Eish, 2024 is fast arriving. The momentum is unfolding. A consequential January 8 is looming.

The real narrative watermarked in all these dysfunctions of leadership and organisation is the collapse of the liberation movement leading South Africa. With all the pain that goes with it, South Africans are resigned to the reality of a post-ANC-as governing party dispensation, unless a miracle happens. The Tshwane and other municipal jurisdictions' experiment has made this expected not-so-bitter pill to swallow, either in the immediate 2024 or the 2029 chapter of the same thing.

To accept the inevitability of death is what drives humanity to think beyond the comfort of false immortality. Thinking or imagining life beyond your physical existence on earth drives legacy thinkers. As members of the ANC, we must start considering our relevance in a post-ANC-as-governing party context. It took the ANC Western Cape almost 25 years to have a pseudo-united PEC. Given the liquidity challenges courts are exposing, the new wonder is what it would take for a not-in-government ANC to recover.

The end of a liberation movement at its own hands might be signalling an opportunity to measure the extent to which the freedoms of association and conscience have been fully developed to allow the new to emerge out of the old. What is the quality of South Africa in dealing with massive regime change and bracing to welcome a new political establishment?

The sheer idea or possibility of living a life without the liberation movement as a governing party makes South African political life consequential. It removes society from the vagrancy of nostalgia and entitlement-driven arbitrariness that has decorated most public power decisions. This might make the metrics and values we set for ourselves more measurable, including quantitative terms.

It has been difficult to imagine South African politics without the ANC as its nexus. It would seem we are moving to a state where what the ANC contributed to our politics will be more important than having it in charge of the politics. It might be the nexus of our political history. In biblical terms, it will resemble the Canaan without Moses and those who were in the story of Exodus. Remember, all those who left Egypt died in the wilderness and could not enjoy the fruits of the promised land.

The liberation movement has, for the last fifteen years, been more about its historical self and paid little to no attention to redefining its conceptual self. A self whose redefinition would have given South Africa an identity distinct from its tormented colonial and apartheid past. What torments its members is the reality of not reinventing itself into a political machine driven by pursuing the founding values upon which a post-1994 South Africa was crafted. Of all the low-hanging fruits the movement could have picked up to rally South Africa around a vision everyone was enrolled on, the obliviousness to the Constitution was an error of epic proportions. 

It is not surprising that many in the conceptual structures of the movement are clutching to open a second republic' conversation when the first was not allowed to deliver the promise legally. Some in the cognitive complexes of the movement have argued how the Constitution is a legal version of the National Democratic Revolutions and the monumental documents of the ANC since 1912. 

The concept of self that drove most members was, and unfortunately still is, carrying the transformation hammer and seeing the whole of South Africa as nails to be hammered in. Instead of celebrating the legality of what any transformation from apartheid can be, as enshrined in the Constitution, the very tool or mechanism they bequeathed to South Africa was left to be weaponised against the movement and its programs. 

The battle for the memory of South Africa and the appetite to live beyond the point of physical death by liberation movements of Africa can arguably be the reason why most have degenerated into dictatorship forms. Some of the liberation movement stalwarts, and this is continent-wide, have made some of the liberation struggle's rhetoric and slogans values. Unlike gambling, politics is not a game of probabilities. Post-liberation politics should be a story about how a group of thinkers, those who led, whose vision of freedom must be revealed through putting the future of society at the service of what we do now. 

The emergence of political competition for the illusive youth vote has incentivised the liberation movement to invest in innovations that might help it to outperform its close rivals. But growing distortions in the political competitive environment, leading to a widening gap between leaders and followers, are a primary factor depressing ANC's historic dynamism. It should, therefore, be expected that the ANC will not perform as we know it; the momentum is not on its side.