The th!nc Foundation

  This is a response to an article in the Mail and Guardian on the 27th of April, 2023, titled The invisibility of Black professionals , by Professor Hlengani Mathebula of the University of Limpopo Business School. The rendering foregrounds matters arising from the piece with a view to giving a completed picture without insinuating any incompleteness. Citing French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who came up with the theory of capital, Hlengani Mathebula posits that to black professionals in South Africa, today is “a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can be anything”. Hlengani Mathebula further argues, as he cites Bourdieu that capital has three “fundamental guises”: economic capital, which mea...

On April 27, every year since 1995, South Africa stops, and the nation is supposedly celebrating its Freedom Day. The question that may not have received attention is what South Africans celebrate beyond that April 27, 1994, extended the full franchise to non-whites as they were characterised at some point. Nations have rituals that give society positive anchors with which they can define their sovereign distinctiveness compared to others. The flag, the national anthem, history, and other heritage symbols are tangibles Nations represent their pride. A shared passion about a past, troubled or peaceful, often defines the mood of being free, even celebrating a Freedom Day. In South Africa, this luxury of celebrating freedom day is a ritual that might be more hollow than society would care to appreciate. When freedom is celebrated, there should be a clear relationship between those celebrating and what exactly they are celebrating to be free from. Apartheid and all discontent that goes wit...

In the years leading up to the 1994 democratic breakthrough in South Africa, what the ANC stood for, as a hegemony of the liberation struggle, was unquestionable. The inhumanity of apartheid, the flagrant marginalisation of women, and the moral authority of the apartheid state to govern without the will of all the people had liquidated the Republic of South Africa of its standing amongst nations of the world. No matter what metric of social and political capital one would look at, they all showed an unprecedented lead in the anti-apartheid struggle by the ANC. Save for the Greenpeace movement, it was challenging to find a morally appealing course to support, in global terms, like the anti-apartheid movement, with the release of Nelson Mandela as its uncompromising symbol of ending the system. Attached to the anti-apartheid movement was the pursuit of constitutional democracy, the sacredness of public accountability as a value system the new dispensation should subscribe to, the suprema...

The advent of a possible national coalition government occasioned by an envisaged low electoral performance of the ANC in 2024 has sparked puzzling thinking about the coalition the ANC might have to form. At the same time, the government of national unity cooperation between the ANC and the liberal right has surged. The economic establishment, scholars, thinkers, and civil society movements have begun pressing the governing ANC to prepare to scale back its commitment to South Africa radically. The inception of South Africa's democracy with a coalition government of national unity despite an outright majority vote for the ANC in 1994 was created to, amongst others, demonstrate the sensitivity to majority rule by the political settlement and prevention of possible civil strife ignited by political marginalisation of 'others'. Apart from the threat of peace by the then political violence in KwaZulu Natal, South African political parties as a coalition behind the success of its...

When President Ramaphosa won the 54th National Conference of the ANC in 2017, and later the 2019 National Elections for him to be sworn in as President of the Republic, many South Africans breathed a sigh of relief. Ramaphosa's NEC recalled Jacob Zuma in early 2018, and one centre of political power was consolidated. This means Ramaphosa is now in his sixth year as President of the Republic. The circumstances surrounding the recall of Jacob Zuma, his 'guilty of corruption and state capture verdict by the courts of public opinion', 'him being paraded at the globally televised Zondo Commission as a symbol of corruption and state capture', and ultimately the 'July 2021 insurrection' following his arrest after a Constitutional Court issued warrant of arrest have shaken the democratic order to its core, only its resilience kept it standing to date.  At the core of Ramaphosa's rise to power has been an unequivocal commitment to fight corruption and state captu...