The African National Congress is the oldest political formation in South African politics. Its establishment was a response to the exclusion of natives from what would arguably be the template for the political order that shaped South Africa's constitutional history and its variants of democracy. It aggregated native political thought into an organised formation whose knitting of society towards an ideal of a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it and that no one can claim any authority unless it is based on the will of 'the people'. Since the 1994 democratic breakthrough, the ANC has been changing how it reorganises itself to play politics as both the governing party and a liberation movement whose incomplete revolution might well be antagonistic to the exigencies of being a government based on the will of the people.
The
politics of being a governing party have changed the ANCs universe profoundly.
While many of its activists, thinkers, and leaders found themselves having to
lie low as revolutionaries and accept the doctrinal shifts wrought by the exigencies
of being government, it is not clear if all that claim its membership are ready
for the vast sweep of the revolution of politics which is redefining the form
and character of the ANC as they know it. The nature of politics this era has
been ushering for South Africa is as monumental as its requirement for politics
to reform the inherited state without truncating the 'national democratic
revolution'. The depth of expectations by the new context of politics
requires a recalibration of many a 'national democratic revolution' nomenclatures
to attune to conditions of not only being a legal liberation movement but one
that is government too.
It often seems that the tools of transforming society from an apartheid
past to a condition where a national democratic society is established are
developed with little thought to their broader impact on the authentic wishes
of all South Africans. Constructs of a South Africa envisaged by its
Constitution as the legal convergence space within which arrangements to govern
each other are recorded rarely meet with the ritual of revolutionary takeover
associated with liberation movement-led seizure of power. As a result, those in
charge of the levers of political power appear to need more time to be ready
intellectually, philosophically, or morally for the society they claim to be
creating.
The
vision of a South Africa being created is trapped in the cocoon of party-political
preference, and thus the prerogative whims of dominant ideological coalitions with
the ANC at its conferences. The in-ANC establishment often ends up being responsible
for coming up with solutions to national problems. Yet there are yet-to-be-known
mechanisms to ask them to examine how their work affects society. This failure
to genuinely consider the governing party policy implications exist because of
the incongruity between the normative expectations of formal constitutional democracy
and the expectations of the prerogative wishes of party ideologues. Most of
those influencing the ANC as an organisation are loyal to its rhetoric, and most expectations emanate from that place. What has increased over time is the new
generation of leaders that understood being ANC in the prism of its
anti-apartheid or system rhetoric and thus have ritualised it as mainstream
political view and not necessarily part of a concretising political order.
Invariably, many that command influence leans towards pursuing a national
democratic revolution, not as an ideological firmament but as a hostile act
against what is otherwise in their control. In other words, a coterie of
idiosyncratic' revolutionaries' might be determining the political and economic
future of South Africa with scant input or oversight from the voting masses
outside of the ANC.
The
unfortunate and real danger of this situation for the nation outside of the ANC
membership is that gradually we become increasingly subjugated to the ideational
limits we scarcely understand, let alone control, otherwise referred to as
resolutions of branches. Revolutionary rhetoric promises economic and political
consequences, and what they need to answer is the programmatic steps related to
the institutional capacity required to deliver on what is promised. The brute
truth is that once you venture into translating the 'revolutionary promise'
into manageable chunks to have, the total system, and through its templates,
must come to the party. That might necessitate gradual unfolding with the risk
of the status quo is a potential enemy of any envisaged change. What might result
is that humanity could hand over its public power to a political elite. Most of
society still needs to understand its objectives and interests fully.
The
future of power
As
the Constitution settles to be the platform upon which political power
contestations will be registered, maintained, and reconciled, the centrality of
political formation will find relevance in direct proportion to how they
advance what the Constitution promises as the liberation dividend. In its
advanced state, the South African Constitution will elevate the rights of an
individual beyond those of a collective. Personal choice, preferences of
political coalitions, and the state’s role will compete for attention to the
extent that jurisprudence and independence of the judiciary allow it. The
growing power of technology as part of government will further create
interactions with political power in ways that reduce the need for the government
while increasing the demand for expansive public administration and management,
albeit predominantly virtual.
