Let our votes talk sense to the future: it might be costly.

The South African Constitution is the supreme source of law. It legalises a non-racial, non-sexist, united, and democratic South Africa. It commits the State to recognise the injustices of the past, heal the divisions of that past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice, and human rights. It obliges all elected representatives to ensure that the government is based on the people's will. 

The Constitution “provides a sustainable bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice and a future it entrenches as the non-negotiable source of legislative, judicial, and executive authority. It articulates the obligations of all legal persons to respect, protect, promote, and fulfil the rights in the Bill of Rights. It is the legal basis for the state to execute a project of transforming society in all respects”. 

It follows, therefore, that after centuries of land dispossessions and racial discrimination, creating templates for a legalised social order, a race-defined caste system, and an institutionalised racial and economic hierarchy, there can be no legal expectation or basis for any organ of state, elected or appointed, to act or conduct themselves inconsistent with what the Constitution provides. 

Whilst the transformation ideals of the Constitution might indeed have underestimated the institutional legacy of the apartheid system and its templates of socioeconomic dominance, its legal power is a constraint for anyone to use it for purposes other than the liberation promise it holds for all South Africans. 

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 might, if we forget the legality of our claim to freedom, bow to the rigid spatial or otherwise demography that apartheid has left South Africa with. 

If not properly managed, the terrain of electoral contestations might provide a platform for race and ethnic-defined political mobilisation as the new instrument to sustain the apartheid-era-created racial oligarchy. The perfect storm of coalition government might have the unintended consequence of resuscitating an otherwise receding and untransformed economic order. 

The brute truth is that since the political power shifts of 2016 and 2021 in metropolitan and densely urbanised municipal governments, there has been a marked backslide in breaking down the templates of economic dominance. Through procedural litigation victories against the transformation agenda of organs of state, resultant court judgements, which are now jurisprudence, have been 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, court judgements have been craftily used 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. In this mix, there is a declining commitment to build South Africa as an open society democratic order with equal opportunities which guarantee equity of outcome. 

The dual and conflictual character of the ANC, first as the liberation movement and second as a political party contesting for state power, has dragged into the vortex of judging it as the governing party, the liberation promise the Constitution holds for South Africa. The governing party's failings and character dysfunctions of some leaders have become one of the cardinal risks to the constitutional order so many have worked for. This condition has made the transformation of what keeps South Africa the most unequal society in the world a non-election issue. Instead removing the governing party and what 'it stands for' is foregrounding most discourses. 

The euphoria about a coalition government victory over the ANC-as-a-political party should be managed away from being a conduit of underhanded objectives of choking the transformation objectives of the national liberation project. Coalitions, in their pursuit of a government 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.

As we pursue one of the true benefits of electoral democracy, changing governments that are not based on our will, we should include the visceral motivations of those interested in the truncation of the liberation promise in how we analyse our somewhat legitimate celebration of the dimension of freedom coalitions can bring forth.

The truth is that South Africa still requires a political centre that will hold the restitution centre intact. The incapacity of the ANC-as-liberation movement from being 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 or provide clean water in Hammanskraal. 

With murmurings of the 1996 settlement requiring a review, it remains unclear what type of coalitions might emerge from the 'anything but the ANC coalition'. Content-deficient sloganeering might find new traction, and the normative dividends of our current dispensation might be wiped out by the prerogative power grab greed. The good about the beauty of South Africa's democracy can be the bad for the promise of freedom the Constitution guarantees. CUT!