The th!nc Foundation

      As we reminiscence on the closure of the 2022 World Cup spectacle held in Qatar, with Argentina winning the tournament and ushering Lionel Messi as the new Greatest of All Times in his generation, we are punctuated in our excitement by news of the passing on of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known mononymously as Pele. No death is timely, yet legacies that give space for a new one can look timely and engineered. Arguably the greatest of Brazilian sons, the most noticeable of many sports icons and personalities, his transition to the beyond-death life marks the beginning of a new era; only those that follow him will dictate the punctuation mark we should put at the end of his great obituary.   Pele was to global football a better person, and the world has learnt to believe that he will also be a lovely corpse. The universal truthfulness of death has once again taken from our living space a great soul. As Pele closed his eyes on 29th December 2022 in a way that giv...

 Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. From all of us at the Thinc Foundation. 

       In August 2022, I wrote, "The ANC tradition connotes a set of deeply rooted, historically conditioned attitudes about the nature of the movement, the role of the ANC in society and the polity, the authentic organization and operation of the human emancipation system it represents, about the way ANCness is or should be continuously renewed, made, and applied. The ANCs tradition, which carries more its practice of being an organizational system than its inherent ideology, is one of its greatest assets within which its political and social capital is embedded. The organization's choices of cohesion, cooperation, collaboration, faction establishing, unification, confrontation, or recalibration, are significantly impacted by the existence or otherwise, as well as the nature of its tradition, or if you like heritage" . In 2017, I also wrote, " Heritage is an embodiment of a past we wish to take into our future without losing the benefits of a changing present. It de...

   Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, one of the ANC's Presidential candidates at its 55th National Conference, voted against the party's marching orders. In doing so, she invoked one of the sacred statements by ANC members when acting within the most principled of its many realms. She declared that her yes vote for the impeachment of President Ramaphosa was based on her being a disciplined and loyal member of the ANC. This was one of the bravest actions by an ANC leader in a context where being elected to its highest office is at stake, including the possibility of facing career-limiting disciplinary proceedings. The question this rendition seeks to explore is at what point is the principle of being loyal to what the ANC stands for as an institution of leadership correct or otherwise when the defence of such a principle is at variance with a prescribed party line that might later be found to be at variance with what the party stands for as a principle? The NDZ vote coincides with dea...

      The incapacity to withstand rebuttal from branches of the ANC to lead it has introduced a new breed of politicking. Why is it that questions of who is this are asked of comrades that served it at almost every conceivable level, but an elected position is all of a sudden driving dirty campaigning? The African National Congress has had several criteria for who ascends to its leadership at all levels. Fundamental to these criteria, with the eye of the needle coming as an emphatic second, is a leader's ability to be preferred by the ANC's basic units of organisational existence. The 55th Conference might go into history as one driven by the valid will of ANC branches. In its democratic heritage, which remains one of the most elaborate by a political formation contesting for state power, the institutionalisation of branch nominations and ultimately being elected at a national conference by branch delegates is, apart from enfranchisement, the best expression that ANC memb...

        Among the emerging narratives and takeaways about the upcoming ANC 55th National Conference is the growing distinction between members of the ANC, who are its guardians and those that are its custodians. To keep an organisation under custodianship is not the same as giving it the guardianship it requires. The custodian of the ANC is fast emerging to be its legacy as both a liberation movement and a leader of society. Its guardian(s) is equally emerging to be the form, character, and quality of its membership.   The recent integrity challenges the ANC went through as an institution or organisation have tested its resilience as an institution more than it has done to its members as its individual components. How it responds to challenges of corruption, state capture, the members of members phenomenon, and the general protection of its reputation has been a function of its institutional wisdom. In its 110-year history, 30 have been characterised by the ANC ...

     The ANC is in a leadership contest. Leaders are deep inside an election campaign. The contest's theme is the ANC's renewal, rebuilding, and unity. In pursuit of the theme and their leadership ambitions, contesting leaders have, by default, become magnets of one coalition/faction or another inside the ANC. Interesting nodes of influence in the ANC have been developing for a while, and these have divided the organisation. What is at stake, though, is the unity of the ANC as a political movement for it to complete whatever is left of its historic mission of emancipating black people in general and Africans in particular. The President Ramaphosa-led ANC NEC, in its maiden January statement of 2018, took to reminding South Africans of the foundational reasons for the ANC's existence. The statement read ..."our organisation belongs to the people of South Africa, and we must safeguard and nurture it. The core ideal, which is the reason for the ANC’s existence, the creati...