The th!nc Foundation

Once South Africa starts to appreciate the chasm that separates insiders from outsiders in any setting and, more acutely, the inside story of and about the politics of our transition, we will quickly build the bridges that matter for our political order to advance further than expectations of its Constitution. It is a given and indisputable fact that we are a constitutional democracy. It is also a fact of life that our democracy, like the living beings it is written for, is a living system which should continually change and adapt to the exigencies of the moment. Because we are now regulated as citizens of one country, inevitably, the differential character of those that lead us, the system they operate within, and the ambitions of individuals assigned with the leadership function will settle for currencies of politics, otherwise called interests, that might redefine objectives our Constitution was intended for. As we let go of the mechanical models of seeing ourselves as a society...

When the ANC meets to finalize its go-to-voters message for the 2024 national and provincial elections, the nation will be waiting with the question, 'what will the massage be this time? Polls and surveys indicate a population ready to face the upcoming elections with a resolve to make them yield a truly better life for all. The 2021 local government elections occurred under various difficult circumstances. The Zondo Commission revelations had, by this time, started to be the context of all politics. COVID-19 has started to redefine how humanity does life, interacts, and transacts. It induced the worsening of poverty and inequality. Corruption as the emergent and cardinal enemy of the still fragile new democratic order became the central theme of the 2021 municipal elections, as it had been in the 2019 national and provincial elections.  The service delivery challenges of government, as the arena of politics, the prize of politics, and the residue of past politics made it a subject...

  A country’s constitution reflects society's emotion about its past and a projection into a future the drafters knew they might not be part of its zenith benefits. This defines the leadership cohort that negotiated the South African Constitution. Their never-again emotion that went into the final text is algorithmic to the 'why and what questions' political incumbents cannot find answers to as they negotiate their lived experience and myths of power with a profoundly humanism-driven constitution. The rising anti-constitutional democracy rhetoric can be traced to this dichotomy of believing you are in power, but the normative coordinates of your power dictate that you are subservient to the constitution. If South Africa could be an autocracy, its constitution is the autocrat, for its word is final on all that defines South Africanness. The constitution is a living document that can be as good as its relevance to society. As society’s ability to be democratic matures, its ap...

As South Africa approaches the 2024 national elections, political tensions are roiling and fomenting instability. Anxious thinkers and business leaders wonder if the two biggest political parties should wait to find common ground and advance South Africa towards a more stable political order. In enduring the realities of inequality, the hard-to-recalibrate templates of race-defined class dominance of the economy and the condition of coloniality in the economy find themselves. South Africans need help creating a standard and non-racial lens through which they will understand their problems.  The stop-start attempts at changing the circumstances through a revolution' or 'mass insurrection' indicate deep-seated discontent with civil strife potential. It is interesting to note that there is consensus on the need to recalibrate the entire economic system, yet acutely opposed differences on how to do it. Engagements between the dominant and advocates of a new economic order are i...

  The election of President Ramaphosa will be remembered for having led the inclusion of a younger generation of ANC leaders at the centre of the liberation movement’s decision-making structures whilst at the same time being the one who started the domino for the downward spiral of its youth league. Visibly, political power is getting into the hands of former youth leaders from the immediate past four generations. As power shifts from the SASO to the COSAS-AZASO-SANSCO-SASSCO, and SAYCO-to-ANCYL generational complexes, we must interrogate what (development) content and paradigms instruct the drive to want to lead by the new entrants. In ANC parlance, the question would be, what type of a leader of society will this new brigade of ANC leadership, which Ramaphosa is handholding, be? It is a common cause that the ANC has had several mandate drifts, and its policy revisions do not seem to be informed by any of its postures on what it means to be a leader of society whilst being a gover...

  For up to ninety-five or so years, the African National Congress has dominated the hegemonic space of what ought to have been the correct arrangements with which the South African society should have long agreed to govern itself. Through its monumental documents, The African Claims, the 1949 Congress League Program of Action, The Freedom Charter, The Strategy and Tactics Document, The Constitutional Principles for negotiations, The Harare Declaration, Ready to Govern, The Reconstruction and Development Program, GEAR, and the National Development Plan, the ANC defined South Africa's future as a thesis for an alternative and less of an antithesis of apartheid. Long before it decided in 1961 on the prospect of a violent choice to resolve the impasse with a stubborn racial colonialist state institutionalised as the apartheid state, the ANC believed in the power of reason and persuasion. How it conducted its engagements on non-racialism, universal franchise, human rights, and African ...