When generational mix signals a shift of the template, we ask, what is the new?

 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 governing party. The ideation deficit in the leadership supply side of the ANC, and because of no institutional feeder organisation, given the dearth of the ANC’s Congress League traditions, has reduced the hegemonic prowess of the ANC amongst South Africa’s youth. The civil society movement character, which propelled the liberation movement form of the ANC, has declined. The unoccupied civil society space has, for the past 30 years, been gradually annexed by an opposition complex whose intents are by design hostile to the transformation appeal of the new dispensation. 

As the exigencies of being a government demand all political leaders to contest based on who can best deliver the liberation promise in the Constitution, the extent to which the entering generation has a relationship with the legal and legitimate paths to transformation in the Constitution is what might define if the ANC will sustain its leader of society position. The elevation of the post-1976 youth generations, who have done well to equip themselves educationally, is a good sign that a new inside-the-ANC establishment is in ascendance. In the ANC’s top seven, only President Ramaphosa and National Chairperson Gwede Mantashe are the remaining threads that connect to earlier generations. Deputy President Paul Mashatile and Treasurer General Gwen Ramokgopa are of the AZASO-SAYCO nexus, whilst the rest come from the later youth formations that folded into the progressive youth alliance now called the ANCYL-YCL-SASSCO nexus. These generational embroideries repeat themselves in the ANC NEC and NWC, with the March 2023 Cabinet reshuffle consolidating them into the National Executive of the Republic, wherein the apex of the Executive Authority is vested. 

 

Many would assume that the renewal and modernisation of the ANC is a project in partial force. How the Ramaphosa Presidency drives renewal is a function of modernising the ANC to become a more formal political party that does not ditch its liberation movement character. The 54th Conference of the ANC, NASREC 1.0, will go into history as one where the ANC made a voluntary and calculated decision to embark on a mid-course correction to preserve its essence as a national leader of society. This included a decisive and bold step of being brutally honest in dealing with those of its leaders that were weighing down on its earned reputation as the leader of society. The rapid institutionalisation of the member integrity management system, emboldening of the criminal justice system to know it has the highest political support against corruption and its adjunct state capture, the ditching of the “innocent until proven guilty shield for criminal acts” that put the ANC into disrepute in favour of “step aside and be innocent until proven guilty outside our leadership structures”, and various other consequence management acts; have now been accepted as modules of the broader renewal and modernisation process. While much can still be done, progress indicates the irreversibility of anti-corruption and state capture as one of the core modules of renewal and modernisation. 

 

In barely half a decade, the renewal program of the ANC has made what was settling in as normal when conducting business with the public sector the new abnormal. While it is true that the sophistication of corruption and state capture has gone to levels our law enforcement agencies have not imagined, the public service has progressively been improving its anti-corruption quotient. The context and meaning of the public service are undergoing reviews, revisions, and iterations to embed ethicalness that will be very much part of the culture intelligence defining South Africa's public sector. To be an ANC leader is fast becoming a public service obligation over and above being a keynote of diversity and opinion in political matters. Members of the ANC gradually have in common their membership to it and their acceptance of the rules, which enable it to hold together the defence of its integrity and reputation through their conduct. As a result, dominant nomenclature in speeches and policy pronouncements of those in the executive indicates new convictions about the purpose of government and being leaders of society from within the ranks of the ANC. A new renewal and modernization-focused leader of the society brigade is under construction. This is not an ecdysis but a change of metamorphosis proportions; every stage of the organisation is becoming distinctly different to the one preceding it. 

 

When Ramaphosa took over the reins of the ANC politically, its support was on a sliding slope. It was led by a President who became newsmaker of the year for reasons most of which did not leave the reputation of the ANC in a healthy state. He inherited a party that was a subject of a Commission of Inquiry on State Capture through its former cadres as proxies of its tacit approval or otherwise of what they were allegedly accused of. He entered at a time when the outcomes of public infrastructure maintenance neglect and organised scrap metal criminal syndicates were pilfering all steel and iron-based public infrastructure to levels of halting the service. He entered two states of national disaster, one threatening food security, drought, and the other threatening lives, COVID-19. Consequently, the renewal program got interrupted, and the state of disaster, which the national accountability ecosystem had no experience in dealing with its potential corruption elements, resuscitated the dying corruption and state capture bacteria to levels it even engulfed those that were paragons of the anti-corruption brigade undergirding a Ramaphosa renewal and modernisation project. It dawned on South Africa that the stability of its democracy is inextricably linked to its ability to deal with the scourge of corruption and criminality, both of which reached embarrassingly higher levels during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown periods. 

