The th!nc Foundation

The 2023 Rugby World Cup victory by a Siya Kolisi-led South African team will go into history as an event that confirmed how non-racial unity can redefine the essence of being South African. Since the 1995 victory against the All Blacks, South Africanness has been spiralling towards a zero performance in race relations. In the last 30 years, our politics have succeeded in overwhelming our common humanity in almost all aspects of our livelihoods. How the Springboks summoned our national adrenalin through their three consecutive one-point wins against the fifth, fourth, and third-best rugby teams in the world has created one of the most emotional, stronger-together moments the nation so dearly needed.  Given the levels of social, political, and economic anxiety the country is facing, the World Cup Champion status of the country gave us heroes through which we can see leadership being displayed in our interest and for our posterity’s sake. The poverty of success and progress in what i...

This is the oldest question humanity has asked to illustrate various societal phenomena. It was so acute that it generated a multi-millennia-old proverb: 'There is no smoke without fire'. But then, can there be smoke without fire? To answer this question, let's start with what is smoke? A Google search yields, “Smoke is a suspension of airborne particulates and gases emitted when a material undergoes combustion, together with the quantity of air mixed into the mass. It is commonly an unwanted by-product of fires”. From the explanation of smoke, it is clear that not only fire produces smoke. It can be an outcome of combustion, artificial or natural. Notwithstanding, it is more accurate as a byproduct of fire. When we see smoke, our natural response is to search for fire. Even when smoke is seen as a result of combustion, machine maintenance sensitivity dictates that the denser the smoke is, the more mechanical dysfunctions the machine has.  Since fire is one of the non-bio...

In August 2023, South Africa celebrated the 40th anniversary of the United Democratic Front. The UDF was one of the most formidable and impactful mass-based, non-racial, and democratic civil society movements in South Africa. Organised to articulate the correctness of the minimum demands of society as enshrined in the 1955 Freedom Charter, the UDF became a proxy platform for what the banned ANC-led liberation movement stood for. The ideal of a South Africa which belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people, which the UDF advocated for, appealed to the civil character of the anti-apartheid struggle to South Africans. Almost everyone organised as a civil society body identified with what the UDF stood for. Notwithstanding the guarantees of advantages that would have come with the reform of apartheid, a non-racial repudiation of apartheid as a system, including by its core beneficiaries, ...

The South African Constitution declares that everyone has a right to basic and further education. Without free and compulsory education paid for by the state, society will be vulnerable to an unnatural aristocracy formed by those who afford paid and private education. The desire to have the white race of South Africa as an aristocracy was arguably the deeper reason why Verwoerd targeted disparities in education as the surest template to make apartheid work. The long-term benefits of his policy still torment the country to date. The apartheid state knew that education was not only about maths and science but creativity, imagination, and innovation. Denying equal and comprehensive quality education would guarantee the achievement of social engineering objectives which the apartheid ideology set for South Africa.  Education as a right obligates the state to respect, protect, promote and fulfil its provision in South Africa. It being enshrined in the Bill of Rights is evidence that wit...

Wealth and power, the motive force for most tensions and conflicts affecting humanity, are moving away from their dispossession-determined locations in Africa. The colonial order is giving way to a new African order that is increasingly crafted by a new cohort of self-determined and purpose-driven Africans inspired by the possibility of prosperity for all pan-African future. At issue is to what end and direction the turning great wheel of defining new economic commanding heights of Africa is taking us. Can an Africanist order emerge to set up new conditions of engagement that the world should negotiate its space to be accommodated?  In his inaugural speech as the second President of a non-racial and democratic South Africa and the … head of the national executive of a geographical space called South Africa since 1910, President Mbeki committed the edifice of South Africanness to Africanness. Mbeki said, “We trust that what we will do will not only better our own condition as a peop...

Global competitiveness is a function of (national) leadership. The predictability of societal stability is measured through the depth of the leadership it has on the horizon. Investor confidence is directly related to the capability of would-be key persons in the national leadership grid a society presents to those not interior to an existing or emerging establishment.   The brute fact is that the domain of leadership is inevitably national. When leaders create strong bonds that show society that they’re integral to its great outcome and want to be a part of their future, they won’t just lay bricks for you. Together, they would build cathedrals within which they would offer prayers and loyalty. The question is, does South Africa have cathedrals within which national prayers can be made about its leadership future?    Society seeks or resonates with leaders who know they are mortal and believe in the eternity of their national or institutional visions. Leaders whose r...

The familiar and straightforward models of land-dispossession-anchored-global-capitalist economic system centre around using nation-state-driven violence to sustain the dispossession as a means to legitimise the system of global-north-domination. The origins of such a system are traced from how the global north agreed on its version of sovereignty and which geographical spaces would be allowed to be nation-states and which would always be 'occupied territories' in all the euphemisms that evolved with such titling.  The treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and the Berlin Conference of 1884 remain the authoritative departure point on how the global land dispossession-based capitalist system will be sustained. Countries were registered as farms belonging to some European monarchs, and there were nation-states whose land transfer system was still dependent on title deed registration in European Capitals. the company and intellectual property registration of several African Countries is leg...

Published in the Sunday Times on 22 October 2023 A performance of less than 50% by South African political parties in the 2024 national and provincial elections will result in coalition governments. Opinion polls indicate there might not be a 50% winner in the national elections. Mzwandile Masina, former mayor of Ekurhuleni, submits that coalition government occurs when no single political party attains majority votes from an election, thereby opting to combine votes to form a government. He concludes that it is through the control of the executive authority of a country that political parties establish a national or any other political executive to enforce their desired policies on the polity. Given that the state is not only an institution with power but the most permanent of human-created institutions, its longevity makes it the ultimate prize of anyone contesting to be the government of the day in an election. Election outcomes are, therefore, about which hegemony or ideology will ...

An edited version was published in the Sunday Times on 01 October 2023 South Africa is blessed with a unique context of having its heads of state living long enough to see the good and bad of what they presided upon. At last count, the previous seven Presidents lived long enough with their Cabinet Ministers and senior bureaucrats to experience the fruits or mess of their labour and decisions with us. What they failed to deliver affects rains on all of us in the same way, albeit we experience it differently.  This is a unique feature we need to use more as a society to draw from a well of experience and truths we foreground when it is no longer there. In his speech to Africa's most organised Association of Public Administration and Management (SAAPAM), President Mbeki, as a keynote speaker, addressed the Public Administration and Management discipline community of practitioners and academics on the issue that the state's failure is their failure. If running a state is a function...

Published in the Sunday Times on 08 October 2023 In his editorial of 01 October 2023, Sunday Times editor Sthembiso Msomi submits that it feels like the government has given up on recovery. He 'laments' that since 2007 "building a capable state has been a popular phrase...yet on close examination, the state capacity to do anything has been eroding ever since (and)...this is not how you (re) build a capable state".    In his rendition, Msomi interrogates the resolve to build a capable state. As a rejoinder, this submission asks if we can (re)build a capable state. Capability is defined in the dictionary as the (power) ability to do something or the extent of a person or institution's ability. It is, therefore, a domain of 'how to' more than 'what is'. To be capable means being able to execute and/or implement whatever is decided or legislated. It is a human-dependent activity and is thus reliant on the execution discipline and managerial discretiona...