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The quality of the opposition is the ANC's greatest asset.

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 purview of those we vote for.  

 

The election manifestos of political parties are about using the legislative and executive authorities to make the constitutional, democratic, political, and economic order or system work. Political parties that contest elections will either maintain the system, reform it to include new and qualifying entrants, or overhaul it to reflect the bond (if any) between voters and the representatives they elect. The brute truth is that the increasing perception that political parties serve a narrow elite of career politicians and insider interests has been proven legitimate if investigation reports in the public domain serve as shallow-dive evidence. 

 

The true animating force behind establishing an opposition complex in South Africa has, since the dawn of democracy, been the control and management of the form, content, and character of the majority, which will preside over the executive and legislative authority of the Republic in all spheres of government. In institutional memory, this force is matched by the ANC, as it has lived through its major epochs of defining its hegemonic destiny. This is why the ANC will, for the foreseeable future, be the predominant influence at nexus points of South Africa's political and economic life. Fortunately for the prevailing order or system in South Africa, the ANC did not launch itself as a movement to blow apart the system. It negotiated its entry into the system to use its legal power and authorities vested in it to repurpose it and, amongst others, establish.... 


Save for the EFF rhetoric, which is about the radical transformation of the system, and the new MK Party that has positioned itself as an anti-system animating force, the rest of the opposition complex is a kaleidoscopic consensus of the continuation of the status quo. They are contesting to be more fitting wherever the ANC has positioned itself in the system. The establishment of many of them since 1994 and their ideological or otherwise positions about South Africa were not driven by matching shifts in public opinion. They are a funded consensus. The loosening of rules on political donations is the first sign of the growing importance of corporate funding in South African politics. With the ANC as its predominant centre, the system has become too big to fail, and the majority that the ANC supposedly represents is too big to bail out the country, hence an investment in a less than 50% performance by all parties. 

 

What we see or are served as an opposition, save for the yet-to-be reverse-engineered into the system MK Party and proven to be commercially available EFF, is a consensus the ANC needs to be safe where it currently stands. The quality of the opposition, which in essence is about pointing gaps in how the ANC should go about with the inside-the-Constitution consensus of 1996, is an asset the ANC needs to calibrate its renewal program launched by one of its strategic and constitutionally savvy leaders, Cyril Ramaphosa. Save for the attention the system consensus should give to a growing broad-based rejection of the existing political establishment and its failure to protect the living standards of the majority, the opposition complex, minus the EFF-MK, another complex, will prevail beyond 29 May 2024. The ANC is the proverbial universal democracy health cover for the system.

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