Holiday nuggets for Leader of Society Brigades. Our obligation must be to the liberation promise.

 As the constitutional order advances and the inherent liberation promises endow our humanity with freedoms, South Africans must embrace the responsibility and obligations to safeguard the democratic order as a guaranteeing firmament. A new epoch began in 1994 when South Africans resolved to recognise the past injustices and establish social and economic justice as the basis upon which respect for human dignity would be the order of the day. Continually, the RSA society faces the cusp of various dimensions of the epoch, but this time, it is about the obligation to live the liberation promise devoid of its tormenting encumbrances. 

The thirty-year experience of being a non-racialising, democratising, equality and equity-sensitive, and social cohesion-chasing society has radically transformed the relationship between “we the people” and the democratic order we are threading. At the same time, the developments in the freedom literacy of South Africans and the growing human rights culture are endowing (us) the people with the power to calibrate state power to be about them. The essential question determining the future of the liberation promises in the Constitution, and much of the democratic life in RSA is whether we, as an informed and empowered citizenry, can use our public power to freely elect public representatives wisely. 

The emerging constitutional order-centric civil society movement, the political party-led opposition complex, influential and sovereign individuals, and organised business have already made headway in synthesising citizen obligation to the liberation promise. On 16 December 2024, the President announced that the National Dialogue would be convened, a step that triggered several conversations about the content and character of the dialogue. As (we) the people gain the competence to manipulate the Constitution in our favour on a grander scale, we should expect those with power to react correspondingly. This might result from the risk our constitutional literacy poses to their power, which feeds off our ignorance.

Those in the vocation of politics and trading with interests as the currency of politics have already started to position how the new process of defining the next thirty years is structured. For “(we) the people”, the impact of the liberation promise will appear once we have arrived at a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, united, and prosperous society. The true meaning of such a liberation lies in how it eradicates poverty, creates jobs for the majority of us, and addresses inequality. This is the obligation our public power to elect public representatives freely expects from those we elect. Modern-day democracy is far better described as what those who participate in making it work get out of it beyond its welfarist comfort zones. 

Thinking differently about using more state and civil society power and systems to make our Bill of Rights far more respected, promoted, protected, and fulfilled is not only fascinating science but also an essential investment in the future survival of our democratic order.

There’s something particularly haunting about the way our appetite for restitution and retribution tends to treat acquired freedom by those who benefited from colonialism and apartheid as not being full rights; we have made theirs less sentient. This explains why the intersection of a truly recognised past and a fully embraced human rights future has the potential to unlock South Africa’s nationhood, offering a beacon of hope for the next phase of economic development and growth. 

Inconveniently, yet true, the capabilities we are rapidly developing to make our (race, class, ethnicity, or otherwise narrowly defined) world better also can make it much worse if we are not careful. Without our permission, our fates as a South African society are deeply intertwined with each other, our aspirations, and the common interests defining our humanity and our increasingly interconnected world. 

A defining feature of freedom from oppression, however small, is that as the frontiers of humanity’s knowledge and experience are extended, new mysteries and expectations beyond the frontiers come into sharper focus. Equally, the cumulative advance of democracy, a constitutional order, and the democratic order we are threading require new leadership of society mindsets and civil society advocacy mechanisms in symbiosis, of course, with theory, insight, and practice. Sovereign individuals who have internalised the basis of the erstwhile liberation movement to be a leader of society have an added obligation to defend the correctness of creating a National Democratic Society wherever they find themselves; it is a civic and national duty.

As a nation about to enter into a dialogue, we should be open-minded about where in the political, economic, and social control cosmos a better life for all might emerge and what forms it could take and devote some thought to the new frontiers it might have or spawn. The time has come that we and our progeny in this democracy should cheer on the brave to see our constitutional order for what it is and not what we wished it was because they will have a pivotal role in spearheading the liberation promise world and determining what happens beyond the whirlpool of status quo defence and restitution demands that are chocking our potential as a democracy. 

 

Suppose we expect further dramatic advances in our politics and constitutional order during the national dialogue process. In that case, we must be ready to live with the questions we have thus far avoided answering. Depending on its agenda’s structure, access, and transparency, the national dialogue must expect new questions to be posed that it couldn’t conceive when it was conceptualised. 

Like a driverless car operating on the algorithms designed to serve those giving it instructions, the future that RSA constitutional and democratic order envisages requires a leadership mindset that does not worry about the loss of control, of pieces of its identity and, most importantly, of its prerogative arbitrary power; instead one that is obligated to the liberation promises the founding fathers and mothers of this democracy bequeathed to us. Fundamental to the liberation promise is that (we) the people shall govern, based on the axiomatic point of departure that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of (we) the people.  CUT!!!

ABOUT THE LEADER OF SOCIETY BRIGADES

This brigade understands government as an agency of a state that institutionally defines our sovereignty, nationhood, and value system. This brigade seeks to defend the supremacy of the constitution and the sacrosanctity of the rule of law as the context of all contexts in South Africa. Those in the leadership of the political parties, civil society, and government are seen by this brigade as South Africans operating on borrowed public power, whence when in government, they are organs of state, and the state is not their organ. 

 

This brigade is intergenerational; it is organised according to the various generations, defining the different epochs of the struggle to transfer power to (we) the people; such power is political, economic, and social control to create a national democratic society. It should be organised as student formations, worker unions, civic associations, and other specialist formations that executed various dimensions of the struggle as it applies to them. As this brigade became a force, questions of ethics, code of conduct, and how to govern and manage became central to its agenda. This brigade should be commissioned into the state, academia, private sector, and the diplomatic corps.

 

 

Many of the first administration Mandarins under Nelson Mandela qualified as ‘Leaders of Society Brigades’, which might account for some of the efficiencies as the transition was constructed. There is no empirical evidence to show if leaving politics and public service can be attributable to the decline in the number of those who played the role of Leader of the Society of the Constitution. There is, however, sprouts of evidence that the private sector outlook of society, at a point, showed their arrival. 

 

As the structural ambiguities of Parliament in conducting oversight seem to be undermined by towing the party line principles across the board, it will always be the conscience of parliamentarians with a 'leader of society' mindset that the democratic order will rely on for its survival. Whilst the ANC as a liberation movement is undoubtedly the custodian of South Africa's liberation from apartheid colonialism, the 'leader of society brigade' within it, which it should have curated and institutionalised appropriate succession, has morphed into breeds of leadership the ‘leader of society mantle’ cannot be bestowed on a significant number of them. The soul space of the constitutional order and the governing complexes it now has should thus be troubled if the centre is not dominated by the 'leader of society brigade'. In that way, when the post-liberation political context gets more complicated and sophisticated, and liberation beneficiaries become especially disadvantaged by the complexity of freedom, the 'leader of society brigade' becomes the interior of society that deals with the threat to the liberation promise in the Constitution.