The ANC might not be ready for voters at the 2024 polls. A si gupeni...!

     South Africa is undergoing a stressful period of load shedding and its attendant down-the-line failings, primarily how it is disrupting electricity-dependent industry sectors. The implications of these disruptions and other public infrastructure failings are redefining how voters will henceforth understand the importance of their voting power. There is, therefore, a growing challenge to the social and political capital the ANC has amassed during the struggle against apartheid colonialism and, thus, its hegemony during elections. 

With its expanding perceptual appeal as the alternative to the ANC, the national opposition complex is at the forefront of this challenge, albeit with a coalition government flair and parlance. The opposition promises an alternative society, despite failing where it has had governing opportunities. The governing ANC must rise to the challenge. Unfortunately, it faces the task of understanding the true nature of the national discontent about it being given a further mandate to govern. 

 

Voter support for the ANC has been in decline, a context which interrogates whether the liberation movement's election machinery is appropriately focused, postured, and resourced to understand the many dimensions of the opposition complex's voter support grabbing threat and preparing on how to respond. A casual poll of ANC members reveals that service delivery failures have dampened the mood of ANC activists to a state of not being ready to face society and justify why the ANC should be voted to power again. Worrying is the ill-preparedness of its structures to execute an election campaign without the incentives which made its internal party contestations possible.

 

Thinking revitalization.

 

The growth of issue-based civil society movements and the increasing registration of new political parties has come startlingly fast. Leaders of these organisations believe in their voter value proposition, including that their existence will increase the prospects of a  new coalition against the ANC. The standard message is the restoration of South Africa's service delivery capability. 

 

The conversion of the courts into a terrain of battling majority rule and the successes thereof have emboldened the opposition complex's belief in the possibility of unseating the ANC from power. What the governing party celebrates as gains made since the 1994 democratic breakthrough has 'apparently' been undermined by court judgements based on non-contextual jurisprudence and a potentially hostile cognitive legal elite that might, and arguably, be in a vortex of judicial overreach. The resurgence of minority rights interests, which 'must' be protected as elections campaigning subjects, have rejuvenated the own affairs believing brigades disguised as regionalist lobbies. Tribalism is not only rife for its negative reasons but follows the income inequality patterns and middle-class affluence affirmations. To that end, the opposition complex has erected an elaborate system of domestic control to maintain oppositional hegemony, power, and control information as they advance the geopolitical neoliberal ideological gains. It is a matter of time before society gets out of the voter apathy cocoons instructed by a not-so-distant memory of apartheid experience under parties other than the ANC. 

 

The disturbing degree to which the opposition complex has developed a model of justifying the maintenance of the current templates of political and economic dominance by a few is most evident in how subtle race and class gentrification succeeds in the Western Cape Province. The socioeconomic and resources dominant support base of the core substrate of the opposition complex continues to view and fund (electoral) competition with the ANC unfolding in "ideological and zero-sum terms". Investment in infrastructure to dominate the influence of the South African cohort of the cyber community and establishing therein doctrinal shifts the substrate ideological point of departure the ANC relies upon is ideationally suffocated. The citizenship to the cyber community is fast becoming reliant on compliance with the demands of the cultural majority as manifest in the redefined and existing conceptions of how a twenty-first elections battle would unfold. 

 

In addition to the litigation wars, lawfare, the opposition complex has been extending the battlefield to the national political discourse, content deployment into mobile devices as the emerging proverbial city hall, and the broader infrastructure that modern digital communication and communities rely upon. In that vein, we have been subjected to how the opposition complex sought to distort the stark realities of inequality, poverty, and unemployment at the behest of a corruption and state-capture narrative. This has to date, succeeded in preventing the universe of South African politics from engaging with the templates of economic dominance as what needs to be recalibrated to bring about different policy outcomes.

 

Obligation to renew. 

 

For the governing ANC to anticipate and respond, it will need emotionally intelligent election management machinery and expertise beyond what they have traditionally relied upon as cadres to deploy for this sophisticated task. The mere continuation of membership record management is evidence enough that those responsible for voter intelligence and preference surveillance might need to be focusing on the right things to manage. After the 2021 July events in Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal and the outcomes of the 2021 Municipal Elections, there is evidence that the ANC was focusing on dealing with the discontents of society in the way it is governing South Africa. Instead, we saw an ANC which reoriented its efforts towards its internal renewal. 

