Revolutionaries have a sell-and-use-by date.

 What sets businesspeople apart is their remarkable skill in transforming anything or anyone into a marketable entity. They establish the terms of trade, the shelf-life, and the 'sell and use by date '. Their approach to all relationships, be they human or otherwise, mirrors that of investment bankers. The return on investment is a universal metric in their lives. They define their identity based on their bottom-line objectives. Their conscience is a product of their contribution to their projections and scenarios. Certainty is a prerequisite, and they will either purchase or engineer it. 

In their pursuit, they acquire all forms of intellectual capital that can alter social and political dynamics. Political capital, which they recognize as abundant among the otherwise purchasable politicians and the body politic, is a variable investment they commit to over time. 

 

As a society, we neither learn civic skills nor experience civic practices in our schoolwork classroom or community nor think of ourselves as possessing any ‘freedom to participate in the power capital organises for their bottom-line objectives. With government being the ultimate prize of politics and the residue of powerful interests, it is in many corporations, just with special characters and characteristics. 

 

When revolutions happen, they only introduce new power networks into power matrices the established must contend to either co-exist with or control towards their set or templated objectives. "Large corporations, and when ideological or otherwise gaps present themselves, will always push, with whatever political, technological, economic, marketing and cultural tools required, the frontiers of domination in all directions. They will create and remove regimes to their wishes. 

 

The capacity of the state to step in when private sector dysfunction disrupts the bottom-line objectives of capital is the reason capital will, in times of boom and profitability, seek to ensure that those they trust manage the state to their favour. Because we live in an age of astonishing inequality where income and wealth disparities have risen to intolerable and revolution-igniting heights,  how power is organised has become the greatest of preoccupations by capital. The binary of race, which defines the character of South Africa's inequality, has made the organisation of black power the most researched and strategised matter in almost all funded and private ideation spaces and institutions. 

 

With all its capabilities and biases, the market has become an amorphous abstraction of dominant and dominant interests. The way economics has recently been bent empirically makes it more difficult for those outside the benefits of its workings to idolise markets. This is simply because of the expectation that lived experiences must ignore inconvenient facts and yield to the power of the market. This happens in a context where lived experience elsewhere has produced evidence of economics having helped build both fairer societies and do more to live up to the productive potential of all citizens. 

 

In South Africa, because of its past realities and how they have created templates of its present, political competence has been about what the status quo can't let go and what the future dictates as conditions of stability. In the build-up to the 1994 democratic breakthrough, a duality of political competence emerged. Some built a competence to fight and deconstruct a system, and there were those whose competence was built to defend what they have constructed and sustain it with all its resilience. Without the latter of competence, political power will achieve short-term success, which will likely doom society to long-term failure. 

In such conditions or circumstances, politically competent leadership becomes a function of having the ability to develop consensus and build coalitions to bridge the 'fight-and-deconstruct' and 'defend-and-sustain' dualities. Taking a nation forward requires the death of certain selves for new ones to emerge and thrive. In crafting these coalitions, there will be those whose past privileges will be projected as dominant and powerful and vice versa. It will be how each coalition member understands the responsibility of their power and commands about the consequence of its abuse. 

As the sobriety of the responsibility settles, revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, and any label attracting participants will be managed to their sell and use by dates to allow new ones the opportunity to bridge the dualities and create a stability-seeking context. Because all are in a coalition which enables them to keep the national unity initiative alive and achieve societal goals, a vision of the future should be the glue that holds it together. Naturally, dealing with broad strategic issues first and then working out the nuts-and-bolts details is the point of departure. In a context where bread and butter-issues are profoundly pronounced, they become so strategic that the function of leadership gets compromised. CUT!! 

 

THE GNU IS HERE; LET THE DIALOGUE BEGIN.