The Democratic Alliance (DA), South Africa's official opposition party, and others are in court over the ANC's cadre deployment policy. Whilst the DAs action is plausible to the extent that it will put into judicial test the correctness or otherwise of a cadre deployment policy in democratic order such as the one we are creating, there are deeper issues South Africans need to also ponder about. The preoccupation with lawfare as a strategic bulwark against majority rule, and a mistrust of the hands that command South Africa's executive authority, might have unintended consequences than what the court victories are achieving. This is notwithstanding the glaring service delivery failures which create a throw-the-baby-with-the-water public policy engagement attitude. There is a visible gap between a nation in an anarchic war against itself. Occasionally, opportunities for a scorch earth policy are optimised daily, and this rendition bursts.
The
pulse, cadence, and rhythm of a nation lie in the capacity and capability of
its organs of state. The South African Constitution has made it easy for its
citizens, legal system, and democracy to understand what it means by organs of
state. It defines organs of state as 'any department of state or administration
in the national, provincial or local sphere of government; or any other
functionary or institution-exercising a power or performing a function in terms
of the Constitution or a provincial constitution; or-exercising a public power
or performing a public function in terms of any legislation, but does not
include a court or a judicial officer.".
The
definition distinguishes institutions and persons as organs of state to the
extent each of them acts in terms of a constitutional provision or legislation, or possesses public power. Public power means the power vested in a person as an agent or
instrument of the state in performing the state's legislative, judicial, and
executive functions. In a democracy that advocates a multi-party system and is
organised in a way that establishes multiple political jurisdictions with
independently sourced political mandates, public power becomes as diffused as
the entire societal, political power is.
Because
we have progressively veered off from being a reality-based society and thus
raised in the process a type of leadership equal to what we have become, we
have stopped implementing decisions with excellence and are now valuing
opinions over action. In the metamorphosis cycle of raising leader-managers as
a condition of efficiency-driven transformation, we have been stuck and choked
in a cocoon where leadership and management should split as separate concepts
with us as leader-manager creatures. We are thus still struggling to work on
what our society is and should be about and are preoccupied with working
on what the politics of being a society are all about. This is probably why our
unfolding narrative and reality of state and institutional decay, including the
dearth of genuine human ideation, is etched from a deep inner voice of (self-)
doubt. It is more apparent by the day that these voices of (self-) doubt have
wasted our time and caused us to feel helpless, and they have stopped
us from moving forward productively and getting the results we want. We have
not contemplated as a society, especially the cognitive elite, answers to the
question, "what if, on the other hand, the worst-case scenario about us as
a nation, society, developing democratic order, or policy is actual?
Given
that diversity is the keynote of social condition and opinion, people in any
society or institution set up have in common their membership to it and
acceptance of rules which enable that society or institution to hold together.
It will always be the differential character of how interests are registered,
adjudicated, and distributed as well as the ambitions of individuals in a
society, which ensures no uniformity. Interests will, therefore, always be the
currency of politics. Accepting that the ultimate prize of good politics is
Government as the arena of all political activity, interests as embodiments of
active diversities in a political system will generate an interest in organs of
state as defined herein above.
Organs
of state are, therefore, institutions as persons or otherwise. They are means with which conflicts and interests are registered, resolved, altered and
maintained. Because of this, organs of state as embodiments of state power, and
not just opinion, have become important to politics. The question of who
constitutes the organs of the state has grown to become an indicator of the
extent to which the political influence of society is intertwined with the
bureaucratic discretion undergirding a political system or order. Political
orders are almost, in all instances, outcomes of elite consensus(es), depending
on the extent to which elite integration has been allowed.
The
South African political order, in essence, an outcome of a negotiated
settlement and an elite pact to avert socio-political disintegration, has yet
to have a fair chance to integrate its demographic diversities into a socially
cohesive elite consensus. The typical dimensions of elite integration, which
include social homogeneity, recruitment patterns, personal interaction, value
consensus, and group solidarity, have, for the known history of political order
creation in South Africa, been compromised by the stubborn racial lenses not
applied in similar democratic settings. Whilst elite consensus and integration
may be a bedrock of oligarchic politics, from the point of view that advocates
stable, effective, and democratic government, its desirability might be a
normative plank upon which common nationhood could be built. The absence of the
mutual respect that flows from the confraternity of power amongst South African
elites has generated one of the most significant trust deficits in a political
order in modern history.
The
consequence of this state of affairs is that elites chronically see each other
as categories of the same elite strata. Consequential policy instruments such
as cadre development to build a bureaucracy with which the liberation promise
in the Constitution could be advanced have become vulnerable to the unfortunate
intra-elite trust deficit. Solidarity platforms of South Africa's elites,
notably cognitive elites, still reflect condescending and patronising comments
ranging from euphemisms of skills being the preserve of certain racial groups
and the enemy title being the reserve of others. In a genuine democracy, the
effects of load shedding and the energy crisis would have generated a ONE
SWITCH ON THE LIGHTS CAMPAIGN, as darkness and lack of energy affects our
people and 'onse' mense the same way. Instead, the crisis has become
a 'we told you so opportunity', 'we can go it alone opportunity', 'economic
hitman conspiracy theories', 'who is eating in this crisis theories', and so
on.
The
court challenges to affirmative action, cadre development, black economic
empowerment, and preferential procurement policies manifest deeper fissures in
the structure of the South African society and, most dangerously, its cognitive
elites who must lead and direct society. There has been gross hypocrisy in how
cognitive elites have celebrated the Mandela-De Klerk-led political accord and
reconciliation path the world has hailed us to have achieved. Unless there is a
true South Africanness which undergirds the activities of its cognitive elites,
the future generation will inherit the muted mistrust of each other, fear of
each other's innovations, and many other proxy behaviours rewarded by the
convenience of wanting to sound politically correct and accepted.
The
unfolding dramas we find ourselves in are ultimately the result of a lack of
leadership by all of us. If there is any iota of leadership in South Africa, it
is about something other than and for all of us. Notwithstanding his oversupply
of social capital, and political legitimacy as a person, often beyond his
political party, President Ramaphosa, should unsubscribe to the idea that
everyone's opinion has to count, as that will, in effect, be handing ideation
veto power to a majority narrative, whilst the minority narrative that the
liberation promise in the Constitution is a permanent yes to what he ought to
be doing for the nation. He should by now, be, knowing that it genuinely takes
less energy to have a legitimate confrontation than it does to keep avoiding
it. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️La, xa heta Khalanga, mitwili
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