The era of systems is here, political power is in crisis.

The concept of political power has been undergoing revisions since the second half of the 1900s. How people agreed on the arrangements to govern each other started to reflect a growing assertiveness of society wanting to claim ownership of political power exercised on their behalf. As these bold demands by humanity to participate grew, the convention that those with power would call the shots was challenged. Waves of political power management started to produce centralised institutions and organisations, many of which have become more complex and acquired greater reach and power. 

 

Theories of power and management, arguably influenced by the context then, concluded that political power works best through large, organised, and bureaucratic systems. The theatres of power, notably governments, were organised to be large, and their efficiency started to cut both ways depending on the human organs of the state-commissioned as the public service. With a monopoly over the coercive and enforcement instruments of the state, political power grew commensurate and considerably so with the pursuit of interests, national or personal, of those in charge of the government. 

 

As the sovereignty of individuals grew, people became numerous, humanity living fuller lives, and the general human freedoms guaranteed, it became more difficult to regiment and control. With these came the desire to regularly, and at fixed intervals, change those society gives the public power to govern. The introduction of freely elected representatives as an arrangement to govern each other started to set in, notwithstanding that it created an environment where it became easier for anyone, including those who are toxic in society, to acquire political power. 

 

In South Africa, the formalisation of public representation to manage political power has seen its use achieving good for humanity with the same vigour it was able to achieve what became a crime against humanity and the very state itself: apartheid and corruption. As the disruption of power gained momentum, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as its apex, several other concentrates of power, legitimate or otherwise, also started to disintegrate, and the geopolitical character of the world has never been the same. What has established itself as a superpower, hegemonic superstructure, and empire started to experience rejection by small and nimble jurisdictions. The scale of uncooperativeness denied the powerful the exercise of power and hegemony. In South Africa, we saw the crisis of ungovernability, which liquidated the legal legitimacy of an otherwise morally repugnant apartheid system. In Europe, we saw the disintegration of artificially created states such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the USSR into self-determined new states. In China, this manifested itself through the brutality of the suppressed Tiananmen Square uprising and so on. 

 

Post-1989, South Africa began redefining the arrangements to govern each other. The apartheid state succumbed to the demand that no government should have authority unless it is based on the will of the people. As the state was reconfigured as a centre of power, political coalitions that fought for a new democratic order were also undergoing reconfiguration, consciously or otherwise. As an organisation, the ANC had to readjust to being a legal organisation leading a profoundly federal and structurally disintegrated constituency organised under the UDF banner. Its claim to the legitimacy of leading the mass democratic movement was the status accorded by those in the frontier of the anti-apartheid struggle. The centralised, commandist, and profoundly underground or secretive structures of a banned ANC had to come to the surface, invariably introducing new leadership dynamics into the above-ground proxies. The ultimate prize of politics, government, also introduced into the mix contestations that attracted toxicities that would later liquidate the bulk of its moral authority and legitimacy to speak on behalf of 'the people'. 

 

As the arena of politics and government was sucked into the ANC, it became the residue of its past politics, and parts of it, essentially its elements, were hardly noticeable. The concentrated authority it wielded from its exile headquarters started dwindling. Re-establishing internal structures has become an elusive exercise to date. The mass character it embraced, essentially informed by the incentive to win votes in an election to lead the ANC and the country, was based on something other than a sustainability strategy. The power which branches embodied and how these became basic organisational units through which ultimate political power could be accessed became targets of unscrupulous in-ANC leaders and factions. 

 

Operating in a profoundly decentralised, and others argue federal, constitutional dispensation, the structures of the ANC, democratic centralist in character, started struggling to co-exist with the new democratic order. The centre held to the extent that it allowed the periphery to hold as sub-national centres. A ‘cloud’ of regional players replaced the centre, each with some power to shape political or governmental outcomes but none with enough power to determine them unilaterally. This became stronger inside the ANC as regionalism took root on the back of ethnic nationalism, secessionist sentiments, and pure federalist ambitions, which collapsed in the aftermath of the 1994 democratic breakthrough. 

 

The contest for political power, especially by the post-1994 new opposition complex, and the ebbing of power as a post-liberation dividend introduced micro powers in the system, challenging the mega power the post-apartheid sought to become. The outcomes of the 2016 and 2021 municipal elections exposed how RSA major "cities are now so successfully unmoored from central government that a modern version of the medieval order of city-states is coming into being, " redefining regional politics away from how the ANC conceptualised it. The abuse and somewhat tyranny of the centre and the fragmentation risks of disbursing the executive authority to differently mandated subnational governments have had the unintended consequences of evaporating power and crumbling institutions. Whilst this benefited the opposition complex by reducing the power of absolute majority governing partyism, it allowed the creation of new power outside the state as society's structure of managing public power. 

 

With the reduced tenure of state power and crumbling systems of holding power within a bureaucratic system that 'loyally executes the lawful policies of the government of the day' came the rise of political parties and coalitions that 'loyally executes interests of funders and the hegemonies they are representing'. The triumph of proportional representation, despite it being propelled by voter apathy rather than any ideological triumph, has foregrounded the significance of a social compact to hold an otherwise crumbling legitimacy of the democratic and constitutional order. With 16m voter participation in 38m registered voters and a 60m total population, those managing the shrinking power of the state should not overestimate their legitimacy to govern. They are together representing a fragmented yet composite mandate of contradictory wills of the people. 

 

The RSA GNU represent a politically deadlocked governing arrangement. The obligation to form a coalition occasioned by the outcome of elections has foregrounded the growing capacity of small parties to ward off the designs of large ones. It has empowered a broader range of civil society actors in national public affairs. The dismemberment of the 'national' in favour of the 'new ethnonational', 'racial-national', and 'regional is what the unity in the GNU should be about. The advantage of size and scale which other parties have commanded is diminishing. Niche and single-issue politics are on the rise and already stand to benefit. Only a well-oiled bureaucracy driven through a normative system can hold the fragments together without imposing the re-centralisation of politics. 

 

The following strategic questions beg the attention of those studying the renewal and revival of the liberation movement.

1. How did the ANC's struggle for power and influence contribute to its internal restructuring and leadership dynamics?

2. What were the specific challenges faced by the ANC in re-establishing internal structures?

3. How did the ANC's concentration of authority change over time, and what were the implications of this change for its effectiveness as a political organization?

 

THIS IS A FREESTYLE REFLECTION ON WHAT NEXT SOUTH AFRICA IS DEALING WITH NEXT. IT IS A GLOBAL PHENOMENON. THIS PIECE IS INFLUENCED BY THE WORKS OF Moises Naim.