As the arc of political hope for the future bends towards delusion for those that celebrated the outcomes of NASREC 2.0, if you like the 55th ANC Conference, the question is, have the tendencies that lost the elections left the ANC. While every hegemon tends to believe it can endure challenges by generations, those that constitute a generation will never stop pursuing what distinctly defines them from other generations. South Africa is politically in the middle of an unprecedented social movement led by a generational mission to achieve 'economic freedom in our lifetime'. This mission was ignited by a Julius Malema-led ANC youth league at its National Conference held in ...., at Gallagher estates. The mission was couched to be a sequel to the 1949 ANCYL generational mission of political freedom in our lifetime, which Nelson Mandela and others lived to accomplish.
The movement to pursue economic freedom in our lifetime mission has the advantage and liability of having to operate in conditions where political activity is not illegal. Unlike the political freedom in our lifetime movement, which operated for most of its time as an anti-state process and thus criminalised to be illegal, the economic freedom in our lifetime movement is legal to the extent that it can be implemented. For the economic freedom in our lifetime ideal to find corresponding societal endearment as its counterpart, its character as an idea should be above the narrow confines of it being an inside-the-party generational mission.
The brute truth is that the political freedom in our lifetime generational mission started to gain traction once the ANC understood itself is a leader of a movement broader than of itself. South Africa's path to its 1994 democratic breakthrough is unimaginable without citing the strategic role of its trade union movement, a network of civil society movements that ultimately became the United Democratic Front, the natural constituency possessing faith-based sector, intellectuals, and a network of global institutions attracted by the moral correctness of the mission. Equally, the 'economic freedom in our lifetime mission' must be beyond the ANCYL, and maybe the ANC, to grow.
What is peculiar about the economic freedom in our lifetime generational mission is how it has become a source of division within the ANC. Since its articulation by the Malema-as-President-ANCYL, it mutated into versions of what it actually means. It became Radical Economic Transformation, later amended to Radical Socio-Economic Transformation, and in recent times it is called inclusive growth path. What has remained a constant about it though, is the steady ascendance to mother body leadership of the ANCYL members, leaders, and ideologues that were at the monumental Gallagher estate conference, which declared the generational mission.
The post-Malema-in-the-ANC youth cohort went into or was manipulated into a detour from its set generational mission and ideological path. The detour was characterised by a Jacob Zuma nine-year term and its discontents, an uncharacteristic posture by the then NEC to see youth radicalism as a threat to in-ANC robustness, the unprecedented corruption and state capture that befell our country and almost equated economic freedom in our lifetime with public sector based malfeasance, the effects of the global economic meltdown induced by crises in the financial services sector, and the COVID-19 pandemic with it conspiracy theories. As the state capture and corruption narrative, with its many proven pockets of legitimacy and truthfulness, recedes to the background of national discourse and is left to law enforcement agencies to deal with, the generational mission has slowly been occupying the space albeit disguised as generational leadership mix at ANC conferences.
The average age median of the ANC NEC elected at the 55th Conference has dramatically improved from the previous one. The substrate of the in-ANC experience has decisively shifted. Those that plied their political trade in the Mass Democratic Movement, the UDF, the trade union movement, and the post-1990 unbanned ANC have ascended. Their lived apartheid experience and post-apartheid discontents about what the state's power should now have achieved are expected to start permeating the policy-making and implementation posture of the ANC. The ideologically gentrified economic freedom in our lifetime and its during-Jacob Zuma misdefined version of Radical Economic Transformation is expected to ascend, albeit with a different nomenclature.
A casual analysis of what most of the current NEC members implemented when they had command of the executive authority at various spheres of government will yield exciting findings. From the municipal land 'redistribution' programs of Ekhurhuleni and Tshwane to the Township Economy Act of Gauteng, the Setsokotsane programs in the Northwest to the Mzanzi Golden Economy in the Arts and Culture sector abandoned by factional considerations. The mix of actual transformation experience where it mattered can only be expected to find a platform in the new ANC NEC that has few that have a direct relationship with CODESA encumbrances and/or accords.
While many pundits have celebrated the electoral loss of the so-called RET faction at NASREC 2.0, it should not follow that the economic transformation in our lifetime generational mission has lost. To this generation, RET was its bastardised version by a generation that wanted to avoid engaging with the details of the Gallagher estate's resolutions. To that youth generation, the failure to use the state's capacity to affect socio-economic change remains the greatest betrayal of the National Democratic Revolution. This is arguably a structural delay in migrating South Africa into a National Democratic Society as the real liberation promise the South African Constitution should have long started delivering by now.
The political dividends of the economic freedom in our lifetime resolutions as a catalyst to the liberation promise of the 'freedom in our lifetime generation' chiselled into the 1996 Constitution are about to accrue to all who see themselves as South Africans, which the Constitution declares the country belongs to them too. The South African economy will recover in the few years ahead and might manage rapprochement with monopoly capital. The current NEC, if it is not a template of transformation, it should model itself as one; otherwise, the cost of being anything either than that will be counted in not the distant future. There is no time to explain the ANC out of the anger at service delivery failures it has presided over. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️Swi fikile, swi kurhile, hi ta vona
🤷🏿♂️Mintirho ya vula vula
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