 

Interestingly, the renewal of the ANC has historically been successful when there are generational infusions. Its formation in 1912 was an outcome of a generational reawakening, and many of its decisive epochs are defined by generational infusion. In fact, its current decline in being a leader of society can be ascribed to its refusal to allow the first post-1994 generational infusion to recalibrate it towards a future its youth was imagining, economic freedom in its lifetime. The module of internal renewal has thus been affected by more of a remembering cohort of leadership than one which imagined a future it will inherit. Amongst the many modules of renewal and modernisation, the ANC has been able to recover, through natural attrition and purposeful engineering by a youth cohort committed to a generational mission of ‘economic freedom in our lifetime’, from being dominated by older cohorts of leaders. The 55th National Conference sent a definitive message; the other opportunity is to recalibrate Parliament and thus the Republic's legislative and executive authority. This will happen in the next eighteen months. The judiciary is also experiencing subtle entries of a new cohort of jurists, arguably graduates from these ascending cohorts of the establishment. The template has shifted but to where?

 

The presence and vibrancy of civil society and an almost autonomous public realm in South Africa is more of its strength than the liability earlier conceptions of the true nature of our democracy almost turned into it. The power of the ANC has always been how it works its constituencies towards a defined program. As a governing party, it has been unable to make this strength a mechanism to be at the touch points of society’s expectations. As an African liberation movement, the ANC has been quick, if not careless, to focus its capacity to appease the foreign investor community by making the economy about its goals instead of the well-being, maintenance, and preservation of South Africa. This has completed the renewal and modernisation module of growing the economy elusive and woefully tricky. Like many other countries that did not stubbornly defend their economies, it will be challenging to combine democracy as it is now understood with the process of economic take-off, simply because investor-origin-national interests have subjugated national interests. The template of being the leader of society should thus be attuned to what defines South Africa as a nation. The National Interest has been described as protecting and promoting its national sovereignty and constitutional order, citizens' well-being, safety and prosperity, and a better Africa and world.

 

The Ramaphosa-Mashatile Presidency should therefore be seen as a moment of historic change. It is a time to put the ANC, and South Africa, on a path to transform itself into a modernised party of a global top 30 economies modern state. As South Africa’s constitutional democracy enters an era of contested modernity and conflictual hegemonies, the reign of political rhetoric that does not translate into bread-and-butter issues is ending. The preamble of our Constitution, which attaches importance to unity and sovereignty more than anything else, should propel the ANC as the governing party and, by extension, the country, to focus on the following, which are uniquely South African,

 

1.   South Africa is a century-old constitutional state with government templates that undergird the stability of the non-racial, non-sexist, and democratic order under construction. Its constitutional history has carried the systems and structures of society through time, and it will be difficult to rule outside what the law provides and obligates. The history of a formal constitutional state has, for the past hundred years, institutionalised the importance of law in inserting the common interests of society into the actual behaviour of its citizenry. From within this constitutional history and culture, there is an expectation that the law, as the undergirding currency of constitutionalism, will establish the futures of society according to its values and normative ecosystems.  Its variously defined and celebrated democratic breakthroughs have been about how those in control of government as an agency of the state repurpose it to address what is contextually a ‘national grievance’ as at the redefinition of the purposes of the state apparatuses.

 

2.   The South African constitutional state views its private sector and capital as tributaries of state power and, thus, an agency of the state. Until the 1909 National Convention, which led to the 1910 Constitution, any resemblance of statehood was a calibration of bureaucratic processes with which the demands of an emerging capitalist class and the extractive mercantilist interests of colonising powers would be served. The state that emerged from 1902 to 1909 constitutional negotiations resulted from a need by mining magnates and industrialists for an integrated measure of regularity and predictability over the geographical space, ultimately called South Africa. Capital’s socio-political fears of the native majority question and its commitment to achieving and cementing white unity and racial domination of the rest necessitated the formalisation of all forms of violence in a monopoly by the state. Human settlements, energy planning, urbanisation, national logistics planning, and national security started as private sector domains, and concerns that their transference to the state created tributaries of an otherwise mercantilist state as extensions of the 1910 Constitution established state. This template got repeated at all constitutional reform and change epochs defining South Africa as a constitutional state. Politics explained new nuances without denting the established templates, which are still tributaries of the state.  The state revenue depends on private sector taxation and income tax collected on behalf of the state by private firms.

 

3.   South Africa has a troubled race relations history and baggage. The global standard terminology of the worst form of racial discrimination, segregation, institutionalised, and statutory racism is apartheid, one of the terminological exports South Africa has sponsored to the world. In crafting its way forward, most of South Africa’s new departures get entangled in its pre-existing context of race as a dominant vector of most of its thinking and ideation. South Africans regard themselves as different races. Some legislations have a definition section explaining who is black, and by implication, whoever is not is white.

