South Africa might be entering a new phase of anti-system politics
that does not have race and apartheid colonialism as its vector of analysis and
existence. Literature on anti-system or Establishment politics reveals that
fundamentally, anti-system activists, and ultimately voters, are bred by
frustrations with political systems they perceive as broken and with economies
that reward only the wealthiest. This generally occurs in societies where a
democracy promises equality, rights, and equity for all voters, and yet the
predominant political economy, more acutely capitalism, continually delivers
inequality, poverty, and unemployment. The rise of anti-system parties or civil
society movements is "the direct consequence of loosening the bond between
voters and the representatives they elect, and the increasing perception that
political parties serve a narrow elite of career politicians and insider
interests".
Those in command of
borrowed public power tend to dismiss anti-system movements purely on political
grounds. "Dismissing angry opposition to the status quo due to
self-indulgence, encroaching greed, or susceptibility to foreign influences and
propaganda is a serious mistake vulnerable democracies with fragile political
stability systems make. It is easy to think that anti-system and Establishment
activism is mainly socio-economic and political. The brute truth is that "economics
is the real animating force behind anti-system and anti-establishment
politics". The absence of theoretical justifications for proxy demands in
the stead of more profound anti-system politics, such as Radical Economic
Transformation, can mutate into a cocktail of grassroots demands leading to a
revolution whose outcome can only qualify as anarchy.
Whereas
South Africa has been buying its time away from the possibility of a social
revolution through its elaborate social grant system and exotic leftist
rhetoric, the liberation promise that the Constitution holds has been
progressively accruing to a cognitive elite, with income equality being its
pornographic indicator that something is wrong. There is a clear gap in
political representation in defence of society's economic interests, purely due
to the monopolistic character of the South African economy. The economy breeds
unconscious oligarchs operating within a normative corporate governance system
justified by the audit standards generated by the contentious system and its
global establishment. Ideologically, especially in how the economic interests of
society should be defended, the governing party and the entire opposition
complex are indistinguishable from one another, save for the rhetoric. This is notwithstanding
profound shifts in public opinion on society's accurate expectations from a
self-declared developmental state.
The
latest acceptance of nomination and ultimately election as Kwa Zulu Natal SANCO
Chairperson by former President Jacob Zuma has not only elicited questions on
the significance of SANCO in the political ecosystem of South Africa but
questions of 'what is the game plan? This rendition submits that the potential
rise of Jacob Zuma through SANCO (KZN), and maybe explanatory to other related
events in his support, can be best explained: "as a broad-based rejection
of the existing political establishment and its failure to protect the living
standards of the majority".
The
growing crisis of leadership diffusion in South Africa, propelled by indecision
in areas of strategic political positioning of a post-apartheid South Africa,
has become a breeding ground for maverick politicking. The roots of discontent
in any society are bread and butter-issues affecting humans’ daily livelihood.
Governments find themselves in conflict with society when they fail to provide
what has become essential services to those they preside over the state on their
behalf. In South Africa, the collapse of apartheid separated development's
flagship, and still spatially impactful, black local authorities policies were
rendered ineffective and ungovernable by the township civic movement led by
SANCO. Amongst all other formations of the Mass Democratic Movement, the civic
movement proved to be the wall-to-wall institutional framework within which
demands of society could be articulated, and through them, the crisis of the
apartheid state was brought to bear in direct relation to day-to-living
conditions. The organic character of civic politics made it difficult for the
repressive state to argue why certain services were not available to humans of
African origin, yet they were part of the same city or regional tax base.
The
importance of the civic movement, which also doubled up as a conglomeration of ratepayer
associations with a political intention, was to the ANC's liberation struggle
strategy and tactics a key social motive force. It provided strategic platforms
to ensure the mass-based character of the ANC and the national grievances it
successfully led, as articulated in the Freedom Charter.
It
was thus logical for the ANC to recognise SANCO as the plus-one of the
tripartite alliance, which included the profoundly ideological South African
Communist Party and Congress of South African Trade Unions. SANCO operated
effectively as the liberation movement's wards and street committee-level
communication machinery that the apartheid state could not quickly suppress.
The effective worker stay-aways, consumer boycotts, and rates and services
payments boycotts that still bedevil the ESKOM revenue collection capacity were
facilitated through the civic movement. It remains the most public, yet cellular
politicisation infrastructure that defined the end days of the anti-apartheid
struggle system.
The
1994 democratic breakthrough, an outcome of a negotiated political settlement,
rearranged the pecking order of the revolutionary alliance plus-one. SANCO became a true plus-one in how the ascension to formal and remunerative
political work was ultimately defined. At best, SANCO leaders that could not
make it into the ward-based branch leadership of the ANC, and thus become
councillors, could only be absorbed by the proportional system; otherwise, the
growing option for those that were politically ambitious has always been standing as independents. This made SANCO a
strategic and potentially formidable organisation with a national organic footprint,
to be available for the taking by an astute and calculating political
agenda.
The African National Congress is an ideologically amorphous construct, only explainable by its famous tag-line that it is "a broad church". Any deeper interrogation of what it ideologically stands for yields the statement that it is still pursuing 'a National Democratic Revolution to create or establish a National Democratic Society'. In essence, this means it is still going somewhere from somewhere, and along the path, it will define or meet its end state. Articulated differently, its five-yearly policy pilgrimages, also called policy conferences, ideationally held together by a broadly written Freedom Charter, will, and as a continuum, define its pathways, sometimes dangerously at the whims of dominant factions, funded interests and political exigencies instructing specific pilgrimages. The alliance partners have for a while provided a semblance of ideological consistency to levels where it grew into a natural force of the left without a clearly articulated leftist ideological stance, save for its gradual migration to the centre, and purely as a result of the institutional leadership dictated to by what instructs the macro-organisation of the state as the logical apparatus to deliver the liberation promise articulated in the country's Constitution. Arguably, the liberal character of the Constitution seems to be winning in fomenting the ANC-as-governing-party ideological cadence.
The
growing, though denied by many pundits and analysts, symbolic stature of Jacob
Zuma as representing what the cognitive elite consensus does not want cannot be
airbrushed. Even with evidence of grand malfeasance, which occurred
during his Presidency, what he represents, has, for a while, been searching for
a political institutional framework through which it could be articulated. The
poverty, inequality, and unemployment demographics decorating South Africa's socioeconomic landscape are to politicians, especially in the ilk of Jacob Zuma, political
capital to convert into votes, or significant tools to influence the country’s destiny.
The build-up to the SANCO National Conference and the rhetoric emerging interior
to its structures might well be a proxy conference for the suppressed Radical
Economic Transformation brigade within the ANC to organisationally ventilate its instructing discontents. The alliance of the wounded
with a noble agenda can redefine any history.
Whilst Polokwane was a watershed moment in defining a new trajectory for South Africa, including the Guptarisation of its National Executive and Accounting Authority apparatuses, the ZUMA SANCO move might define new and unique paths, guided by a clear and passionate quest, to salvage his battered legacy. As Shakespeare has wrote, "beware the ides of ...my crown I am, but still my griefs are mine. You may my glories and my state depose but not my griefs; still am I king of those.” At best this move might be reminiscent of Brutus's posture when Ceasar was considered for the throne when he said, “the abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.”
Some horses are too bright to be ignored until they grow too dark to be ridden. SANCO might just be a broad daylight dark horse being saddled for an interesting political ride in not a distant future. The conflict between a complacent establishment and its antagonists generally escalates parallel with the economic downturn. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️Ndzo ti tsalela, swihlayi swi ta dya
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