The deep roots of recue lie in renewal; ngisho nje.

 The mainstream South African establishment, including some internal to the ANC, views the ANC's permanent 'we are in a revolution' rhetoric as not being in step with what should genuinely be RSA's national interest. The ANC is inarguably the nexus of RSA politics, when it sneezes a lot catches cold. It will continue to command a significant national influence as a political movement, even if it looks like it is running out of runways. This might mean that even in the unlikelihood of its replacement by the MK Party, arguably its ideological adjunct, it will only be a change of guard, not an approach. As one of its longest serving leaders, OR Tambo, is alleged to have said, it can only collapse at its own peril.

Justified as the concerns about its rhetoric are, revolution rhetoric becomes the most potent source of political and social capital when unemployment, inequality, and poverty, are as high as they are in RSA.  In a constitutional order that allows free political activity all other human freedoms, revolutionary nomenclature breeds all sorts of mavericks. Pragmatists become an endangered breed of leaders in a self-breeding pool of mavericks disguised as revolutionaries when society needs reconstructionists and nation-builders. The breeding of mavericks happens without regard for right, centre, or left politics. It becomes a context reminiscent of a festival of ideological vultures and hyenas feasting on a chronically misgoverned and yet extremely progressive constitutional order. The revolution that most claim to be pursuing is not necessarily the NDR defined by the ANC. 

To be regarded as a revolutionary in the ANC is earned through your understanding of the National Democratic Revolution, what it pursues, and your quality as a member or cadre to be trusted with the revolutionary task. The quality criteria for your cadre status and thus membership of the NDR brigade are articulated in its eye-of-the-needle prescripts and various member integrity management mechanisms. In facile terms, the NDR is a process of struggle that aims to transfer (political, economic, and social control) power to the people. It seeks to build a non-racial, non-sexist, united, democratic, and prosperous South Africa. Arguably, the 1996 RSA Constitution legally confers the process of transferring political power, the levers of social control, and being in the policy-driving seat to facilitate the transfer of economic power. The revolution continues, therefore, in respect of advancing its objectives, which is an intergenerational mission optimised by the dialectical material conditions obtaining in a particular context.

The hoarding of investment leadership to support the cocoon-cracking policy courage of a Ramaphosa-specific-ANC leadership might imperil the democratic order of South Africa, which society is still threading. The ANC as a construct has demonstrated its ideational capability to deconstruct whatever qualifies as a 'crime or equivalent' against humanity. If organisations have allergies, to the ANC, oppression of one human by another attracts the worst of its anger and the best of its strategic prowess. Unfortunately, this capability is its strength and ends at ideation, policy crafting, and mobilisation of support to massify justification. The challenge it has had is reconstructing what it would have deconstructed. It is good at liquidating the moral or otherwise basis of an adversary or complex at variance with the NDR objectives, sometimes even if this includes the ANC publicly chastising itself when it gets off the rails it set for everyone. What it still needs to publicly acknowledge is its gross error in understanding, the concept of the new government versus has been a new state. In reconstructing what we called a new South Africa as a government of the day, it might have deconstructed the state and its organs it needed; hence it is now the loudest about the need for a capable state as the basis for its renewal of self and South Africa program. 

With South Africa growing into a haven of think tanking and evidence-based ideation, the time for the establishment to be open to alternative views on what defined their current dominance has come. A closer examination of the revolutionary rhetoric displays more rants than new content of or about the liberation promises legalised and entrenched in the RSA Constitution. Those who claim to be revolutionaries and those they call anti-revolutionaries only differ on how best to implement the revolutionary ideals everyone else is contesting for political power to implement: the RSA Constitution. There is, therefore, a case for the Establishment to invest in unpacking and understanding the political or otherwise appeal of the revolutionary rhetoric to appropriate its worthy elements to national strategy and collective effort. It is crucial for South Africa, acutely all shades or factions of its Establishment, to pivot youth energy and ideational exuberance towards nation-building and national interests. 

The prospect of a GNU reconfiguring revolutionary rhetoric into its nation-building equivalent has created a disequilibrium within the ANC's ideological complex in favour of pursuing the ideals of the Constitution and, by fiat, the Freedom Charter. The GNU should programmatically focus on achieving those service delivery obligations that are joined with their election manifestos. Unless the GNU emerges as a pragmatic intervention to deal with rising crime levels, unmanaged immigration crises, weakened national security management system, bulging youth unemployment, runaway inequality and poverty levels and a financial services regime that chokes the development state character of the RSA economy, the emerging opposition complex will grow in relevance and appeal. South Africa deserves a sober and realistic debate about the untenable exclusion of Africans in its economy, save as consumers and comparatively cheap labour. 

The ANC, the leading party in the GNU and still the liberation movement in RSA, is expected to be the most capable institution to execute the tasks that history has thrust upon it. As an institution, it should be managed through a machinery of ideation-to-implementation second to none, if not a few, in RSA. Its systems should induct and disciple society into behaviour reminiscent of its democratic revolution objectives. Its habits as an institution should set the pace and cadence of all other institutions in the country, particularly the government as the most active agent of the state and the ultimate prize of politics. It should, in essence, be the lead institution of leadership. 

Having abrogated to itself the role of leader of society for as long as it has existed, the ANC should live up to this claim's integrity and leadership demands. The quality of membership it attracts should be beyond reproach, even if the measurement bar is the minimum threshold it has set. Commitment to its member integrity management systems, codes of good conduct, the overarching rule of law principle, and supremacy of the Constitution are non-negotiables without which it would collapse its already fledging moral high ground to lead.

The bar set by the Freedom Charter as the summary document of what defines the ANC and the Constitution of South Africa into which the Freedom Charter and its human rights demands as old as 1923 were chiselled requires a through-the-eye-of-the-needle quality leadership and membership. The commitment to the NDR objectives, human dignity, social justice, fulfilment of the Bill of Rights, and pursuit of what is in the national interest procures for a membership core diametrically at variance with what is currently on offer or on the shelves of the political enterprise called the ANC. If a deep ANC exists, its visibility should match the calls for renewal. 

A 40% hegemony over state power, with a guarantee of NDR allies in the new opposition complex, requires leadership and membership sophistication focussed on what should be pursued and achieved in the liberation promise the Constitution articulates. South Africa needs a leadership which will make it a concert of political coalitions fighting for hegemony to make it a non-racial, non-sexist, united, democratic, and prosperous society. If the ANC renewal is about that, its relevance is rescuable. If the GNU is about that, it might gain some runway. CUT!!!