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. Some members would have been good as registered supporters with restricted rights.
The institutional make-up of the ANC has, for the longest, be one that churned processional revolutionaries for the purposes it had set for itself. At inception in the first decade of the 1900s, and building up to its formal launch in 1912, its leading lights were described as having...
"emerged from mission schools strongly attached to the ideals of Christianity, wore Victorian attire, adhered to British cultural values and put much of their faith in what they referred to as a white sense of fair play…detached from traditional society, they were employed as teachers, church ministers, clerks, interpreters and journalists, and aspired to show how easily Africans could adapt to white civilisation. They shared a vision of a non-racial civilised society in which merit counted more than colour'.
It attracted men and women that were lettered, landed, and royalty into its ranks. They set up an institutional template which advocated for a democracy written into the Constitution of the country, on which the laws of the land would be based. The template matured over its lifespan and got established as a pattern of norms and standards anyone that joined would abide by as a condition of acceptance.
As the mission of the ANC grew in significance to the society, it abrogated itself the responsibility to lead, and its requirements for the professional execution of the anti-colonial struggle system became a complexity its organisational make-up needed to respond to. The ante of membership recruitment went up; it attracted into its ranks professionals who had a grasp of its mission and yet wanted to somehow retain the interpretation autonomy associated with it. The hackneyed phrase ‘herding cats’ does not even begin to capture the complexity of the challenge that faced cohorts of ANC leaders. Leading the ANC has been a hugely difficult task since its inception and worse after its official unbanning.
As the attainment of its mission was related to the political power dynamics of South Africa and, by default, the geopolitical interests of world powers, its choices of strategic partners required it to be ideologically non-aligned to the extent that its material needs are attended to. It flirted with the west as much as it could with the east. Its membership would, over time, concretise commensurate to its non-aligned posture and yet incubate, in certain instances, diametrically opposed viewpoints about what the ANC ultimately becomes. It became as much a contested terrain as the geopolitical space. It has a mission to lead the society therein. It thus built professionals for itself from several persuasions determinant to international relations.
Consequently, the authority to lead within the ANC became ambiguous and diffuse, its members grew idiosyncrasy, and internal relationships became complex and confusing. Lessons of democratic centralism it learnt during its struggle years when its membership was managed from an underground and spread across the globe contexts kept it going only until its unbanning placed a premium on its transparency. The interest in handling the distributive prowess of Africa's most significant 'formal' economy came with the exigencies of managing its professional revolutionaries' changing and conflictual interests.
These conflicts of interest, which existed during the anti-apartheid struggle, albeit not as pronounced, constituted a cocktail of uncontrollable circumstances, with the disintegration of the centre as its most vulnerable victim. Consensus, with a dose of democratic centralism, took over as the logical way to lead and manage the interests-infested ANC. Notwithstanding the nature of professional revolutionaries in the ANC, who were inherently ideationally unmanageable, although claiming loyalty to the centre, they started clawing into their own interests. This is where the challenge of leading the ANC is acute. Despite the professional trait of its ideational members being an asset, it has become one of its liabilities, given that its vector can be sponsored.
With leadership being a hierarchy-based practice, any shift of the hierarchy environment works if it is at the behest of those leading rather than followers. With the change of illegitimate authority as its target, the professional revolutionary space comes with permutations that make it hard for followers in this space to funnel into a direction. What they needed to be good at during the struggle is a skill you don't need once in power. Worse, running underground machinery might have necessitated going to bed with masters of the underworld you would be expected to round off when you are in government.
This condition has created several nodes of professional power, including in the criminal underworld. In an electoral democracy, some of the power nodes get to be in or get others into leadership because of referent power-a status that accrues to the 'professional' because of what they bring into the movement. Their ability to bring money, 'necessary' anarchy when divergent leaders call for it, the 'izinkabi' networks when stubborn opposition is to be assassinated, 'members of members' when branches must quorate, and many other professionalisms those that are led believe in their necessity at one point or the other in the life of the ANC as a movement.
