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 outside the liberation movement firmament,
defining the bulk of the enduring endearment of the ANC by the majority of
Black South Africans. Any history of the ANC since the Polokwane burst of the
divisions within the first three decades of being a governing party will give
prominent, if not pre-eminent, attention to the emergence of distinct factions
and the broader counter-revolutionary movement with polytheistic political or
other interests. The in-ANC succession battle period between 30 May 2024 and 16 December 2027, will be the most
critical to determine if the ANC is serious with its renewal. The 112 year-old movement should survives its fierce ecdysis or
metamorphosis; either way, it will not be the same. With the Cyril Ramaphosa
cohort of leadership entering the last thirty months of their ANC second term,
provincial structures starting their succession battles, metropolitan and
economic nodal regions entering their urban succession battles, and facing a posterity-defining
local government elections battle in 2026, it will be left to a fragile if not
in crisis Luthuli House to craft a survival strategy.
Established in 1912 as a
royalty, property owners, elite, and church leadership pact or coming together
to respond to a watershed moment, the 1909 Convention, in the establishment of
a formal constitutional state for the territory which is today known as South
Africa, the ANC's founding defined its enduring heritage still characterising
it today. It was established as Umbutho we Sizwe, Mokgatlo wa Sechaba or People's Movement, it operated like a Parliament of the majority that was outside the then Parliament. Its
founding conference in Mangaung was attended by delegates from all over the
Southern African region, beyond modern-day South Africa's sovereign borders.
Epistocratic as it was then, it established, at inception, a practice, which
became its heritage's core substrate, of being driven by those it claimed the
right and legitimacy to represent. To its founders, the ANC was about the
enfranchisement of all South Africans.
The soul of the ANC was,
at inception, directly linked to its members. This arrangement has instructed
its entirety; hence, its policies have a relationship with the well-being of
South Africans. Its integrated policy documents capture the ANC's character as a
people's movement. These include, but are not limited to, the 1923 Bill of
Rights, the African Claims Document, the 1949 Congress League Program of Action,
the 1955 Freedom Charter, the Rivonia Statement by Nelson Mandela, the Morogoro
Conference Resolutions, the Kabwe Conference Resolutions, the 1987
Constitutional Guidelines, the Ready to Govern Documents, the Harare
Declaration, and the 50th ANC Conference Resolution adopting the 1996
Constitution.
WHAT IS THE
NATURE OF THE BEAST
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