Losing an election cannot translate to the end of ANCness. It is at best the truncation of strange breeds of its leadership. ANCness will endure.

 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 claims reflected how a yearning dominated it for a liberal alternative to racial colonialism. In the conduct of the struggle for 'liber(al)ation', the ANC was focused on establishing a political order anchored on a universal franchise as a means to take charge of the government as an active agent of the state. The ANC saw a mechanism in the state to deal with injustice and heal the nation from its past. 

The 1994 democratic breakthrough still represents the ushering in of a new political management process of the state without challenging the theses instructing to the political economy and, by extension, the enduring apartheid templates of subjugation and domination. Constitutional democracy allowed the country to be democratic without an immediate and outright disentangling of society from the grips of apartheid's after-effects, especially its socio-economic impact. True to its form and character, the ANC negotiated the new constitutional dispensation long before the 1996 Constitution was drafted and adopted by a democratically elected Constituent Assembly. A basic structure anchored on (democracy, equality, reconciliation, diversity, responsibility, respect, and freedom) was set up to undergird all negotiations and sit as the background of permanence for the new political order. The constitutional principles in the 1993 Interim Constitution, the legal reference instrument to certify the 1996 Constitution and many other legislations, were negotiated to, at best, guarantee the minimum demands of the Freedom Charter as the basis of calibrating a new political order. The ANC and National Party political accord, represented by the various interactions, euphemistically dubbed talks about talks, before the Interim Constitution was drafted became the declaration upon which a new National Democratic Order would be established. A new political order was thus established under the tutelage of the two oldest Nationalist Movements in South Africa. 

 

What remains difficult to comprehend is how foundering the ANC  has been in its rhetoric that it is still engaged in a ‘national democratic revolution' to establish a 'national democratic society' when it is sworn to the 'political order' it has agreed to and institutionalised as the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. The 'never again' voter mandate to draw up the Constitution inside a Parliament, which was institutionally responsible for passing laws that fought against what undergirds its basic structure, would guide the First Administration and the First Parliament to define the arrangements with which we are today governed. The First Parliament and Administration were a ritualised transition governed in terms of an interim Constitution, with no acute apartheid legislation being in the statutes. How government was constituted represented an elite emotion the country needed to curate the mood of liberation, whilst all that signed knew emancipation was nowhere near what was ritualised. The rational justification for the NDR establishing a NDS is that democraticness in a society is a continuous endeavour; no generation can claim to have drawn a line where it ends. The cocoon within which the narrative of a revolutionary continuum the ANC sometimes finds itself choked might be responsible for how it struggles to calibrate to its commitments during the CODESA negotiations. With its dominant presence and organising prowess on how the democratic order should unfold to the dictates of the Constitution as an agreed template, the convergence of the agreed-upon political order and the difficult-to-fracture economic order can only be shaped by complex, shifting, or drifting and different to comprehend political and geopolitical interests, and less by choices made by citizens. 

 

Despite the complexities of managing interests as a condition of inherent diversities and opinions about what will ultimately qualify as good for South Africa, pursuing the republican ideal by contending forces has pulled together a cohort of leaders to agree about starting a new chapter for South Africa. The idea of freedom was greeted with joy by most South Africans, including those freed from being oppressors. The storyline of the ANC having the bragging rights to having hegemonically led the anti-racial colonialism and anti-apartheid struggle alliance or movement grew to be a background of permanence for any analysis of where and how this democracy originated. However, the battle has, and since 1994, been about wrestling the moral authority with which the ANC could continually draw limitless social and political capital to justify why it should govern South Africa. On a global scale, the self-underrated social and political capital to lead with moral authority all endeavours to undermine institutional racism and many other chauvinisms might have or is attracting international race-based right-wing the decampaigning of South Africa as an investment destination.

 

In entrenching itself as the custodian of the liberation promise it bequeathed to the nation by chiselling it as a constitutional imperative for anyone that might govern the country or an executive authority wielding jurisdiction, either than themselves, the ANC translated its monumental policy documents and positions to be part of the law with which the rule of law would rely upon. This it did in the state, society, and the world.

The State: In constructing the character of the state, the ANC built one of the most elaborate social welfare systems, a social democracy which advocates a ‘nothing-about-us-without-us community development paradigm. It established a policy architecture that has made it difficult for the ANC to take a direction, bought or lobbied, which might undermine its declared intent to be a developmental state.

The ANC has declared, and we have to date not seen anything to dispute this, that “South Africa enjoys a system of vibrant multi-party democracy, with a progressive Bill of Rights which recognises political, socio-economic and environmental rights and obligations, and with separation of powers among the executive, the judiciary and the legislatures. Beyond the formal processes of regular elections and legislatures, various forms of legislated and other forums ensure popular participation”. This declaration defines the ANC beyond the emerging narrow interpretation of the human element-induced leadership deficits, which do not touch its form and character. The state is constructed to allow for accountable bureaucratic discretion monitored through the chapter 9 institutions established as part of the national accountability and oversight ecosystem.

