In less than 24 months, the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance, a historical coalition that shaped the theoretical dimensions of the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle, had transitioned from a dominant force to the brink of a monumental crisis. The significant loss of 68 seats in Parliament, reducing their performance from 57% to 40%, signalled a corresponding reduction in their deployment to state power quotas. The erosion had already begun in local government since 2016, leaving the career aspirations of alliance leaders up in smoke.
As
the challenging times of 2016, 2019, 2021, and particularly 2024 brought about
livelihood crises sooner and more intensely than anticipated, the calls for
reconfiguring the alliance, including the SACP's decision to operate
independently, grew louder. The alliance's shape and decision-making structure
evolved in line with the loss of political power in all government spheres
since 2016. The labour component of the alliance, which expanded in sectors where public policy was influential and shrank where the capital-labour conflict was escalating, meant the worker and working-class substrate in the alliance was not as ideologically concentrated as it should have been.
The
melting down of the ANC's leader-of-society status and how its brand was
compromised by corruption and state capture allegations revealed imminent
stress in the alliance. Even those who saw the turmoil in the liberation
movement as part of an established pattern in post-liberation democracies
started to contemplate how these states of affairs could impact the stability of
the constitutional and democratic order under construction. The spectre of
hardcore party politics, rigid regionalism, tribalism, left-right ideological
rigidity, and prospects of power sharing were creating increasingly complex
civil society movements many levels removed from the underlying national
grievances of the majority of South Africans, who are black and African in
particular. These factors make the political landscape increasingly fragmented and challenging to navigate.
The
inside-the-alliance political rhetoric was already in a prepare-for-the-worst-case
scenario mode. The key partners' discussion documents indicated a rising wave
of discontent with go-it-alone tendencies taking discourse centre stage.
Cassandras, within and outside the alliance, notably from think tanks, warned
that the spin doctoring of fissures inside the alliance carries the
inconvenient message of a total loss of political power by the African National
Congress. This loss of power could lead to a significant shift in the South
African political landscape, with potential implications for governance and
policy-making.
Blurred
by the trappings of state power incumbency and buoyed by their control of
patronage dispensing power, those in the alliance's leadership either
refused to read or accept the script and signs and stubbornly clung to the
belief that the liberation movement was invulnerable. Compounding this was that
the structures of the movement were a sprawling mess, and their political
mandate processing systems so bizarrely antiquated that no one had until the
2024 May 40% moment realised, or accepted, that its basic units of the
organisation, branches, had been losing membership and influence at a rapid
clip for more than a decade.
The
powerful sway leftist politics, the dominant currency of the alliance, had over
the pre-1996 Constitution of South Africa is now weakened. The monopoly to
represent the poor, the working class, and workers by the alliance has been
thinly spread between civil society bodies and legal representatives. The
labour relations system has matured into a pro-workers system, and the appeal
of unionisation will start to wane. The voter market for the left, which is
shrinking, is contested by parties that believe in the need for a second
revolution. The left has had a proliferation of newcomers, including those with
toxic ideas, that think its rhetoric is a means to acquire power. Given the
go-it-alone SACP choice, leftist organisations will be able to call the shots
in South African politics as much as the SACP did. The leverage might be
gone.
Just
thinking
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