Is the ANC losing the hegemonic grip to define the liberation of "we the people"?

The announcement of the 2024 National and Provincial elections results will forever signify a posterity-defining moment for the hegemonic hold of the ANC over South African politics. This is a moment of profound significance, a turning point in the political landscape of South Africa. The absolute political power to govern the RSA might have evaporated forever if the evidence about political power remains irrefutable.  The sad faces of ANC officials at the IEC counting centre and rumours of shuttle coalition negotiations were not only the writing on the wall that politics in South Africa will never be the same again but an indication of a new dawn. The results put the concepts 'we the people' and ‘our people’ into their most consequential review state. Voters were expressive of  ‘sounds the call to come together’ in the national anthem in the most and uniquely RSA instructive way. 

It is not that the ANC did not know that it was not its numerical supremacy at the polls that was a thorn in the flesh of the opposition complex but its hegemonic hold on the liberation narrative of South Africa. As early as 1978, the idea of minority rights protection through the limitation of majority rule and guarantees of proportional representation against the first pass-the-post system was being canvassed as a precondition for considering any political accord by the non-black political establishment. This historical context underscores the gravity of the potential decline of the ANC's power. As at going to the 2024 elections, with knowledge of the dismal showing at the 2021 municipal elections, the ANC still believed in the invincibility of its mass mobilisation juggernaut, which had now morphed out of being volunteer-driven into rent-seeking brigades of activists. This condition continues to mirror the form and character of its basic units of existence, the branches.

The ANC's hegemonic hold disintegrated at its historical strongholds of KZN, Gauteng, and metropolitan areas, where the ANC had traditionally launched its major struggle programs. The below 50% decline in voter numbers represents a frontal attack on the essence of just being ANC. Even where performance was highest, the below 55% overall voter turnout does not bode well for its next showing at any national election shortly. The battering led to a surge of anti-absolute political power national sentiment, which the ANC had been in the last thirty years. May 2024 represents blatant aggression at the hegemonic hold of South African politics by the ANC. 

The poor showing has significant implications for the geopolitical value of South Africa in ideological terms. The DA-led then-opposition complex and the internal to the ANC MK Party-led current opposition complex could carry out a technically and inspiration-filled sophisticated assault on ANC hegemony, courtesy of the dearth of its leader of society thinking prowess. The shrunken base of its party funding support, the decline in appeal to the old-money business establishment, and the nascent anarchy represented by some of its local branch leaders have undermined, if not upended, the ANC's hegemonic hold as a past undisputed leader of society. 

Had the ANC wanted to frame its response, assuming it was aware that its hegemony was the target of the last election contest, it would have had to fundamentally review the public policy trajectories it pursued on economic matters. The battle was more about the loosening bond between the ANC and those that have historically voted for it, notwithstanding a downward performance spiral in changing the poverty, unemployment, and inequality levels. While it was essential to project an investor-friendly posture, relegating its base constituency's food, energy, and livelihood security was a fatal error to an unimportant election matter. The electricity (or energy) decisions that preceded the May 2024 elections were suicidal and fractured several important substrates of ANC hegemonic strongholds. The most significant load it shed was not electricity but absolute majority political power.

The idea of a social compact, which has now morphed into a difficult-to-define in output terms National Dialogue, and essentially a vintage ANC strategy to hegemonically prevail, would have been a saving grace had it been implemented before May 2024. The dialogue would have, and may still, position the ANC, once more, as a liberation movement working for the freedom of "we the people" from the tyranny of rising anarchies. 

The ANC previously knew how to occupy the hegemonic centre in RSA politics. Its speed in claiming authorship of what is the alternative of what is not wanted by "we the people" has resulted in its policies defining the main features of the constitutional order. The 1923 Human Rights, the African Claims, the Congress League Program of Action, the 1955 Freedom Charter, the Harare Declaration, the Constitutional Principles, the 1996 Constitution, and the RDP documents gave the ANC the legitimacy to be hegemonic over RSA politics.

Regarding the economy, the templates that define its demographics, the structure of its value chains, and the history-defined ownership patterns, the ANC chose a path that has, to date, limited its capability to be hegemonic on economic matters. Save for two principles in the Freedom Charter; there needs to be a comprehensive strategy to turn around or recalibrate the templates of economic access to make economic and social justice a lived experience. Economic policy debates have yet to receive the appropriate vigour and passion to match the size and character of the economy to be recalibrated.

The ANC’s economic transformation rhetoric has been about exerting restitution without delineating achievable economic objectives and a theory of the transformation end-state. Even as it pulled the Black Economic Empowerment program, which created passages for a few impressively successful black participants in an otherwise still hostile economy, the BEE strategy could not develop into a theory of change and an integrated strategy. As a result, the state procurement-led aspects of the BEE strategy became an area through which its unintended policy consequences could be weaponised to erode the hegemonic hold of the ANC. The unintended consequence of corruption and state capture clothed with BEE made the economic transformation agenda attract an unfortunate characterisation of it being an endeavour of thieves and thieving. 

