How national will the national dialogue be?

The anticipation for the National Dialogue is palpable, with preparations in full swing and potential participants actively discussing it. The critical questions of 'what the National Dialogue is', who should be involved, what the dialogue should focus on, how it will be structured, what will make it truly national, and who will lead it are all under intense scrutiny. Despite these uncertainties, the dialogue is paramount and promises to be significant. 

South Africa's history is rich with national dialogues that have shaped its historical, political, and constitutional development. Every decade since the dawn of a constitution-based democracy in 1910 has seen one dialogue or another. From the 1909 Convention to the 1912 Conference of Natives and the 1913 Afrikaner conversation, these dialogues have been a continuous thread in the political fabric of South Africa's evolution—the 1910 to 1913 dialogue produced two nationalisms that politically divided RSA today.

As ideation institutions like the Boerderbond of 1918 and other similar think tanks were established, an Institutional Right of South Africa was being consolidated. The Native Congress, an outcome of the 1912 conference, was consigned, structurally, to occupy the then empty Institutional Left, despite it being a construct of landowners, businesspeople, a cognitive elite, and Kings and Chiefs: all of whom would constitute an Institutional Right had it not been race as a vector of RSA political evolutions. The dice of the two nationals were set, and various interests and human agencies characterise these nationals. The ongoing contests, which are still ongoing, will be about the attributes of 'the National' rather than the 'nation'. 

The 1920s marked a significant turning point with the pathfinding dialogue that led to the transformative 1923 'Bill of Rights' adopted at the ANC National Conference. This decisive moment not only set the course for a 'human rights-based society' but also became the lodestar for the constitution of a modern-day RSA. Adopting universal franchise, non-racialism, non-sexism, and cardinal human freedoms of speech, press, assembly, conscience, and property rights became the cornerstone of South Africa's constitutional and political development. This inspiring transformation set its non-negotiable standards as a democracy, inspiring it to uphold these values in our present and future.

The demand by natives for inclusion into the 1909 Convention settlement took on a 'human rights' character, a condition that challenged the 'net-blankes' redefinitions of 'the national'. The exclusion of humans of African origin in any political settlement has as its roots an element of crimes against humanity in the 1923 Bill of Rights.

Among the many other reasons, the crises of poverty, unemployment, and inequality, which were then a race-blind phenomenon, intensified the black-and-white divide at the behest of competition for decent jobs. The 1929 Depression and its aftermath galvanised, through election pacts and coalitions, one of the most highly charged racial civil society movements. The institutionalisation of cheap black labour and the mischaracterisation of poverty amongst white South Africans as 'a poor white problem' sharpened race into a vector in the definition of interests as the currency of politics.

Anchored on the historic 'replay of the Voortrekker movement', culminating in the 1948 victory of a Dr Malan-cohort' National Party' victory, a racial oligarchy legitimised by a whites-only franchise grew into South Africa's apex political liability, still predominating the worldview of many we consider to be the leadership of sections of our society. The outcomes of the conversations leading up to the 1948 victory would be Institutionalised through state-funded Commissions of Inquiries that theorised the basis of the grand apartheid legislations passed between 1948 and 1960.

The diversity of South Africans would be manipulated by law to create a segregated spatial geography, which manifested itself in skills development, infrastructure investment, land ownership, economic citizenship, and the welfarist character of the state. This has crippled the conceptual reach of diversity to represent what apartheid meant to the majority of South Africans.

Following the 1923 Bill of Rights, the ANC-led 'National Dialogues' emerged as a coalition advocating for freedom as a human right. These dialogues produced the 1943 African Claims document, which outlined the future envisioned by the ANC, which was now not only a 'liberation movement' but a de facto think tank led by Africans and charting an alternative way forward. Mischaracterised as a response to the 1948 Apartheid victory, the build-up to the 1949 Congress League National dialogues produced the (political) Freedom in Our Lifetime Program of Action.

One of the POA's critical outcomes was the decision to create what is now known as the Freedom Charter. This Charter was a decisive statement on who has the legitimate authority to govern a South Africa that would belong to all who live 'in it'. Undoubtedly, the 1955 Congress of the People, if the historical accounts of its organisation are accurate, is the only representative national dialoguing process whose legitimacy has stood the test of time and, notwithstanding its elite character, marked the beginning of a movement that would ultimately lead to the end of apartheid. What remains is it is a global crime against humanity wherever it appears. 

Subsequent national dialogues in RSA were, in more than one way, about the practical implementation of the 1955 Freedom Charter. None of these dialogues, including those within the complexes opposed to the essence of the Freedom Charter, have challenged its normative fortitude. The South African Constitution 1996 is the legal embodiment of the Freedom Charter, existing within the philosophical universe of what we proudly call the Supremacy of the Constitution and the Rule of Law. As we journey towards the National Dialogue, the organisers must remember the essence of past dialogues and incorporate the outstanding elements into the current framework. 

The 2024 elections have confirmed who has a legally proven mandate to claim a right to represent those who gave the mandate. Equally, the voter turnout has also demonstrated that those with the election outcome numbers are not the absolute representatives of all of us as 'we the people'. Basic political science and common sense abrogate the representation lacuna of other leadership institutions with the reach and influence to assume the voice of the unrepresented. This complexity and its convergence with the multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-class, and multi-geopolitical interests in South Africa will complicate 'how national' the national dialogue should be.

The broadly accepted criteria of letting the foundations of former presidents and icons lead the National Dialogue have been liquidated since the outcome of the elections by a potential trust deficit of leaders with proven support, given the brazen antagonisms that were at play leading up to May 2024. The conversations about conversations, almost similar to the pre-1994 democratic breakthrough, might have spun preconditions to participate, the stubbornness to capitulate there from becoming political capital for the upcoming and influential local government election.