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.
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