 

Notwithstanding the plausible focus on itself as an institution of leadership, and thus a custodian of the dominant social and political capital to undergird the liberation promise in the Constitution, its removal of the foot on the fact that is a party that must win elections might have catastrophic consequences to the stability of South Africa's democracy. The brute truth is that as the ANC was occupying the space of being government, the opposition complex was transforming itself into a hegemony capable of supplanting the ANC as the custodian of the leader of society high moral grounded posture. Anchoring to this opposition complex's transformation has been its increasing hegemonic control of the information and political narrative environment, especially given the propensity of the majority in the population to flirt with anti-system and anti-establishment politics easily. The opaque strategy to establish a coalition of minorities into a majority is not only on track and intact but has continued to vex ANC leaders seeking to develop sound and impactful policy towards the consolidating opposition complex's narrative that the ANC is the problem of South Africa. Consequently, if the ANC, especially its thinkers, fail to discern and characterise the opposition complex's intent of making minorities the majority, it will struggle to understand its new terrain of political power maintenance.  Comforting in these circumstances is that the recent conference outcomes have given the ANC capability, internal credibility, and time to change course. 

 

First, political deployees must reorient organs of state into a service delivery machinery. The ANC could not afford to carry the label of 'why did you take us out of proverbial Egypt if you knew we were going to die in the desert". It can only afford to go into full election mode with an answer or solution to the electricity crisis. The lights must switch on. 

 

Second, the ANC's basic units of community mobilisation, people's power structures such as shop steward councils, SANCO branches, and fraternal faith-based and community-based organisations must better adapt the elections manifesto message to the sheer depth of discontent at the ANC. A process to facilitate rapid responses by organs of state to service delivery challenges should define the seriousness of the ANC renewal plan as being about South Africa. Given the increasing pace of civil society activism to create conditions for regime change, driven partly by social media and mobile communications, the ANC needs to adapt and modernise its strategy quickly. That might well mean using artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse data to find what we need to make decisions quickly. Notwithstanding the ethics related to Donald Trump’s success in using Facebook metadata, election politics are becoming increasingly sophisticated one-on-one relationships with voters. 

 

Third, the ANC needs to review how it views the opposition complex genuinely. The opposition complex presents a loss of political power threat and a loss of the moral correctness of having executed the struggle against colonialism and apartheid and replacing them with a Freedom Charter-inspired Constitutional Democracy. Understanding the obligation to defend the moral correctness of ridding South Africa of the effects of apartheid might include accepting that the ANC no longer has the monopoly to lead society in that direction. The mere bequeathing of the Freedom Charter demands to society by entrenching them in the Constitution should be messaged as an acceptance of the ANC that the leader of society brigade is beyond its membership and supporters. 

 

Addressing these dimensions of being a renewed ANC, which understands itself inside the country's Constitution, will require a significant realignment of the types of individuals and skill sets it recruits, retains, invests in, and allows to lead its specialised programs. They should stop being shy about hiring technical experts as a run-of-the-mill practice. It cannot expect to run a global top 40 economy without its brigade of professionals to serve throughout its analytic corps. It should also formalise and broaden programs designed to hire and mentor the next generation of ANC leaders; finalising the renewal of the ANCYL is urgent. 

 

Beyond the known threat of losing political power in the 2023 national elections, there is a range of opposition complex-friendly influence actors and operations, many of which are funded and organised by a global academic media complex in pursuit of a geopolitical influence agenda. The race for resources in Africa cannot be airbrushed as a strategic influencer to how the election threat is part of the hegemonic intents of global capital. There is a clear pattern of South Africa-specific encroaching influence efforts targeting cultural institutions, provincial and local government institutions, media organisations, educational institutions, businesses, think tanks, and policy communities. 

The ANC must not only recalibrate itself to withstand this onslaught but should strengthen its ability to categorise, disrupt, and deter the opposition complex disguised influence operations to effect hegemon change to give way for a pliant regime. Even as it contends with the threat of losing political power, the ANC must increase its engagement with its traditional constituencies, including by championing what it originally stood for; the attainment of Freedom Charter demands. The ANC must hold onto its leader of society role because if it does, the opposition complex will step in and redefine the original idea of liberation or attainment of Imvo za baNtu. CUT!!! 

🤷🏿‍♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela makwerhu