Can the 1996 Constitution anchor a multi-decade RSA political order.

 The creation or building of a political order is an idea that develops over a sustained period of time and is in all instances a conglomeration of various interests into a few 'national' interests or 'elite consensus' on diverse interests. It is an outcome of an inner circle, surrounded by several layers of rings often made up of landowners, business elites, economists, intellectuals, politicians, and those with a monopoly on violence. To concretise and impose their will, interests, and consensuses, those in the various circles establish think tanks, form political parties, and ensure dissemination of their messages through appropriate media outlets, platforms, and systems. 

A political order is simply a constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape a society's politics over a sustained period of time. If it succeeds to go on for a period exceeding 60 consecutive years, it settles as a background of permanence for anything political about society. A political order sits in society as a template for being political. As the new in politics enter, they can only nuance the order, and once they settle into the true demands of the order, it starts to nuance what they stood for to fit the template. 

In South Africa, the process of establishing a political order has gone through various iterations, all of which had one common characteristic; 'what arrangements are best to channel social, political, and economic capital to pursue the interests of the established political order? At inception, the process of channelling these capital forms had as an outcome of success the extraction of material value to locations that claimed imperial rights over the geographical space. The destination of what was extracted defined all of South Africa's wars, rebellions, and revolutions including the National Democratic Revolution, and constitutional negotiations and settlements. Acceptance of the resulting economic order and power structures that facilitate arrangements with which society has agreed to rule itself, otherwise also called democracy, is what generations of society were always expected to accept. Such acceptance would either be by voluntary surrender to the established political order by giving it electoral legitimacy through a periodic mandate to use public power, or coercion through manipulation of the system to favour the consensuses behind the political order. 

Racial colonialism, later perfected into the apartheid system, lasted as a political order anchored on native land dispossession, extraction of the country's wealth for the benefit of the colonial centre and non-blacks, and enslavement of others as a caste upon which the rest could flourish. The viciousness at which this order was established created templates that are psychological, cultural, spatial, and opportunity-defining. The system that the political order has created will take a while to reconcile with the true outcomes of its antithesis. Victims of the effects of the political order have over time grown to be its greatest defenders, if not optimisers. Leadership legitimation and iconisation include the pursuit of reconciliation with the effects of racial colonialism and operating with its advantage as a geometric given to solve other values of liberation to society. 

In other socio-political settings around the world, the construct of a political order happened in a context that understood the interests of society and the consensuses of elites as a national sovereignty matter. The template was to design an ideology of co-existence, a philosophy of human livelihood, an open opportunity for all in the space, and a hierarchy of human classes without the dehumanisation of another on the basis of any chauvinism. The national and the sovereign were primal in how interests and consensuses were ultimately defined. Where the national and sovereign were subjugated, the colonial centre became primal in how any consensus or interest would be defined. In fact, the colonial expedition funding elite defined the interests and consensuses, of which over time these would receive new iterations and develop into a less liberty-intrusive nomenclature known to be the preoccupation of previously colonised nation-states. The most celebrated is a foreign direct investment as an agglomeration of interests defined at boardrooms from far-lands.  

The South African political order has on the other hand developed on the basis of managing interests and consensuses about its mineral wealth and the attendant industrialisation and rapid urbanisation that went with it. As capital formation and production methods dictated the conversion of natives into wage labourers, it also had to attract cheap non-racial labour. Fundamental to the emerging political order, and this has been carried throughout the political-economic history of South Africa to date, was the classical mixed economy view. Because the state was colonial and capitalist to the extent that the colonial centre extracted more value from colonial subjects, 'state' intervention in the economy was desirable. Mining magnates and monopoly capital, who were then loyal to the Union Jack, became proxies of the House of Lords and somewhat took political economic decisions that established templates of the current political order. 

Once the total annexation of the geographical space called South Africa was completed, the codification of economic interests and elite consensuses into a Constitution was negotiated at the 1909 National Convention. The 1910 Constitution emerged as a permanent template of the arrangements with which South Africans agreed to govern themselves. As a template and the basis of obtaining political order, it was entrenched as part of the Constitution-based democracy that would over time only experience modifications as errors and political miscalculations of the political order were corrected. The template of the political order has thus far stood untouched save for its remonstration with the realities of extending opportunity and advantage of elite consensuses to include all race groups. 

