national economic transformation discourse space is not the only area of concern facing polarization. Deep political and social cleavages and remonstrations over in-race class, class, race, gender, cultural diversity, ethno-nationalist, and religious are being unmuted by the impact of the economic transformation deficit-notably poverty, unemployment and inequality. 

There have been louder noises for ethnic nationalism. The questioning of concepts such as 'our people', 'onse mense', 'die volk', 'uZulu omnyama', 'julle mense', 'afrikanses', and so on is gaining cessationist traction dangerous to the nation the constitution has bequeathed as a liberation promise to all. The rising income equality with race and urban suburbia advantage as its vectors of justification have slowed the desirability of reconciliation and nation-building as the liberation promise is choked by the economic transformation deficits.

Recently, the governing party has also experienced dismal performances at the municipal level of government and lost influence over service delivery in most of South Africa's critical economic nodal points. What defines South Africa's city life and commanding to whatever civilisation South Africa ultimately settles to is determinately in the hands of different hegemonic power, politically. The reality of coalition governments is introducing the potential for alternative political choices in society. The nostalgic voter behaviour associated with post-liberation democracy is challenged to the core by enclaves of political power not being in the hands of the ANC. 

As the decision centres of the governing ANC focus on in-ANC power contestations, strategic positioning by the political opposition complex composed of civil society bodies is gaining momentum. An even more significant threat to the ANC's continued government may come from it being victim to the consequences of social divisions that sap South Africa's potential to be a nation. The historical apartheid and colonialism created social hierarchies that continue to define the contours of inequality and fortify the frontiers of poverty, still determining the political economy of South Africa. Therefore, anyone thinking, dreaming, and/or hallucinating about ANC renewal must deal with these cleavages and in-society remonstrations. 

Where does ANC Power Lie

For a while, members of the ANC have stopped to accurately pinpoint where the power of the ANC lies. The leader of society characterisation of the ANC was more a recognition that the basis of its power is societal legitimation more than its legal access to political power.  This is better explained by its posture as the broad church possessing the soft power to be the ultimate hegemony and the institutional state power to chisel into law and practice what it stands for. 

While in exile, the ANC had long recognised at its Morogoro Conference that its indirect influence over society through those it deploys into organs of state and private sector spaces will constitute nodes of its networks with which it could utilise as substrates of its leader of society role. Cognisant of the determinate role of its internal dynamics on its leading society, the ANC understood how its moral high ground on any matter would be important to ensure it is followed. 

In adopting the Freedom Charter, which is preambled by respecting the people's will to enjoy legitimacy by any government, the ANC located its basis for existence in the people. Power to the ANC does not only mean the power to protect the sovereignty of the State, and neither is it only the institutional prowess of the state acting through its most active agencies, organs of state. Instead, the ANC has, and over several decades, modelled its understanding of power to embed in how it moderates its relationship with social cleavages and political and economic power as an institution of social and political leadership. It was the uneven access to these, and worse, in South Africa, the unevenness was state-sponsored to levels of being a crime against humanity, which defined the purpose objectives of being ANC, as well as how it optimised its struggle system beyond just being antithetical to the status quo. 

The consequence of excluding blacks, the primary constituency of the ANC, as economic citizens of South Africa through stripping them of land ownership in their numbers became the core substrate of the ANC currency to be in politics. This exclusion, and its many adjuncts such as inferior education, and denial of freedoms (of speech, conscience, association, assembly, and press), which defined social hierarchies, became the basis for the ANC's source of power. Otherwise, its existence would have long been about contesting political power independent of what that power delivers to those lowest in the social hierarchy. 

With blacks being a natural majority by any standard of measure and political interest definition, their exclusion as a race from determining the destiny of South Africa became one of the most legitimacy-attracting aspects of ANCness. Notwithstanding its expansion to include in the real discontent, all races, thus making its cause non-racial, the African in particular qualification, position the natural majority as the core of its political constituencies. 

The inverse of this particularisation has always been the risk of the ANC and, after dealing with a statutory exclusion, being trapped in the quicksand of restitution that might quickly mutate into reverse discrimination. With race having been the source of formal and state-sponsored social, political, and economic divide for more than a century, the reversal of the same would be a natural source of power, albeit tinkering with it being the reverse of what is being corrected. Exclusion from the economy on a racial basis in an extractive and mercantilist set-up could have only meant private sector profitability would be based on the impurities of the reigning political economy. Cheap labour and fictitiously adjusted salaries of the superior in the racial pecking order would distort the inflation basket when monetary policy considerations are made, a condition that might explain the airbrushing of the costs of being in the economy by black in post-apartheid inflation targeting calculations. 

The source of ANC power is in such conditions legitimised by its continued focus on the poor and downtrodden. To the ANC, the demographics of poverty, unemployment, and inequality should be treated as a contagion. These should be taken as a sociological phenomenon. Curbing the growth of these and increasing the recovery rate of its base constituency should be its statistical preoccupation until sufficient herd immunity rates are reached before allowing the free market system to regulate sustainability. Keeping the rich sanitised, wearing masks, and giving them access to immunisations, as well as locking up the economically downtrodden with the hope of dealing with the pandemics of poverty, unemployment, and inequality, will render the whole of the economy dysfunctional. The source of ANC power is thus the material conditions of its historical and natural constituency. It cannot thrive if the nation does not thrive. 

The social fault lines that come with poverty, unemployment, and poverty are not good for the health of the democratic order under construction. The global competitiveness of South Africa depends on its productivity, economic growth and political stability. The inequalities that characterise South Africa's economic citizenship should continue to be the preoccupation of the ANC; its source of political power or any power and capital lies therein. 

What then?

This attempt at characterising the ANC's source of power is not only a communique to its members but a siren to the economic establishment. It is easy and tempting, especially given the command of cultural and economic power for as long as it lasts, to use it to justify the correctness of a fragile status quo. The consequence of inequality, unemployment, and poverty is a race to the bottom, with anarchy and corruption as the most active catalysts. 

The openness of South Africa's democracy has lowered the barriers to entering politics as a career to levels where the social value of politics has been overtaken by the growing belief of the unemployed that politics are an economy. The appeal of the rule of law gets to survive in conditions where all can thrive because of the opportunities a functioning and growing economy presents to its young and agile in society. The duality of development in South Africa has created, on the one hand, a society that can self-correct and truncate the possibility of runaway state capture and corruption, and on the other one that has the potential and appetite to see advantage and opportunity in anarchy, state capture, and corruption. With the declining protection of minority rights in a survival of the fittest and morality-predating economy that South Africa might be growing into, historical advantagedness has been progressively growing into race and privilege-defined right-wingism, and disadvantagedness becoming its unfortunate and distorted opposite. 

These reality about South Africa calls for the following,

1. The fast-tracking of discussions on the economic and social compact. 
2. Dealing with the structure of the economy must reign supreme in such a dialogue 
3. The ANC should return to its default position of being about the plight of the poor
4. The institutional power of the state should be mobilised to contain the context required to reboot South Africa to its former glory
5. The state must be central in restoring the commanding heights of economic development and growth.
6. The education system should be prioritised to take the next generation on board. 
7. Foreign Direct Investment, if essential, should be directed if not dictated where to invest. 
8. Energy Sovereignty, Food Sovereignty, Broadband Sovereignty, Water Sovereignty, and Data Sovereignty should be elevated to national security matters

The calibration of South Africa's institutions of leadership requires a different breed of leaders from the ANC. A leader of the society brigade. CUT!!!

🤷🏿‍♂️For the ANC to THRIVE, The Nation MUST THRIVE. Kanimambo.