The
digitisation of human information, thus movements and demographics, will create
person-to-person interaction across social media platforms to levels where chat
groups become units of influence that can be assembled and disassembled at the
stroke of a click or account closure. Instead of political parties wielding
influence over the direction of power, the brands of political formations or
individuals as leaders in society will drive the diversity of opinion and
condition as a prerequisite to access political power. Companies and States
that control interactions and algorithms will wield power to levels where
regimes might be predetermined with the marginal influence of electoral
preferences. Political parties organising their members within these digital
spaces and creating cyber constituencies will be first in accessing humanity in
its growing area of convenience. As implementation of blockchain technology
advances in integrity to levels where enfranchisement as a human right could be
risked in determining the public power exchange market, so will gatekeeping
within political parties be compromised.
The
volunteering away of personal information to cyber-secured platforms is not
only a sign that humanity is ready for totalitarianism for convenience but an
indication that codes have now reached most corners of human existence. Already
the politics of opinion polling are transformed by increasingly capable
systems, the integrative character of technology, and the quantifiability of
cyber societies. Political parties and the ANC are acutely feeling this at
present. They are finding it challenging to regulate the extent to which
digital platform-enhanced human liberties (freedoms of speech, thought, and
assembly) of its influence-wielding members can put the party into disrepute.
The unprecedented power the following individuals can amass on social media
platforms has made some influence society better than the political party they
belong to. As the cyberspace generation takes over thought leadership spaces,
traditional substrates of ANCness will grow into irrelevance and be easily
replaceable, notwithstanding their impeccable credentials and institutional
memory prowess. As technology takes over platforms and becomes invisible, the
slow to agility character of heritage will give way to a powerful force that
will control internal to the ANC ideation, speech, thought, and consciousness
in ways few of its members will notice, let alone question.
The
55th National Conference of the ANC was the first pilot site for the power of
cyber democracy and socialisation to be deployed. The contest for the top seven
positions of the ANC was monitored through a cyber census of voting delegates,
and last-minute bargaining was precision managed to deliver most of the
outcomes. The disappearance of deliberative democracy, where the substance of what
you represent determined the amount of delegate support you could muster, gave
way to the power of tag lines and tweeting and branded personalities juxtaposed
with the instantaneous rewards at and inside the conference. The fragmented discourse
about what was at stake in society did not even allow 'load-shedding' to
influence outcomes. As a political community, ANC delegates were fed with
political content that conformed to their pre-existing content about each
other, and information where they disagreed with each other was gentrified from
the conference space.
The
battle for the soul of South Africa will 2024 follows the same pattern. The
capacity to shape public discourse away from pre-existing content about
contesting political parties will determine which contenders will have an edge.
While the demographics of privilege have for some time been used to advantage
the ANCs struggle credentials, the access to voters on their gadgets might make
that content difficult to deploy therein. The optimisation of anti-corruption
and state capture as a social ill has already developed its algorithms and searchability
of reports and statistics, including who is involved, which will make daily
breaking news in the build-up to the 2024 national elections. The requirement
of transparency as a mechanism to protect democracy will foreground service
delivery failures and reconfigure voter support to contesting political
parties. Perception control, a feature that drives today’s media freedom, will
follow the pattern of established journalistic hegemony; and the dominant theme
in South Africa is 'talking truth to power', and if the ANC is defined as the
only power, truth must be talked to, the monopoly of critiquing it is in
abundance.
When
good politics start to dominate spaces that deal with social and political
redress politics, habits that prevent publicly minded speech in the potential
contexts of the public sphere tend to react differently to what is otherwise standard
in comparable situations. Without a vibrant public sphere, even within
political formations, notwithstanding their fragile reputations that are
vulnerable to the provocation of actual politics, democracy as a lived citizen
experience might be impossible. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️A
ndzo ti vulavulela, la va twaku va ta twa. Yiii...ndzi myela la. Ndza gimeta.
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