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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