The th!nc Foundation

  "Heritage is an embodiment of a past we wish to take into our future without losing the benefits of a changing present. It defines not only a sense of belonging, but it also makes the past a form of the present and an abstraction of what a future will look like with us as a presence of the past which is a present we live in now. Like its adjunct tradition, it creates and reorders our background of permanence. It assists us in transmitting the merits of the past to modern-day originality.     Such a background anchors the values with which a society can be normed." On 26 November 2022, I was invited to a function in Mamelodi, my home, ko gae, ko motseng, to facilitate a panel discussion about Mamelodi Heritage by the Mamelodi Heritage Institute at its launch. The MHI is a not-for-profit company organised to identify, collect, preserve, and disseminate heritage. Led by a team of authentic and Mamelodi-born intergenerational team of South Africans, MHI has finally arrived ...

    To believe that the 1994 democratic breakthrough dealt with all African Claims (imvo za bantu) but enfranchisement would be a colossal understatement. Economic freedom has been illusory despite the equal opportunities declarations enshrined in the Constitution. As a critical national grievance, restitution of capital, land, in particular, has been met with and by the technicalities related to the currency of property rights versus the history of accumulation. Acutely and central to how post-apartheid power relations migrated from an oppressed context to a liberatory one is the dependence on adjudication precedence etched in the colonial era construed law, which predominates South Africa's cognitive legal elites. Justice is an elusive dividends  liberation promised by the Constitution. N otwithstanding that justice is what the liberation struggle was, in essence, about, the negotiated settlement guaranteed justice to victims and perpetrators of apartheid alike. This fe...

    The 55th ANC National Conference  is less than thirty days from happening. The in-ANC coalitions battle lines are drawn, branches have made their nomination choices, delegates are known, the venue is soon to be quarantined, and the ANC won't be the same come thanksgiving time. The conference is billed to be about renewal, rebuilding, and unity. Rules of engagement, written and otherwise, are spelt out. Resolutions to be discussed and adopted are ready for final processing. Constitutional amendments submitted in good time are prepared for processing. For all intents and purposes, the in-ANC democratic heritage is on display and churning lessons for learners. Funded interests are at play to tweak the process in favour of policy positions and individuals they prefer as leaders of the ANC to prevail.   As these battles for the soul of the ANC unfold, it is clear that the technology of contest is growing in complexity as no delegate is far enough not to be influenced....

         The ANC is once again getting into succession or leadership battles. The contest for political power within the ANC is in full swing. The contest will continue the despoliation of the ANC’s liberation movement character without introducing a party political alternative. In its conduct of the succession discourse, the ANC has, and since its unbanning in 1990, been perfecting its new tradition of referencing its past without a commitment to break it asunder and bringing forth a newness that re-creates it as a ‘new or post liberation’, liberation movement. The road to the 55th ANC Conference has started in earnest. In Lenin's parlance, 'there are (set periods) decades in history where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen'; a few weeks before 16 December will certainly have more than a decade happening. In the local parlance 'these weeks, like some nine years before them, and subsequent five years as of December 2022, might be...

         Since the advent of South Africa's constitutional democracy, our political system has become more complex. The shift from a rule-by-law to a rule-of-law democratic system meant an inundation of policies to debate and understand by society and the ascending political elite. The information intensity required to govern or regulate a constitutional democracy undergirded by guaranteed human rights calls for endorsement by democrats. What has not been difficult for the ANC is to recruit and enrol democrats to its vision of a 'South Africa which belongs to all who live in it, and that no institutional organ of state can claim any authority unless it is based on the will of the people'. However, what has been difficult for it to sustain is keeping the normative rectitude of the organisation to institutionally lead the recruited and enrolled democrats and those it carelessly invited into its membership when numbers started to matter for it to stay in power. Som...