The National Dialogue: What Does It Hold?

Published in TimesLive of 15 January 2025

At his Reconciliation Day speech on 16 December 2024, President Ramaphosa announced that the National Dialogue would be held in 2025. He would appoint a panel of eminent persons and a steering committee to facilitate its realisation. In its annual 08 January 2025 Statement, the ANC NEC included the National Dialogue among the programs it will engage in during the year. It submits that the central purpose of the National Dialogue is to create an inclusive and transparent process to shape a new socio-political consensus.

According to the ANC NEC statement, "the National Dialogue offers a comprehensive platform for all citizens, 'we the people', to be part of the political process and reclaim agency to ensure that 'we the people’ are our own liberators". It directs its members that "the National Dialogue will create an opportunity to discuss and find solutions to the difficult issues of economic exclusion, social inequality and societal marginalisation". It envisages a National Dialogue that will "rekindle and restore public participation as the expression of people's power".

 

The ANC has expressed interest in the National Dialogue and defined its objectives. This interest might be one of the critical moments when the ANC enters a terrain that requires its capability to assume external actors' perspectives and viewpoints as the basis for its nation-building program. While the National Dialogue appears new, it was first mooted in … The difference is the momentum it has gained and the growing expectations of civil society formation.

 

The genesis of the National Dialogue is traced from the National Foundations Dialogue Initiative (NFDI) initiated in 2013 by Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, FW de Klerk and other foundations "to strengthen and deepen RSA constitutional democracy through dialogue". The NFDI founding statement declares that 'every Nation must stop and take pause, especially one with deep racial and economic divisions as in South Africa, to refine its capacity for reflection, dialogue and action constantly'. It is modelled as an initiative to reclaim the RSA dreams as promised in the 1996 Constitution, the liberation promise. 

 

Inspired by the Constitution's objective to heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice, and fundamental human rights, the idea of a National Dialogue within an open society framework was institutionalised to be an ongoing feature of the democratisation process. At conception, the National Dialogue was modelled to mainstream thematic issues from within civil society onto the centre of public policy and open national dialogue. Functionally, it would moderate, through content and engagement, the widening social distance between those governing and society. 

 

It was necessitated by a realisation that RSA politics were veering off the path the 1996 Constitution had set. The founding provisions of human dignity, achievement of equality, advancement of human rights and freedoms, non-racialism and non-sexism, the Rule of Law, and the Supremacy of the Constitutions were all threatened by the conduct of RSA state and non-state agencies. The stability of the constitutional and democratic order was at stake. Arbitrary and prerogative decision-making by organs of state, elected and appointed, were starting to trump the normative foundations of South Africa as a sovereign nation.

 

The trust deficit between the then governing leadership of the state and civil society bodies, acutely the business or economic establishment, was alarmingly high and growing. Only after President Ramaphosa confirmed the deficit and social distance with communities by calling for a social compact did the need for a National Dialogue take a different turn and gain traction. The Ramaphosa call incorporated the pressure to restore RSA from the wreckages of state capture, corruption, and the general decline of government as manifested in collapsing public infrastructure and social cohesion. The need for a National Dialogue was thus born to recapture the contested space of leading society and package it in such a way that primarily makes it a national program of action. 

 

Without vitiating Parliament's constitutional status as the representative voice of "we the people," the growing number of abstentions by eligible voters has dampened the completeness of its public representative legitimacy. Those voting for the system are a worryingly small fraction of those not voting. The RSA civil society sector has been growing commensurate with the discontent about the declining capability of the state to govern and the shrinking capacity of the economy to grow—a condition known to be an ingredient for a social revolution and political instability in a democracy.

 

By declaring that the National Dialogue will happen in 2025, the seventieth anniversary year of the 1955 Freedom Charter, the year of the ANC's National General Council, the year in which the consequential Local Government Election Manifesto conferences will be held, and the year RSA will host the G20 nations amidst a volatile global peace pursuing initiatives to avert a full-blown World War, RSA is poised for a dialoguing year. There might be no aspect of human co-existence that will remain untouched in South Africa. 

 

Besides the challenges of how the dialogue will be conducted to ensure it carries the confirmable inputs of society, a process whose perfection has always been claimed by the organisers of the 1955 Congress of the People when the Freedom Charter was produced, the criteria for inviting participants at the inception National Convention will generate more dialogues about the dialogue. The hegemonic contest to shape the dialogue is intense. There are already calls for a discourse on the “Second Republic” or a referendum to review the 1996 Constitution.

 

Since 1994, South Africa has grown its think tank industry. It has succeeded in positioning the influence of experts and eminent persons as neutral, credible, and above the fray of the policy-making vortexes. This is notwithstanding a growing discontent about the rise of funded narratives and policy influences that support sponsored viewpoints. The content generation contest has already begun between civil society organisations and political parties.

 

The National Dialogue will be anchored on the expertise of civil society organisations, many of which are unrepentant advocates of positions from constituencies funding or contributing to the existence. Thus, the agenda of the National Convention's inception and the muted voting-district-based dialogues will be visibly contentious. With the government suffering a trust deficit, the civil society bodies which dominate the national narrative and think tanks, funded or otherwise, will become brokers of political or other compromises throughout the National Dialogue process.

 

The ANC-led liberation movement complex is in a hegemonic retreat, arguably against the proverbial wall, and recovering from one of its embarrassing voter repudiation replies. The established coalition of the left, also called the tripartite alliance, is disintegrating. Consequently, the ideologically conservative think tanks will have free reign over content produced for the National Dialogue process. The discourse might privilege limited government involvement in matters of the economy and unfettered free enterprise as a neutralising antidote to the historically preferred developmental state model of economic planning.

The National Dialogue presents the most open opportunity in the national policy process about RSA, especially when there is no absolute majority to govern, where substantive influence can be exerted on the content, form, and character of the liberation promise in the Constitution. Only political parties with the sophistication and depth of networking with and trusting the expert community will emerge as leaders of society beyond the National Dialogue. Of all the outcomes it can yield, the contest for claiming, if not wrestling for, the leader of society mantle after the liberation movement complex has exited the space will be the most defining for RSA beyond the National Dialogue.