The th!nc Foundation

After the Mandela-led Constituent Assembly adopted the 1996 Constitution, the ideal of a non-racial, non-sexist, united, and democratic South Africa looked set to define a new nationhood. The racial and equality tensions that characterised society seemed to have melted into the liberation promise the Constitution guaranteed all citizens. After centuries of land dispossessions and racial discrimination, creating templates for a legalised social order, a race-defined caste system, and an institutionalised racial economic hierarchy, South Africa opted for democracy, human dignity, human rights, and social justice.  Few South Africans were unhappy at the prospect of being one nation and committed to building a new democratic order. However, this ideal underestimated the institutional legacy of the apartheid ideal of seeing South Africans as ethnic and racial enclaves of humanity destined to develop separately. The endurance of ethnic and racial nationalism seems to have been undermined...

Leadership is the art of being followed and revered for what your last performance was about. When society invokes your past to impose it to your present, there is something about your present that does not inspire confidence to face a future with you as a leader. Capturing the imagination of society on what matters to it at the time you should ascend is a sure way of galvanising support from quarters you never imagined. This task has grown to become a science and has practitioners and professionals that specialise in converting torment into advantage.   Generally leaders, especially political ones, tend to dogmatically stick to what worked when they rose to leadership positions they occupy. The truth is that leadership is a function of networks and networking, unless those that were with you when you rose mutate into nodes of new network expansions, they can easily become targets of other networks to capture the new leader's influence. Remember, it takes a network to dislodge anot...

The thought of possible coalition governing arrangements by the 'liberation party' (the ANC), the implicit support by South Africa's civil society and other political parties, and the endorsement of the process by the economic establishment is a good sign about the health of our democracy. This might be the clearest answer to the inconvenient question the governing party is grappling with “Is it time for political power to taste the care or hands of new curators as it has been slowly but surely changing hands at the sub-national level of government? What up to this phase of the 30 years of democracy "may have seemed like an abstract and inchoate challenge has suddenly become real, urgent, and perilous".  In response, genuine members of the liberation complex, who were organised differently during the anti-apartheid struggle, are already organising themselves into ‘leader of society brigades’ outside the ANC as a political party contesting for state power. Sprouts ...

Edited version was published in the Sunday Times on 20 August 2023 The implications of a below 50% threshold election result by all political parties in South Africa will be both a positive test of the resilience of the fragile democratic order and a liability to how it operates on behalf of citizens. The Public Service, as a constituted mind of the state, organised in the three spheres of government, and as organs of state, is a mechanism through which society or citizens interface with the government of the day.  The South African Constitution provides basic values and principles governing public administration, the operational field of Public Service. The Constitution specifies that "within public administration, there is a Public Service for the Republic". This Public Service, over and above its functioning and structuring in terms of legislation, is constitutionally expected to execute the lawful policies of the governing party loyally.    In the last thirty years of...

Up until the EFF became the first opposition political party in South Africa to fill the FNB stadium, many people refused to believe that it is an alternative in the making, if not a new political force to reckon with. Notwithstanding warnings from ANC youth leaguers who were part of the Malema-as-President ANCYL that the delays in allowing the ANCYL conference to sit might result in stranded youth imagination being captured by the EFF, few in the ANC listened. When the EFF called for a 'South African Shut Down' of the economy on 20 March 2023 which was successful, mainstream media and the political commentator complex dismissed it to levels they almost declared it a non-event. The unexpected peaceful character the 'shut down' assumed irrespective of the intimidating rituals fearful states do in such situations, could only demonstrate that a new leader in society has emerged and can command the young and youthful better that any leader of his time.  With no precedent to...

The 2024 National Elections will be the most consequential in defining the true ideological position of the broad church of South Africa, the ANC. The liberation struggle, if enfranchisement was its fundamental goal, has ended. What might be outstanding is the pursuit of the National Democratic Revolution. The steady decline of support for the ANC over the last 15 years, with 2016 and 2021 as difficult-to-dispute indicators, has forced it into a coalition-thinking mode beyond its alliance with the SACP and COSATU.  This has meant that the governing party context of South Africa has been radically altered. The one governing party model of politics does not meet the demands of this complex, rapidly changing phase of the democratic order. The concept of 'the people shall govern' is undergoing new iterations as the idea of political power battles to coexist with its multi-partied character. The time to make sense of what would justify a possible DA/ANC coalition government beyond t...

Like any system, a democratic order is susceptible to disruptions it least anticipates. Democracies navigate complex paths created by those agreeing to govern themselves. One of the most significant disruptors of a democracy is when an election happens, and there is no outright winner. This disrupts paradigms of the majority rules sections of society. It turns upside down the conception of freedom In liberation struggle parties.  The sixth administration of President Ramaphosa is left with less than twelve months to hand over to a seventh administration. The political mandate of South Africa would have been renewed by the end of August 2024. The true feelings of more than 50% of South Africans about the governing ANC would be known as the voter numbers are collated to give election results at the national and provincial spheres of government. What will soon start preoccupying the minds of thinkers and analysts is the impact of a below 50% threshold performance by the governing ANC....

Africa, and South Africa as its abstraction in this rendition, has a wealth of experience and intelligence, or rather wisdom, that its development challenges are incongruent with the knowledge it commands. The nodes of influence of its past leaders at all levels, mainly those interior to its struggles, should be more recognised if not valued. In almost all countries, alumni of the first post-colonial governments are still of cognitive value and can answer the question, 'if I were given a chance again, what would I do differently'? Having not seen the 'resolutions of the ANC veterans league conference in July 2023, this rendition wonders if this question was ever considered by one of its commissions.  In South Africa, which went through a colonialism of a special type, where the coloniser and the colonised lived not as settler and native, but nativity was part of the more significant contest, there are, therefore, elders of a special type too. In machine nomenclature, these ...