The National Dialogue is the new battle to lead society.

Published on 24 December 2024

The Constitution's liberation promise of establishing a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights is under stress. The idea of a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, united, and prosperous South Africa is polarised. Political parties, or their leaders, have made the victory of the other an existential threat to the constitutional and democratic order we are painstakingly threading. The 'national unity toenadering' that characterised the Constituent Assembly between 1994 and 1996 was quickly replaced by scorched earth political rhetoric. Race, class, and ethnic nationalism are becoming the defining features of our national politics.

The Constitution, with its deliberate founding values of human dignity, the achievement of equality, and the advancement of human rights and freedoms, was designed to build a democratic society. The founders of the democratic order, collectively apexed in the person of Nelson Mandela, conceived of the Supremacy of the Constitution to ensure that interests as the currency of politics are ...... within its set parameters. But the oozing political rhetoric and contests have become enmeshed in race, class, and narrow ethnonationalist politics, exacerbating divisions that tormented a past we are fragile to deal with. 

 

While it is true that our apartheid past stands out as the most dramatic moment of institutional breakdown since the founding of South Africa as defined sovereign state in 1910, it is its 1996 Constitution, the basis of our new nationhood, that sets it apart from its tormented past. The inconvenient reality is that even after apartheid was removed from the statutes, its templates of racial domination and spatial demographics continued to be a net negative force that discounted the statutory gains the Constitution has since made. Equally, there is no way that a spirit of freedom from being an oppressor or oppressed race, class, and ethnonationalist group that has sunk so deep in the population can be repressed again. The vision of a South Africa where "we the people" live and work together as equals in conditions of peace and prosperity is an uncompromising pull factor that has made heroes of those individuals and institutions that stuck their necks to be chopped off, if necessary, for that ideal. 

 

To the extent that society's powerful worked against the ideal of a democratic, united, prosperous, and non-racial South Africa, those who fought and advocated for it grew into natural leaders. The material expression of these ideal conditions can only be guaranteed through a form and character of state capability whose ultimate measure of success will always be the lawfulness of its actions with the parameters set by the supreme law of the land. This creates a new political race, that of being society's new leader. 

Leading South African society is not only a political endeavour but also economic, socioeconomic, and profoundly cultural. Its apartheid legacy has created a set of correctnesses that have muted into cultural practices whose defence can, in practice, translate into a reset to apartheid default settings. The institutional force and motif of apartheid created across-the-spectrum of human co-existence "cultural allegiances that divided constituencies in multiple ways, making them an unreliable basis for building a national consensus on the form, character, and content of national unity. With the growing centrality of the will of "we the people", and not members of political parties, in determining who and how we want to be governed, the leader of society mantle is now firmly under people's power. The fifty per cent threshold to access absolute power to govern became consequential in how the democratic order neutralised the potential of being under a tyranny of the majority. 

 

The era for political formations and leaders to enjoy the endearment of society only through their loyalty to their party, class, race, and tribe evaporated with the failure of all political parties to command the required threshold of absolute power to govern. This has stemmed the tide of faith in South Africa's democracy faltering. Society leaders will henceforth be defined by their devotion to our constitutional and democratic order. How majoritarianism, legitimate and correct as it may be, and this rendition takes no brief on its desirability or otherwise, almost facilitated dictatorship by political tribes, might well have been the risk of the good that our democracy is or has been thus far. 

The prospect of the mooted National Dialogue is an opportunity to press the reset button and give society a new reason to embrace a new or renewed leader of society. Unless fundamentally renewed, South Africa's inherited and dominant political and civil society institutions are a poor fit for a leader of society the next phase of our democratic order requires. They carry ideological or otherwise baggage that has thus far only served as a liability to a united and prosperous future. We must refuse to be a polarised society. Instead, we must strive for unity, for it is only together that we can truly move forward. 

 

Racism, ableism, classism, and tribalism operate like viruses of systematic oppression. Equally, nostalgic allegiance to ideology and past era-defined approaches to social phenomena are viruses of self-imposed and systemic oppression. The status quo, often ritualised and sometimes packaged into a systematically entrenchable learning program, tends to limit the possibility of seeing institutions anew for their survival in the future. For the oncoming National Dialogue, any organisation or institution striving to create a united and prosperous South Africa must recognise how the templates and systems of socioeconomic, cultural, and economic domination perpetuate cultures of exclusion, harm and oppression. 

The National Dialogue must emerge as the battleground to lead society anew. The disintegration of the liberation movement, the ANC, is the surest sign that in its current state, and by its admission, hence renewal, it can no longer lead society. Its alliance partners are correct in interrogating or demanding its reconfiguration. The shifting civil society base, with its profoundly anti-system postures, manifests a vacuum in how society is led to respond to multiple global and sovereign challenges. After all, is said and done, South Africa has virtual and unseen skeletons or frames and a socioeconomic dominance system or template as central to its operation as the studs and joists we cannot see in the physical buildings we call homes or structures. Leading it as a society is about foregrounding these for attention and fracturing. It is how we gather the pieces of what we have become as a society or nation, package them through a dialogue process, and give them back to ourselves, which will make a difference. For this, we need a new or renewed leader in society. But the potential for positive change is immense, and this should give us all hope for a better future. 

Happy Christmas, South Africa. Thank you for your patronage and support. From the Thinc Foundation, our optimism about the National Dialogue has always been the most cautious of our reflections.