The institutionalisation of apartheid through; the Group Areas Act 41 of 1950, the Population Registration Act 30 of 1950, the Influx Control Law of 1923, the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act 49 of 1953, the Immorality Act of 1927, and other legislations established near permanent race relations contours which define class and castes based on race. South Africa’s social intelligence (a person’s ability to understand and manage interpersonal relationships, including race relations) has since 1948 been on a decline to levels it is obfuscating efforts at building one nation and social cohesion. The innate sense of separateness and, in some instances, unbridled racial superiority and inferiority, continues to mark templates of subjugation and dominance and, by extension, interactions in the political economy realm.

4.   The South African body politic has a duality of politicians operating in the supremacy of the Constitution and the rule of law normative context, with a lived experience of the supremacy of Parliament and rule by law arbitrary prerogative context. The South African state has been bureaucratically authoritarian for most of the years in its formalisation as a constitutional state. It graduated from being a colonial outpost to a race-inspired separate development republic, which did not share power with ‘non-whites’. The political intelligence (the ability to adapt to new political settings) of South Africans has thus been about the furtherance of the idea that state authority is responsible to no one but to its preservation and the preservation of the interests of the establishment or elites in their various categories.

The lived experience of oppression by the state defines how the system relates to the citizenry. The concept of the public and who the public is, which represents the innate character of the public service, remains chocked in an era where new development paradigms still follow the erstwhile institutionalised population group profiling. Planning systems, political ward demarcations, access to ‘new public’ amenities, and per capita expenditure of social services and education are still structurally choked in the apartheid grand design templates. The basic structure of politics has moved in respect of its legitimacy and remained static in keeping the legality of the status quo intact.

5.   The South African economy is an economy in South Africa, and still struggling to be an economy of South Africa. The per capita computation of South Africa’s GDP has, for a long time, been unable to reconcile with the per capita share in the economy by all. These computations, if interrogated deeper, might indicate that even the per capita share in the economy by education qualification cannot reconcile with the demographic make-up of wealth and opportunity accessibility concentrations. The experienced economic growth epochs have, at most material times, been inextricably linked with cheap labour or the wage labourasation of natives or equivalent castes. It is arguable that South Africa’s economic growth, or the proven templates to grow it, is unimaginable without cheap labour. The structure of the economy, its industrialisation pathways, and economic transformation cannot extend beyond the imagination of extractive economies whose livelihoods depend on South Africa’s consumption character.

The shifting template should have as content the building of a resilient governing party and, thus, government. The characterisation of the liberation movement wheel as containing spokes with which the pillars of the anti-apartheid struggle were symbolised might need to be invoked to define a new continuum with a key strategic end state for South Africa. The interdependence of a government system, a state architecture, the ideological posture of the governing party, and the requirement to be Constitutional and, thus, legal and legitimate must define the essence of state capability and capacity to deliver on obligations to society.

The structure of the new establishment should be generationally modularised and synchronised to absorb or avoid shocks from one generational cohort, not to reverberate throughout all the components of the new liberation movement or modernised party system and tear apart as the 52^nd National Conference in Polokwane did. The distinct characters of in-party generations should be mixed to stay modular components of the same ideological system but contained to ensure that failing generations as components of the same system do not collapse the entire leader of society brigade development system.

The eldership system, which embodies the heritage and traditions of the leader of the society creation system, should be calibrated into a necessary redundancy with which strategic buffers could be created to cushion the movement against unexpected shocks; notwithstanding its discontents, the 55^th Conference might be a model to emulate going forward. With the dearth of ideation and the growing encumbrances of leading thinkers within in-party generations and as leaders of society system components, organising these as cohorts of ideation with which the resilience of the settling generational mix could be strengthened. As the shift to younger leaders takes shape, the party as an institution should nurture a shift in mindset and encourage past cohorts to enter the leadership mentorship rings with answers to this nostalgia fracturing question ‘if I were given a chance to be part of this generation how relevant would I be’.

The robustness of the renewal and modernisation process will then subscribe to a truism that adaptiveness as a module of renewal and modernisation is not merely about surviving national crises. Instead, it should be seen as learning how to better respond to future crises from such crises. Recent failures in collaborating to aggregate diverse ideational resources embedded in factions and in-party coalitions have demonstrated how misapplied ideation can propel crises in society. What Ramaphosa has put together, by design or default of in-party fatigue at differing, should be harnessed to be embedded as part of a wider political order creation and democratic order consolidation. As an institution of leadership, the ANC should cultivate this cohort of the ebullient leader of society brigade into a team whose diversity must result in the appropriate use of talent. CUT!!