Cardinal to the political order has, and since the 1910 template, been,

1. the provision of an integrated measure of regularity and predictability for the entire territory of South Africa,
2. the consolidation of 'white privilege' interests and consensus of perpetual land and capital ownership on the same basis,
3. the consolidation of all native policies to establish, as part of the political order, a racial order whose pinnacle would be building of a caste out of which racial supremacy would go unchallenged, 
4. the establishment of a modern state to police labour, regulate regional tariffs, develop integrated transport logistics with rail as its backbone for haulage of goods,
5. the establishment of a political representation system regulated by periodic five-year elections where the public sector and public service matters could be dealt with,
6. the convergence of the institutional structure of the state into a centralised unit directed by fiscal investments with which national development would be driven, 
7. the establishment of a central legal system with a judicial authority that would adjudicate competing interests within a rapidly industrialising and urbanising society, and commercial sector, 
8. the establishment of courts which would meet the need for legal certainty, the protection of vested and in most instances annexed rights, the satisfaction of legitimate expectations, and maintaining the supremacy of the colonial courts over any other adjudication system existing in the territory.
9. the consolidation of non-black unity and making the state an industrious hub of racio-class separate development anchored on a demographic spatial development model supportive of the political order,

The development of optimisation systems most of which remain the structural and template challenges to attune the revisions of the political order to be inclusive and less strange to the newly allowed members of society became decisive in how the order turned out to be. These optimisation systems were introduced into the political order during the first decade of formal apartheid. They have become templates of how the political order is anchored, they are reference points of what is not wanted yet continues to be extended into posterity.

These were  ‘the Group Areas Act (1950) forcing people to live in separate areas; the Resettlement of Natives Act (1954) empowering the then government to remove other ‘publics’ for the settlement of ‘other publics’, for instance, the removal of blacks as a public from Sophiatown to Meadowlands in SOWETO; the Immorality Amendment Act (1950) which prohibited others to have sex with others along racial lines; the Population Registration Act (1950) that enabled race registers for publics in order to define access and opportunity; the Separation of Amenities Act (1953) that kept races apart in public areas; the Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents Act (1952) designed to control movements of blacks in the country; the Bantu Education Act (1953) that dealt with skill development ceilings for the BaNtu people; the Extension of University Education Act (1959) that enforced university separation; the Bantu Authorities Act (1951) that established self-government structures in the homelands; the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act (1959) and the Urban Councils Act (1961) that regulated urban political co-existence’, (Wilkins and Strydom 1978: 200), and many other regulations further devised by boards of private sector bodies to control job reservation, basic conditions of service, access to credit and financing instruments. 

It was during the same decade that the optimisation systems to the concretising political order were introduced that a decisive antithesis in ideological terms, and not in structural and template terms, of South Africa, belongs to all who live in it was proffered to inspire new hope. Only when an existing or ascending order begins to generate discontent and a crisis of its legitimacy emerges, is a room made for the next ideology to gain ground. The ideological consensus to come up with an alternative thesis of being South African had as a point of departure for any political order that it should be based on the will of the people, black and white, and of any creed. Literature, more specifically Fukuyama, identifies a political order to have the components of state building, rule of or by law, and accountable government. In  the parlance of this rendition these would be functional institutions of leadership, the rule of law anchored by a constitutionally defined judicial authority, and an accountable executive authority system. 

In defining a new path towards developing a political order the 1955 Freedom Charter, an agglomeration of many other documents and African claims before it, laid the basis for a new ideological firmament to instruct the concrete political order. What is today celebrated as the liberation struggle against racial colonialism came down to a negotiated settlement and a Convention for a Democratic South Africa was held to agree on principles with which the Political Order would be codified into newer arrangements with which society agrees to govern itself. A constituent assembly composed of men and women elected on a one man one vote basis convened under a legal system and protocol whose adjudicative prowess remains the strongest of the powerful remnants of a political order continuum. The 1996 Constitution was drawn up on the basis of the agreed constitutional principles with which its certification as being legal would be based. To date the Political Order is regulated through the principles and a maturing jurisprudence whose constitutionalism is undergoing various iterations of transformation. CUT!!! 

When published, a book on my essays will elaborate on this matter further.