The th!nc Foundation

THE EDITED VERSION OF THIS WAS PUBLISHED IN THE SUNDAY TIMES ONLINE OF 21 May 2024.  The battle for South African voters has been fought on the streets, stadiums, social media, and all other platforms. Pacts and coalitions against the governing party were formed and announced. New political parties entered and exited the contest. South Africa is now dealing with institutional readiness to deliver one of its consequential national and provincial elections. The debate is now about the functionality of the democratic order and how it affords society the uninterrupted right to elect representatives freely. The main contestants are the governing ANC, the DA, the EFF, the IFP, ActionSA, and the new kid on the block MK Party. How these parties perform in these elections will determine whether South Africa gets to a coalition arrangement. That the ANC will get the majority of all votes is not in question; what was at issue was how to reduce its performance to less than 50%. All poli...

THE EDITED VERSION OF THIS WAS PUBLISHED IN THE BUSINESS DAY OF 27 MAY 2024 Over the weekend, South Africans were turned into a jury listening to the closing arguments to influence their decisions on May 29, 2024, when actual voting would happen. An enormous citizen challenge awaits in preserving South Africa's economic, political, constitutional, and democratic order. Almost all leaders that addressed their supporters humbled themselves to the voters and declared, 'We know you have all heard us as we made the case for you to vote for us or our parties; we are now waiting to listen to your verdict'. This is a season politicians understand that voters hear, they should listen, an opportunity, as pundits predict, voters will use this time around. Despite the show of numerical force and through the ritual of stadium-filling, it was clear that voter sentiment was fast becoming an unknown to those campaigning. Voters have realised how close our democratic order is to either a ...

By June 16, South Africa would have inaugurated the seventh administration, appointed a new President, and appointed the nine provincial Premiers. The executive authority of the Republic and all sub-national governments will be constituted. A 50% majority vote would have decided on the above process. The democratic order will once again continue along the arc of stability, a peaceful transition from one administration to another, with the coalition negotiations playing a crucial role in maintaining this stability.    The outcome of the coalition negotiations, as indicated by consistent polls showing a performance of less than 50% by all parties, could lead to in-party succession battles. The prize of politics, for several parties, will shift from government control to presiding over RSA's most influential political parties, potentially sparking succession battles in most parties and their subnational structures.    The election results will start one of the fiercest ...

The South African democracy is a nineteenth to twentieth-century construct. It is etched on the promise of equal rights to all voters despite it operating in an economic order that produces chronic inequalities. The politics to conserve order are not in the domain of those we elect; they are a piece of a bigger power puzzle managed by an economic establishment that has mastered the art of creating templates within which they want all to work.  In South Africa, the prize of politics is about gaining control, through a more than 50% majority of those who voted, of the legislative and executive authority with which you can influence the judicial authority through who you appoint because it is supposedly independent. These authorities are exercised through institutions within the state and organs of the state whose powers are defined in law. The influence of these authorities is worth one trillion in a nine trillion and above economy. This means the true system operates outside the p...

The election campaigning has officially ended; whoever is still convincing is now clutching the proverbial straws. The country's political parties have spoken, promised, and even lied to us as a society. We are now transparent about who we will vote for, including if we will vote.    As a people, we have been immersed in a political environment for the past thirty weeks, bombarded with messages that one party is superior to the other. The underlying bias in these messages has been the failure of the governing party and the potential benefits of reducing its influence to less than 50%, thereby instigating a coalition government. This narrative has been so potent that it has challenged the elite to question their allegiance to a post-apartheid state as defined in RSA's Constitution, threatening their identities as ethical and thoughtful individuals.    Our general association with the liberation promise in the Constitution, which, as an elite, we know cannot be readily...

  South Africa has arrived at a stage where its politics are shaping into two dominant orientations, with rats and mice falling between the uncovered spaces. Two nodes are developing, albeit with ideological overlaps, the intersection of which is an area the economic establishment wishes could be occupied by a pliant minority party with its interests as the context of all political contexts in South Africa. Having succeeded in influencing the Constitution as a broadly interpretable supreme law of the country and ensuring the foundational interpretations are settled in the apex court, what is still outstanding is the control of the executive authority of the Republic.  Opposition politics has been about managing the impact of RSA's past injustices on how the future turns out to be for those who benefited. A new breed of opposition focuses on the governing party's lenience in dealing with the injustice of the past. The common objective of anti-corruption and state capture crea...

