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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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