In defining organs of state to broadly include elected and appointed officials exercising a (public) power or performing a function in terms of the Constitution or legislation, the government architecture has emerged out of the negotiations, and went through the policy approval processes of the ANC, notably its Mafikeng Conference, has imbued on South Africans bureaucratic discretion to be allowable to the extent that it advances the liberation promise in the Constitution. This is, in the main, a derivative of the monumental ANC documents mentioned above.

Society: How the ANC, in the drafting process of the Constitution, masterminded the correctness of defining a new society anchored on its historical mission of establishing a non-racial, non-sexist, and democratic South Africa, where no government can claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people. Government and the State were thus calibrated to become permanent institutions of societal leadership only nuanced by policy objects of those who win the political prize through an elected government. The outcome of the constitutional negotiations, notwithstanding fatal compromises on the templates of economic liberation, made it the responsibility of all organs of state and other non-state agents to have a transformation obligation. The preamble declares,

 

We, therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic to ­

·      Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights;

·      Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law;

·      Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and

·      Build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations.

 

What happened then? Engulfed by the sins of incumbency, the steady exit of its first-generation administrators and governors, the subtle marginalisation of its thinkers and thus leader of society material brigades, and the general bug of corruption and state capture which has bedevilled similar liberation movements, the ANC could not escape its current beleaguerment and division melancholy South Africans are suspecting its glory days are behind it. Post-liberation governments worldwide face acute destabilisation related to the scale of raw materials and minerals they command to define the next phase of global development and new industrialisation pathways. The myopic view of the largesse that comes with the resource distribution power that accompanies the state's executive authority has undercut the developmental state agenda and intents, which backed the moral authority of the ANC to lead society into the liberation promise. The moral authority to drive a global development agenda which the ANC still has the template, has seen a sophisticated, aggressive, and globally networked right-wing rushing forward to challenge its hegemony and envisaged role in a hostile world order. Manifesting this is the proliferation of political parties that are all angling towards the neutralisation of majority rule and instead valorise a context of government by a majority of minority parties being in charge. 

 

Notwithstanding, the brute truth is that the institution of the ANC is not foundering. Save for shallow narratives that deflect discourse on the substance of liberation. The translation of the liberation promise in the Constitution into tangibles that are legally protected and constitutionally legitimate, the often foregrounded narratives of individuals failing the ANC being presented as its decline, often ignore the deeper societal influences and circumstances which continue to make the ANC the nexus of South African politics and the triumph of non-racialism as a global value proposition. While South Africa, like all over the world, will be shaped by continuously shifting and complex political motive forces, the ANC's triumph over the world's concentrate of statutory and institutionalised racism with spatial demographics that valorise divisions, positions its institutional edifice to withstand any onslaught that carries with it the defence of what the ANC stands for as an institutional make-up. The correctness of the causes it champions as an institution has made anything beyond that distinctly abhorrent. It is easy to craft a narrative hellbent on carving off the moral authority its causes continue to command. The rise of brazen politics of anarchy and unbridled dominance of profit motive-driven greed as alternatives to a developmental paradigm promised by the South African Constitution has resuscitated the leader of society brigades of the ANC into action. 

 

The write-off of the ANC will be rendered impossible by its sheer dominance of any history that explains what was wrong about South Africa for most of its formal democratic history if the non-blacks-only franchise meets the broader criteria of democracy. The recent shenanigans of corruption and state capture define a term of office by individual leaders of the ANC and perhaps tangentially reflect on the ANCs sleeping on duty as an institution of leadership, but how it has and is responding is what will define it into posterity. Electoral democracy turns to interpret voter reactions to narratives, including the choice to abstain from voting instead of voting out the incumbents, as a sign that political parties will fade into senescence. This is further from the truth regarding the ANC as it draws its power not only from its voter numerical strength but on the monumental contributions its ideation prowess continues to shape the institutionalisation of democracy. The political order, which is unfolding in South Africa, and the Democratic Order all are contesting to lay their hands on, is now built as a system and, in some instances, settled as the template of being democratic the South African way. 

 

These systems or templates whirred into action when the scourge of corruption and state capture was thrust onto the face of the nation. The logics of anarchy, greed, and corruption were processed through the structures of the ANC, and a policy process to directly deal with the integrity issues of ANC members was set in motion. The resultant membership integrity management system, which is internal to the ANC, has upped the bar to the extent that the support of the ANC is no longer guaranteed until a guilty verdict in the criminal justice system is pronounced. Through this, the ANC has come out clean in protecting the political and democratic order it has presided over in the struggle to attain it. This has already started to position the ANC to remain at the centre of the political and democratic order and system in part because of its role as a pivot in how the mobilisation of persistent national grievances is balanced with the exigencies of delivering on the entire gamut constituting the liberation promise.  

 

The merits of ANC’s hegemonic endurance don't just lie in what its members, primarily rogue in character, do about newfound power, but in how it brought about this democracy and its correctness for humanity. The ANC earned its position to be in the hegemonic advantage it now commands. The coalition-building prowess of the ANC in how it crafted the global anti-apartheid movement, and through the UDF, how it prevailed over the NGO sector and all other formations committed to the ideals in the Freedom Charter. CUT!!!