The announcement by Jacob Zuma on the 16th December 2023 that he will be campaigning for the MK Party, which he is now its leader, and like the Mbeki 20.. announcement to relieve Jacob Zuma of his duties as Deputy President of RSA drastically changed the political landscape in South Africa. The ANC can formally be seen as two distinct camps that permeated all its fraternal and alliance structures. The fog of post-liberation victory that covered deep divisions representative of new governing party-induced interests is cleared, and a bare-knuckles fight for the soul of the ANC is now in the open. The spiralling in-ANC rivalry, which found nodal personalities or political orientation postures from Polokwane and 16 December 2023 in Soweto, will shape, drive, and destroy ANC, and by default, South African politics for the foreseeable future.    The intensity of the rivalry has gotten to a stage where battle lines are drawn by a desire to define each other as being inside or out...

THIS IS THE UNEDITED VERSION OF AN ARTICLE THAT APPEARED IN THE SUNDAY TIMES OF 12 MAY 2024, page 17.  The sight of a post-apartheid South African flag burning in your lounge through a national news agency should have evoked emotions of disdain and insult in a state that has a nation.  A national flag is a single symbol that combines the wholeness of a nation, whence its hoisting is never without the nation's praise song, the national anthem. The price of politics is not only the government but also the privilege to become an organ of the state as a person, thus acting in its interest all the time.  Of all the virtues expected from those who choose politics as a vocation, patriotism or the feeling of love, devotion, and a sense of attachment to a country or state should be cardinal. While it is a fact that the 1994 democratic breakthrough was the departure point towards healing the divisions of the past and establishing a society based on democratic values, social ...

"It is certainly easy to be wise after the event, and yet this facile wisdom is sometimes illuminating; for life, after all, is a game of blindman’s buff or a horse race in which some dark horse is always the winner", writes Arnold Toynbee in his 1934 rendition on the aftermath of the Versailles Treaty. The rise of the stalwarts in the last phases of the 2024 election campaign poses a question: 'To what end is the embrace of a Ramaphosa second term by the ANC veterans and stalwarts complex'? Will a dark horse emerge as the winner, or will the race be dominated by proxies of the main racing horses?  Following the announcement of the election results shortly after May 29, South Africa will be thrust into a fierce in-ANC succession battle. As history has shown, mainstream ANC politics between 30th  May 2024 and 16th December 2027 will revolve around who succeeds Ramaphosa as ANC President. Regardless of the election outcome, forming a coalition or national unity governme...

  Asked about the disciplinary hearing of Jacob Zuma, one of his former allies, who enjoys the respect of Zuma, former Deputy President David Mabuza, responded by indicating that the process should be allowed to run its entire course. He hints that the evidence and counter evidence at the hearing will reveal the issues, and whatever the verdict, it will have to be faced and respected. This is a vintage ANC response when a leader conceals his/her proper stance. It is a closing-the-ranks response.  The Mabuza response comes when former top six leaders of the ANC, who have not left the organisation, were fully galvanised to show their support of what Zuma calls a Ramaphosa ANC. The President and Secretary General who presided over the historic epicentre of the current in-ANC turmoil, Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlhanthe, led the charge as the ANC's election juggernaut entered its critical last push stages. Unlike Mabuza, who was measured in his response after a long and loud sile...

Until the suspension or firing of Khumalo as the official leader of the MK Party, the party's true character was shrouded in mystery. Zuma's move to position himself as the party's linchpin starkly reflected the widespread dissatisfaction with the post-NASREC 2017 renewal program. The MK Party, with its carefully chosen name, symbols, and core constituency base, appears to be a potent weapon aimed at the governing party in the 2024 national elections. The full extent of its impact remains to be seen.    In the post-1994 era, the ANC is at a pivotal crossroads, teetering between a potentially catastrophic decline and a momentous shift towards a brighter future. The party faces the daunting task of addressing internal strife and rescuing the democratic movement from self-inflicted wounds. The current coalition government scenario necessitates immediate, radical change towards a genuine renewal of the ANC and a significant improvement in cadre behaviour.   ...