Can SANCO be a dark horse to be ridden? Beware the ides of ...!

    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