The th!nc Foundation

Published on the 25th of February 2024 on the Sunday Times South Africa codified the arrangements with which society would govern itself for the first time into a Constitution in 1910. RSA constitutionalism has always been about creating political stability and policy certainty for the survival of its economy. During colonial rule, Britain's primary public benefited from the economic stability the South African Constitution guaranteed. This created a condition where the policies of successive governments were about South Africa and not of South Africa, and where it was for South Africa, race defined which South Africans. To ensure that the administration and the bureaucracy, as the mind of the state, loyally execute the policies of the Imperial Council, the Public Service was identified as a critical enabler.  One of the earliest institutions to be established was the Public Service Commission in 1911. Its core mandate was to commission into the Public Service, and on behalf of the...

If stadium filling is an indicator of voter support for political parties, the battle is thus far between the ANC and the EFF. The EFF filled the Calabash and Moses Mabhida, and the ANC filled Mbombela and Moses Mabhida. Both are promising siyangqoba rallies to confirm who has a greater mass convening prowess. However, during an election season, the certainty sequence ends with voter numbers and data when votes are counted. Stories, myths, and show-of-force rituals are essential components of the value chain of the vote-for-me; they mean nothing if not translated into actual countable votes. How parties sway public opinion is an art whose science has little to do with the truth in our evidence about their performance. Instead of religion being an opiate for the masses, if Marx were born in this generation, he would have concluded that political promises and party political gimmicks are an opiate for the voters. To the opposition complex, the 2024 elections are more about ensuring that ...

Published in the Sunday Times on 18 February 2024. In times of political upheavals and uncertainty, few countries have weathered what South Africa has gone through. Despite our relatively small GDP per capita compared to economies we would diplomatically take on global issues, it has always been the greater good for humanity that we stood for, which gave us the moral high ground to mount difficult-to-comprehend campaigns. Even if the campaign is at the expense of critical aspects of our national interests, such as the well-being of citizens, our assumed an almost sacred role as the human rights lung of the world reigns supreme. In all the epochs where we tested our resolve to the limit, it has always been the wisdom of those who were in charge of the oldest leader of society, the African National Congress, that could rescue us because of the respect that ANC commanded globally.  The decision by South Africa to stick its neck out in what will go in history as its second anti-aparthe...

  Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has been suffering from the loneliness of the 'us' and 'them' syndrome, which characterised much of the 19th Century after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In South Africa, this has played itself with race as a dominant vector of all manners of analysis. For most of the 19th century it has been 'swaart', 'rooi', and 'ANC' 'gevaar', and its matching responses of 'kill the boer', 'one settler one bullet' and 'dubul'bhunu'. The 1990 to 1996 political 'accord', 'settlement', and 'compromises', which culminated in the present Constitution, aggregated the diverse political emotions into a legal edifice from which a constitutional and democratic order would be established to reconcile all protagonists' interests.  The period before the 1996 Constitution was characterised by the anti-black majority rule, anti-...

This was published in the Sunday Times of 14 February 2024 In a quest to give the successes of the governing ANC a face, President Ramaphosa introduced Tintswalo to make its thirty-year reign more real. Tintswalo is not the ANC's election campaign mascot. She represents a human form of the ANC's perception of its contribution to the lives of South Africans. While Tintswalo is an African name and may be mistaken for the ANC's success for and on behalf of black Africans, as a representation of an era in the history of South Africa, Tintswalo as a concept goes beyond her blackness.  The ANC's claim to represent black people has since been liquidated by its adoption of the Freedom Charter and bequeathing its core message of South Africa belongs to all who live in it by chiselling it into the Constitution of 1996. At the time of chiselling, the ANC was operating as the leader of a liberation movement committed to building a non-racial, non-sexist, united, and democratic So...

As the thirtieth anniversary of South Africa's non-racial and non-sexist democracy fizzles and the fiftieth beaconing, pursuing a human rights-based rule of law by erstwhile revolutionaries will create a new tidal wave of citizen-state relationships, particularly the understanding of the rule of law. Essential public questions include how to accept the extension of the equality clause of the Constitution in a context where restitution has not run its entire race. Other concerns include policy questions on the obligation imposed on natural and juristic persons, including organs of state, to fulfil the rights in the Bill of Rights in the interest of all who live in South Africa belonging to them. Constitutional orders hold solutions to post-conflict political settlements. Yet rule by law and post-conflict triumphalists tend to undermine rules-based constitutional and democratic orders. Some 'peacetime and nostalgic revolutionaries' peddle notions of radical restitution, kno...

The idea of a one-party majority governing party might have run its last race in the sixth administration of South Africa. Majority rule might henceforth be an outcome of a consensus of the political elite coming together as minorities to create a governing majority threshold. South Africa might be experiencing the early phases of its disintegration into distinct, interrelated, and interdependent political jurisdictions managed by different political parties.  This time, there is a strategic competition between those provinces ready to 'go it alone', and a no 50% majority has taken hold in major urban centres, especially Western Cape and Gauteng. There is no question that the liberation movement's power and hegemony at the centre have surged since the Polokwane leadership change. The various legitimacies of the political order with the liberation movement as its lead have been contentious and undergoing moral liquidation.    In addition to their admission to being accused...

Metaphors and parables are traditional methods of teaching or explaining in the African education system. Supported by storytelling and symbols, metaphors have provided sieves of indigenous scholarship and African civilisations for centuries. The intellectual resilience of African wisdom cues and philosophy-endowed idiomatic expressions have served as repositories of community values and anchored a normative environment. This is comparable, if not better, than the recorded philosophy of other civilisations. Therefore, the use of metaphors creates a relatively neutral platform for society to reflect on itself about presented phenomena. In fact, we can escape the challenges of being accurate by the cliches that metaphors can be.  Orwellian literature has assisted society in reflecting on itself through the symbolic use of animals in a fictionalised story, Animal Farm. Round-the-fire stories by elders in many societies have all been found to have used animals as characters in a d...

Before the 16 December 2024 announcement by Jacob Zuma, it seemed as if the vision of having a South Africa governed by a funded consensus was on track. There was an implicit understanding that a coalition of the ANC and the DA would be the political silver bullet to the unfolding service delivery and ideological woes inflicting the democratic order. The opposition complex was already working on a moonshot pact whose intention was to “unite all the forces that stand opposed to the ANC and the EFF”. There were also moves to consolidate stranded members of the ANC from the UDF generation through Roger Jardine’s Change Starts Now party.  As this cocktail of coalition government is packaged, the left 'looking' and 'believing' coalition was recovering from a liberal order endorsed by Ramaphosa’s presidency. The ANC, in particular, is fighting a rigorous, sophisticated, and highly funded hostile takeover by a global liberal order. The liberation struggle parties and their spl...

  As South Africa's political parties intensify their election campaigns and the prospect of a less than 50% performance by any of them is inevitable, the unfolding debate is whether we need a GNU or pure coalition government. A coalition government would mean a majority of minorities with less political legitimacy, but a quantitative threshold will form government. It might also mean an anti-ANC coalition might be in charge of the country's executive and legislative authority yet lacking a single block support of the majority.  There is an emerging discourse on the desirability of a government of national unity (GNU) to mitigate the risk of disintegration of the now fragile political and democratic order.  Plausible as the GNU idea is, it will have to negotiate with interests, geopolitical or otherwise, which would rather have a fragmented political mandate than a single majority block-dominated government. The safest characterisation of post-2024 elections in Sou...