As their skills succeed in keeping the organisation alive where its true virtues are not known, ignored, or never shared with members, these professionals become the normal of the organisation where their influence is the substrate of ANCness. The roles they play in keeping the organisation alive, and when rewarded with high office, become models the next generation starts believing is the norm. As technical expertise, relationship with members, and reputation of the wrongness start producing leaders that ultimately have influence over the distributive prowess of the state; these 'professionals', dubious, normative or otherwise, become members who must be led by a normative context that might be at variance with who they are or what they believe the ANC should be about. The power whence from they are referenced becomes more than formal; their 'credibility and authority obtained from such a world, and if it is part of a well-coordinated network, can easily be what is normative about the movement.
The plurality of these nodes of professionals, good and bad, is visibly emerging as the chief determinants of the concrete factions the normative in-constitution must deal with. These factions and their demands for the reviewal of devised member integrity management systems that are suffocating the negative 'professional skills' are driving the disintegrating in-ANC 'leader of society brigade', a professional sect in its own right, back into the unity of purpose. Similarly, and dangerously so, they are driving the apartheid status quo defending opposition complex back into unity about the reversal of post-1994 gains. As these professionals are messing or otherwise the liberation promise in the Constitution, the movement might have to enter the 'economic freedom in our lifetime' social compacting process under less optimal conditions.
In OR Tambo's parlance when faced with the reality of negotiations in a unipolar world order led by a whiteness-defending cohort of US leaders, and this rendition paraphrases for its purpose; "we are... lagging behind on the ideas thrown about among the (lumpen or otherwise professionals) in their quest for a way out of the (state capture and corruption) crisis that (wants to) leave the (truncated gangster state) system intact". The difficulty of leading the movement with such a diverse group of professionals with conflicting skills, ideological orientations, interests, and encumbrances is that they are becoming engineers of a moral fibre our ANCness is suffocating to co-exist with. Armed with tools that are etched in the belief that 'economic transformation' is only possible under a leadership that should be brave to undermine the established constitutional democratic order, some of the professionals have become the most visible liabilities to an intelligent and synchronised movement to fracture the templates of economic dominance established by our past.
As we enter the last month of negotiating slates that should emerge as leaders of the ANC, our preoccupation should be the discernment of these professionals. The 54th Conference, with its discontents, neutralised the substrates of the various professionals, and we emerged with a reasonably balanced leadership cohort under the circumstances. Now that we know what we had bargained for, we have information from revelations by the (Zondo, Nugent, and Mompati) commissions, and we have seen how the integrity management system has brought contextual stability; it would only be the prudence of those that would be delegated which will save the movement from the claws of state power loss. There will be rhetoric and propaganda about and by professionals against or for their causes. The time for the voice of reason and the 'Leader of Society Brigades' to prevail has arrived.
The brute truth is that amongst those with the requisite demeanour to be part of the 'leader of society brigade', the normalised tendencies of the 'plunge South Africa into disrepute brigade' swallowed them to levels where they are stressfully defending what they don't believe in. Worse is the uneven handedness of the criminal justice system in processing those matters whose resolution would have started to yield trust dividends of the emerging constitutional democratic order. Our posture should be to brutally engage with ourselves in the mirror and ignore debating what we see through the window.
The saving grace for the movement will always be those of its members that have embraced the 1996 Constitution as a translation of the Freedom Charter ideals. These members, or rather the 'leader of society brigade', would, in defending the sovereign integrity of South Africa amongst nations of the world, unequivocally reject any leadership which disregards the in-Constitution values upon which this country was founded. In classifying as an enemy, any system of domination, including domination by kleptocrats, oligarchs, state capturers, cognitive legal or otherwise elites, monopoly capital of any race, highly resourced civil society bodies, and political parties with systems that cannot protect society from the above mentioned; the 'leader of society brigade' of and within the ANC declares what will undergird its enrolment to any renewal program. CUT!!!
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