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 the
national unity exigencies that were instructional to the inaugural 1994 Mandela
1st administration is with us.
That
the DA is a liberal party with a predominantly non-BantuBlack support base is
indisputable. It has positioned itself as the custodian of an 'equal
opportunities without guaranteed equal outcomes' political system. While it
recognises injustice in South Africa, it has argued that restitution must
coexist with aspects of the status quo, save for compensation if the exigencies
of true restitution demand material alterations to the beneficiaries of past
injustices.
The
ANC, up until it was banned, WAS a liberal construct. Its early formation
political rhetoric was not only espousing Wilberforcean liberalism but very
deliberate in its demand for the extension of civil rights to 'blacks in
general and Africans in particular'. Inclusion into the constitutional order built
for a post-South African War 'colonial state' through the extension of
franchise rights became the core of its politics. There is no evidence of any
ideological leaning outside of being liberal until its banning in 1960.
Save for being an integral part of the mobilisation of society to participate in the development of the 1955 Congress of the People, which adopted the Freedom Charter as the expression of the 1943 African Claims in a broadened context, the ANC had several attempts to define itself ideologically outside the liberal character it was posturing. Closest to an ideological characterisation of the ANC is its advocacy for human rights through a 1923 conference resolution. This resolution resulted in The African Bill of Rights of 1923 the ANC masterminded and arguably contributed to what would later become the UN Charter of Human Rights and the present-day Bill of Rights in the Constitution of South Africa. Even still, the content of its human rights document was etched in its civil rights and liberal traditions.
The
conditions of being banned necessitated an ideological mid-course correction.
In the heat of a Cold War, the pressure to have an ideological bias, especially
because apartheid South Africa's propaganda machinery was pigeonholing it as a
communist front, the material conditions of the era defined it as a candidate
force of the left. This was despite its insistence that it is a broad church
with no set ideological dogma beyond what the preamble of the Freedom Charter
espouses.
Reading
through The Road to South African Freedom document indicated that the ideation
prowess of the SACP, as part of the Alliance, is arguably the source of the ANC's
NDR posture. It is clear, as Ivor Chipkin submits, that the CST theory came to
account for apartheid, and NDR became an elaboration of tasks that the
liberation movement had to perform to overcome apartheid. The shift deeper into
the left was thus an existential necessity in ideological terms. The ANC's
accounts and literature, including the wobbly broad church characterisation of
the ANC itself, would make a trend reader not be shocked if the ANC contests a
liberal posture to define its reason for existence.
Emerging
out of CODESA, the Constitutional Principles it has agreed to and the
commitments to the Basic Structure of the constitutional order it made are all
a cocktail of what has made South Africa to be able to be democratic. The
negotiated Constitution of South Africa in 1996, albeit carrying the NDR
objectives of a non-racial, non-sexist, united, and democratic society based on
social justice and the respect of human dignity, has also entrenched liberal
order characteristics. The triumph of the liberal order after the
disintegration of the global left coalition with the Soviet Union as its global
power node, as well as the triumph of state capitalism in China, has created favourable
conditions for liberalism to be a safer ideological posture.
This
might well explain why almost all major policy initiatives launched by
post-apartheid South Africa -including the late just transition in the
electricity space, universal health coverage otherwise known as National Health
insurance, characterisation of OPEX as supernumerary in social services, and
classification of citizens as clients or customers of the state- has been
managed away from the socialist posture the ANC sold during the liberation
struggle days. The emerging "new model for governing - a combination of
governmental and non-governmental organisations, private and public
partnerships, and novel business arrangements to meet public demands- defines
the triumphant liberal order's policy architecture. The systemic coalition with
capital on the service delivery terrain has moved the ANC to a centre that can
only attract liberalism as an appropriate label to characterise the ANC.
The
DA, save for its unfortunate racial composition and latest posture to defend
whiteness with a liberalist order construct, is ideologically the largest party
to fit with the consistent liberal character found or settling within the ANC
and arguably dominant since President Ramaphosa became its leader. Noises or
voices opposed to an ANC/DA coalition can only succeed if they are etched in
what instructs the policy posture of the ANC or DA, for that matter. The opportunity
to posture the ANC to attune its principles for entering a coalition with other
parties has passed with the policy and electoral conferences of 2022.
There is a near consensus today that the governing party, in policy and practice, has entered a new era. But how it postures to define and navigate this new era must be clarified. With an eroded policy-making sophistication in the ANC, and because of a complex private sector and geopolitical interests pursuing lobbying prowess, few people can offer as informed and comprehensive a view of the strategic benefits of the ANC coalition-building policy, especially at a moment when it is in a renewal mode and rethinking its strategic objectives and sometimes struggling to find new ways of pursuing them.
As
a Sepedi saying goes, "ya tsentšha tlhaku e nwele"... (if a cow's leg
is inside a water fountain, the water is considered drank). CUT!!
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