The brute truth is that the global liberal order's master plan is unambiguous about instituting a world order with a hierarchy that does not have South Africa on top, except for a few co-opted individuals. The plan is to re-imperialise the world and bring all mineral resources endowed by jurisdictions into line, thus guaranteeing the continuation of extractive and mercantilist economic activities that privilege the West, and arguably even the East, over all other regions. After the successful anti-colonial struggles, those in charge of the world order rearranged the global political power architecture to work based on approval by market forces or investors. 

A quest to prevail in hegemonic terms was unleashed through its agents or South Africans who believe in what the world order represents. That the ANC hegemony is waning, the following symptoms illustrate its inconvenient political impotence:

·      Inability to innovate a political programme beyond all its achievements of chiselling almost all of its monumental documents into the reigning constitutional order. The ANC has not internalised that all contests for political power are about being in control of the hegemony to implement what it has been chronicling since 1923. It is illegal to be opposed to establishing a non-racial, non-sexist, united, democratic, and prosperous South Africa, all of which are objectives of the National Democratic Revolution the ANC has bequeathed to the nation through the Constitution to anyone that can deliver it.

·      Shrinking membership/supporters' loyalty when it needs them the most. The new and next ANC needs voters, as human life needs oxygen to avoid death or political irrelevance. Its supporters are ready to show their strength of numbers at rallies and other events, but they do not loyally translate this to state power gaining votes.

·   Declining brand loyalty manifests itself in how identity with the ANC has been made to look wrong. The reputation liabilities associated with state capture reports are weighing down on the ANC's brand value.

·    Disarray in the membership maintenance and organising department. The disintegration of a hegemony starts with the dearth of vibrancy in the membership of the organisation driving it.

·      Declining funding sources to sustain the hegemony. The ANC's relative irrelevance to private capital has impacted its ability to convince funders to continue supporting it. Instead, it has attracted encumbered funding, which has eroded its policy influence autonomy.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE

The question is what can be done to stem the tide and restore the true ANC hegemony without impairing the political demands of modernity on its leaders.

·      The ANC must abandon its revolutionary rhetoric and embrace the fact that the Constitution defined the state's role as achieving the NDR objectives. This will recalibrate its relationship with the truism of the ANC being the system for as long as it is the governing party and cannot engage in anti-system politics.

·      The ANC must accept that its old self was about executing a struggle to transfer power to the people. The ANC described this power as political, economic, and social control. It is, therefore, incumbent on the ANC to embrace a truism that the granted universal franchise by the constitutional order is the apex manifestation of power being transferred to “we the people”. The extent to which our freely elected representatives use the transferred power to deal with economic matters and social control is a function of the competence, capacity, or capability voters have mandated to execute the assignment; it is, therefore, not an absence of transferred power. The ANC should, thus, change its attitude on this matter.

·      The new ANC, which contested in free and fair elections for the use of the transferred power, is about utilising state power, like any political party, to pursue a non-racial, non-sexist, united, democratic, and prosperous South Africa. An obligatory relationship with this truism should change how the ANC understands the importance of constitutional structures, such as Chapter 9 institutions, and a facility to assist it in doing politics and engaging in good governance. This includes embracing the idea of seeking certification by the Constitutional Court of policies that create sufficient doubt on their constitutionality.

·      Besides promoting and protecting the constitutional order is a national interest matter, the ANC should not only make it a pillar of the movement wheel but elevate it to a strategic and new frontier of politics.

·      The next ANC, the one to emerge after the renewal program, should be based on pursuing national unity, inclusive economic growth, fulfilment of the Bill of Rights, and reconstructing South Africa based on knowledge about the needs of "we the people". The nation has the ANC as its component; members of the ANC are not the nation. We, the people, can only be beneficiaries of a successful ANC renewal program, but we can exist in politics despite the ANC. This truism must recalibrate how the basic units of the ANC, branches treat us, “we the people” throughout a political term.

·      The next ANC is in a difficult moment. It should master the art of seeing its reputationally costly past as a governing party about the future. It is how the next ANC will interact with the complexity of RSA being a G20 member state, a key component and founder of BRICS, one of the largest economies in Africa, and an unstable political system with multiple interdependent influences that it will sustain its leader of society status in South Africa. This must preoccupy strategic conversations of the ANC at all its influential nodal points.   

 

The true north for the next ANC is a relationship with "we, the people." Understanding our true needs will define its place beyond what it has achieved to date. Otherwise, it faces an early thank you. We can do this ourselves. CUT!!