The th!nc Foundation

An election legitimacy calamity might be unfolding in South Africa. The IEC's decision to uphold Jacob Zuma's objection to being on the MK Party list, which is based on the facts and the applicable law, might be throwing a cat among pigeons. The basis of the decision is the contempt of court criminal case against Jacob Zuma. This is despite the raging debates in the legal community on the correctness of the law of the Khampephe decision to issue a jail sentence without an option of a fine for a civil case of contempt of court.  The debate on the case includes the correctness of a court whose civil standing on the case is the legal issue to continue sitting on the matter. The legal question which a new generation of jurors, a distance away from the Zuma safaris with the criminal justice system, is to what extent is contempt of a civil case court criminal and what was the constitutional issue the Khampepe decision dealing with to warrant the criminalisation of the rights Zuma w...

  Officially, the SAA transaction to establish the first post-apartheid Black-Owned aviation company with the most global, lucrative, and Mandela goodwill dividend landing rights and routes is off the table. The opportunity to demonstrate the liberation promise of black ownership of the commanding heights of the South African economy as private sector participants who earned their industry positions evaporated with the transaction lows and ebbs. The Takatso SAA deal would have been an industry game-changer in many respects. Its failure might be judged by history as an epic betrayal of the economic transformation intentions of the post-apartheid state.   To the naked eye, the transaction ended because "with the time it has taken to date, for reasons outside the control of the parties, the change in market dynamics have led to Takatso reconsidering its positions...it is on this basis that it was mutually beneficial to both parties to terminate the sale and purchase agreement...

South Africa is entering the intensive phases of its election season. The ultimate prize of politics, government, is at stake. The outcomes of elections have constantly reconfigured social and political networks. Depending on the reach, strength, and resilience of the ruling class or establishment, the matrices of power in a society never remain the same after an election. The cognitive elite, or thinkers, are often the early victims or beneficiaries of post-election changes. They are equally influencers of cognitive trajectories society might embrace through their collusion or intervention, including belligerence. To this end, caution is necessary for thinkers during this phase of national selection of public representation.    The 2024 national and provincial elections are poised to be the most consequential in defining South Africa's democratic and political order. The hegemonic hold of the governing ANC has been under intense pressure since the historic 1994 democratic bre...

Published in the Sunday Times on 17 March 2024 In the middle of an impressive record of decisiveness in implementing what the governing ANC called renewal through weeding out characters responsible for putting its integrity and standing into disrepute, two personalities of the ANC emerge. The pursuit of integrity as a strategic and tactical terrain upon which its reputation as a leader of society would be rescued from the battering it suffered because of revelations at several judicial commissions of inquiry and reports of chapter nine institutions is a personality which inspired hope in its renewal program. On the other hand, the March 2024 NEC decision to submit a list of parliamentary nominees inclusive of persons its self-created member integrity management system recommended should step aside and those cited by several inquiry reports as human nodes whose conduct is inconsistent with corruption and state capture free post-fifth administration a Ramaphosa presidency committed to....

This article was published on Business Day, 07 March 2024. It was headlined 'Those in power continually redefine the barriers to entry' Rodger Jardine's Change Starts Now (CSN) decision to withdraw from the race echoes more of what will come. South Africa's political order has settled on being driven by political parties. Individuals as brands, funded and manufactured legacies, and overrated approvals by the economic establishment will, therefore, struggle to enter politics as easily as it was post-1994. Politics as a vocation in South Africa has a 30-year non-racial experience. This means those inside have by now started to define barriers to entry, and new entrants must have more than just funds to disturb the status quo.   Post 1994, South Africans entered an era of accelerated opportunity. Young people were appointed to positions of responsibility that few adults before them dreamt of occupying. Getting into higher positions of national influence was possible fo...

 Published on the Sunday Times 10 March 2024 A frontier is a transition zone where explorers and settlers arrive. It is the region at the edge of a settled area. It characterises the relationship between those settling and the indigenous people found in the area you are settling. The contestation for hegemony over the land and its resources, access to 'tradeable commodities', and the growth and expansion ambitions of the 'settling or occupying' non-indigenous has often resulted in frontier wars. Like most wars, the 'winner-determines-peace-treaty-terms' principle applies. Where there is no outright winner, a joint settlement establishes a 'retreat and recover peace' context for the next war to be declared. Historically, these frontiers were physical, so life-and-death wars were fought. Loss of life, territory, and other moveable assets of value characterised the end-state of frontier wars. Those who won the wars would centre themselves in all privilege...

The edited version was published in the Sunday Times on 03 March 2024 and headlined, "The public service should be free of party-political interests." The election of President Ramaphosa as the fourteenth President of the ANC and the fifth President of the republic was with a promise of a new dawn. The excitement included the prospect of a technocratic presidency focusing on the nuts and bolts of truncating the slide towards a crisis and potentially a failed state. His safaris in private sector boards were touted as the experience capital South Africa would invest its public power in for five years. The liberation promise in the Constitution was assumed to have been in the custody of the right hands.  South Africa might have overlooked that all the capital forms Ramaphosa commanded would depend on the executive authority and administrative capability teams he would ultimately surround himself with. Concerning the executive authority team he could put together, the members of ...