To be African and express the National in you has been incubated for the past 110 years by the African National Congress. For a century, the ANC has been an institution of leadership through which African aspirations and imaginations in the political economy, politics, socio-economic livelihood, international relations, and ideation on the development of Africa were expressed. Facing imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, and the subliminal of the three through the proxies of globalisation, world trade organisation regulations, world production and manufacturing standards biased to the global north, and resistance to allowing Africa its uninterrupted industrial revolution; the ANC endured all epochs it faced related to that. Despite these, the ANC facilitated, through negotiation and necessary compromise, a Constitutional Democratic Order (CDO) with which it could incubate the African liberation promise without excluding anyone that lives in South Africa.
With the advantage of having inherited a State system that was one of Africa's strongest pre-1994, the institutional mechanisms the state had to operate within reduced the burden of establishing a new post-apartheid state but increased that of repurposing. The nation-state carried with it the legal, financial, and institutional edifice with which the competing interests of society could be facilitated into tangible and implementable programs in an egalitarian, democratic way.
The geopolitical heftiness that came with the Mandela goodwill dividend positioned South Africa as the primary strategic nodal point of influence. It has the largest concentration of diplomatic representation outside Washington, New York, Brussels, and Switzerland. Drawing from the established networks of the anti-apartheid movement, which rivalled only the Greenpeace movement on environmental and climate change issues, the strategic access to the soft power set during the Oliver Tambo era was for the ANC to either lose or recalibrate it into a foreign direct investment attraction mechanism.
The political and social capital the ANC amassed during its leadership of the anti-apartheid alliance of organisations which repudiated and liquidated the moral standing of the apartheid state, defined it as a natural heir of Africa's geo-strategic political and economic nodes, South Africa. Notwithstanding, the glory days of the ANC as a liberation movement and leader of society are approaching a cul-de-sac. Faced with divisions defined by various forms of crass, its values of non-racialism, non-sexism, and democracy are threatened by the membership it attracted when it became the governing party. The opposition complex, which has been searching for relevance for a while, is aggressively occupying the hegemonic space once monopolised by the ANC.
Truth is, the ANC is not foundering. Those rushing to occupy its hegemonic space seem to ignore the more profound legacies of apartheid and colonialism as the dominant vectors of politics and socio-economic grievance shaping human coexistence in South Africa. It will be difficult to dislodge the ANC as the nexus of political life. The dominant presence of ANCness in the concretising democratic order, whose template is the constitutional democracy the ANC has delivered as the liberation promise to South Africans, is a feature few can successfully wrestle out of the historical significance of the ANC to society. Curated as the complex, agile, and difficult-to-claim policies, as well as visible service delivery monuments associable with post-1994 government;, the ANC is stubbornly, and with complacency occupying the source of liberation status, few will wrestle out of its hands.
Faced with one of its most consequential review moments of its distinctive traits and capacities, the 55th National Conference will be epochal and definitive of its power and influence over the emerging democratic order. What doomsayers make as a mistake is to see the ANC within the prism of other failed democratic experiments in post-conflict societies. What they have not factored in their analysis of the South African version of the historical cycles is that in South Africa, change has always been about optimising how to legally tinker with the arrangements with which society agrees to govern itself; otherwise also called a democracy. The brute strength of ideas, institutions, and values that are complexly woven into the fabric of South Africa's democracy has, at all its epochs, become the lighthouse all its political ships docked at. The 1910 Constitution, which defined the geographical borders today called South Africa, has been the template upon which nuances of the politically dominant have been finding expression in respect of purposes of five-year government mandates without changing the institutional edifice necessary to carry society forward. Ours remains an order that has become a system with multi-partied imaginations rich in vicissitudes out of which an open society context has decidedly emerged.
Parallel to the establishment of this order in 1910 has been the formation of the ANC with a design to claim its right to be part of the order according to the arrangements applicable to all that participate in it; without due regard to race, sex, class, and creed. As the state grew in sophistication as an institution of leadership, the ANC grew its moral or otherwise legitimacy to lead society in its demand for enfranchisement based on a one-person vote system. This demand and its optimisations until 1994 defined the basis of the ANC's claim to being a leader of society. These optimisations earned the ANC international respect and acclaim to levels where apartheid as a system applied to humanity anywhere is now an internationally prosecuted crime. Acceding to international protocols, even before it became government, the ANC defined itself into the ideal domains of democratic livelihood, with the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law being lodestar policy positions.
As an organisation, the ANC conducted itself following the requisite moral high ground commensurate with the democratic outcomes it had advocated for South Africans. It developed a code of conduct which made specific actions associated with organisations conducting a struggle for liberation repugnant to the ideals it stood for. The code did not, however, vitiate the necessary tactics by its anti-apartheid complex, including a whirlpool of somewhat contradictory methods. Cardinal to the code of conduct was to infuse into the ANCs cadres and leadership a sense of public service that abhors personal aggrandisement and general malfeasance. This code of conduct became a disciplinary code whose trigger was the traditional process of the complaint investigation, charging and ultimately, trial and penalties. In the aftermath of the 1994 democratic breakthrough, this system progressively grew to be limited in combining the reputation management of the ANC and the innocent until the proven guilty process derived from the criminal justice system. Consistent with its institution of leadership character, the ANC developed an integrity management system that blends the reputation management risks of membership conduct and the necessity of the innocent until proven guilty principle.
The combination of the internal systems of the ANC, its policy-making process, its democratic heritage, and the Constitution-based order that regulates the interests of society have cut the South African democratic experiment above many in its league of post-conflict democracies. Notwithstanding its checkered maturity trajectory. To date, the institution of leadership prowess has come in handy to mitigate the risks of corruption and state capture. The combination of the in-ANC member integrity management system and the criminal justice system, with their operational gaps, has been on display in the last fifteen years. The fear of being caught for corruption index has been improving, and consequence management is about to impact on the reduction of corruption incidents. Reduce CUT!!!
TO BE CONTINUED
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