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 as a possible
political mobilisation force by maverick leaders. The dividends of the spatial
engineering of human settlements have made such mobilisations a social
normality that the non-racial mindset is bowing to the rigidities of
ethnic-defined regionalisms.
With
the 2024 National and Provincial elections promising to be the most
consequential in defining the resilience of South Africa as a democratic order,
the form and character of political mobilisation under the guise of coalitions
have demonstrated that South Africa might not have decisively dealt with the
'national question'. The terrain of electoral contestations provides a platform
for race and ethnic-defined political mobilisation as the new instrument to
sustain the apartheid-era-created racial oligarchy governed through an
untransformed economic order.
While
the democratic order is not yet at pornographic risk, the liberation promise
that the constitutional order guarantees the majority of South Africans might
be endangered by a perfect storm of coalition government arrangements that
could have interests aimed at choking critical aspects of the very liberation
promise. Since the political power shifts of 2016 and 2021 in metropolitan and
densely urbanised municipal governments, there has been a marked backslide in
advancing the fracturing of templates of economic dominance the constitutional
order has codified as the new normal. Through litigation, jurisprudence is
recalibrating the lawfulness of many an aspect of the liberation promise and
thus tinkering with how healing the injustices of the past settles as a memory
of the future.
Unlike
outright denial of opportunities to those subjugated by a politically defeated
racial oligarchy, coalition political arrangements have craftily used hung
municipal voter outcomes to gradually redirect, if not choke, the cadence of
the liberation promised by rewriting the economic transformation and related
playbooks that were beginning to take root.
Notwithstanding,
out of the coalition arrangements, there had been green shoots of wanting to
build South Africa as an open society democratic order with equal opportunities
that do not guarantee equity of outcomes. Municipal coalition governments have,
at least in their rhetoric and spasmodic implementation, realised that the
democratic order will only survive if it adapts and revitalises itself for new
generations facing significant challenges, ranging from energy, water, and logistics
security to growing inequality, as manifest by chronic unemployment.
With
a near memory history of apartheid, this intense, emerging comprehension of
South Africanness cannot imagine society through non-racial and caste-free
lenses. This has impacted the ideological basis of political coalitions in
South Africa. While there is an apparent battle for the 'liberal soul' of South
Africa, with the ANC pulling it towards the liberal left with socialist
rhetoric, the DA is drawing towards a liberal left with an unfortunate racial
supremacist lace that subscribes to a South African specific notion of right-wing
definition. The convenience of mobilising around an anti-ANC ticket, with the sad
service delivery and corruption track record of the past fifteen years, has
blurred the view of society to realise that the socio-political demise of what
the ANC stands for ideologically might mean a tacit collusion in the rejection
of the liberation promise in the Constitution.
The
conflictual character of opposing the ANC as a governing party and separating
how you oppose it from its liberation movement characteristics seems to be only
mastered by the EFF, save for its rhetoric not being able to transcend
perceptions of it being anti-white. The intertwining of the
ANC-as-a-liberation-movement objectives with the essence of the constitutional
order has made the failings of the ANC as the governing party, including the failings
of its leaders as personalities, put to risk the democratic and constitutional
order. It is in the interface of the two ANCs that South Africa has to deal
with, which makes the coalition arrangement a risk to the liberation promise
and, by extension, the liberal order.
On
the other hand, the true integrity of a democratic order is the ability of its
beneficiaries to determine how it configures the government of the day through
the lawful means it has adopted. In any case, democracy, at its zenith or apex,
"should represent popular control over decision making…and equality
(of opportunity) between citizens in the exercise of that control.”
One
of the tenets of democracy is its demand for continuous political discourse,
debate and respect for dissent. To meet this demand, state power should guarantee
the cardinal freedoms of assembly, expression, association, speech, and
conscience. Reducing, if not eliminating, the growing chasm between citizens,
state institutions, and those with the executive authority in a state should be
the preoccupation of a democratic order. Those commissioned to the vocation of
politics in a democratic order like South Africa have an added responsibility
to separate truth from chaff in dealing with the ideological realities
entrusted to our constitutional order.
While history might record the triumph of voter self-determination in the emerging coalition government phase of South Africa as a dimension of its liberation promise dividends, there will still be a strain in how this development might have become vulnerable to underhanded objectives of choking the transformation objectives of the liberation project. Coalitions, in their pursuit of the democratic nature of Lincolnian of, for, and by the people, should be protected from mutating into a proxy battle terrain to stop the legitimate expectations of resolving national grievances against apartheid and colonialism. We should include the visceral motivations of those interested in the truncation of the ANC as the liberation movement in how we analyse our somewhat legitimate celebration of the dimension of freedom coalitions can bring if de-Zanufication of our politics is put into the mix.
The
brute truth is South Africa still requires a political centre that will hold
the restitution centre intact. The dislodgement of the liberation movement as
the governing party in certain municipal jurisdictions has demonstrated what
political and social capital costs South Africa has had to pay to close a pothole.
With murmurings of the 1996 settlement requiring a review, it remains unclear
what type of coalition the ANC might form opposite to the 'anything but the ANC
coalition'. Content-deficient sloganeering might find new traction. The
coalition government reality offers insights into the natural leader of society
brigades. Assuming theirs is the pursuit of the liberation promise in the
Constitution, coalition arrangements present an opportunity to reset the
country to constitutional defaults without a dangerous political control-alt-delete
the environment seems to be pursuing. CUT!
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