The th!nc Foundation

When reality sets in, history compels men and women to react thoughtfully. Leaders in crisis face a pivotal moment that will shape their legacy. Like falling off a cliff, once you begin to descend, the ensuing narrative will revolve around how you landed or were crushed upon impact. Only your resilience, mental strength, and capacity to think clearly in the face of fate can save you. The ANC has been in this situation since the 2024 national election results were announced. The 29 May 2024 election outcomes, an epoch representing the last fall from the cliff, have put the leadership of the ANC in a position where anything they do to truncate the fall can only manage the inevitability of landing. The gravitational pull is in control of the speed towards crushing or landing. Whichever way you engage with interventions that are made, the endgame is to reach a point where the next take-off can be made, of which such a point can be a crash side.    In vintage Mbalula style, h...

  The ANC, a resilient entity, has weathered 113 years of existence. It has triumphed over British Colonialism, apartheid, the homeland system, and the Cold War's hottest moments. Despite facing assassinations, detentions without trial, long prison terms, and economic marginalisation, it has persevered as an organisation and movement.  The ANC has the whole human history to live and potentially recover as a hegemon or leader of society. Its current membership, leaders, and capturers risk being rejected by what the ANC stands for. The ANC has never been subjected to such degradation of what it stands for by those that must represent its founding values and provisions. While it is true that organisations are its members, there are moments when the organisation carries, defines, and makes its members. As a brand and historical reality, the ANC survives without those inside it.  In the last two decades since its founding in 1912, its members and leaders have challenged th...

  Previous State of the Nation Addresses over the past fifteen years have been reports on what the government, mainly the National executive, has been doing to contribute to South Africa's performance. This has come across as being mechanical. Ignored often is that in RSA, the significant progress issue to be tracked is how far the country is concerning what the Constitution provides.  The thrust of the new constitutional order is to translate the transferred political power into economic and social cohesion benefits for society. The national objectives of non-racialism, non-sexism, democracy, national unity, and prosperity should be obligatory for the government to report on. The RSA Constitution is about creating a society anchored on social and economic justice, human dignity, the supremacy of the Constitution, the rule of law, and the obligation to fulfil the Bill of Rights.    The State of the Nation Address (SONA) should be about progress from an aparthei...

Dr FM Lucky Mathebula  Throughout history, the US has consistently exerted its influence on other democracies, employing a range of strategies from soft power, where it asserts ideational superiority, to hard power, where it dictates policy options through it hard power. This pattern of behaviour underscores the extent to which the US is willing to enforce its will and trumpet its national interests. Since 1910, South Africa has been a standout constitutional order, asserting its intellectual independence on the international stage. Influenced by General Smuts's internationalist worldview, it played a key role in the formation of the League of Nations and later the United Nations. OR Tambo's internationalist perspective on the liberation struggle established the ANC as a global anti-apartheid force, eventually leading to its influential role in the Non-Aligned Movement and the Global South. RSA influenced pursuing a human rights-based world through the 1923 Bill of Right...

TimeLive 29 January 2025 South Africa is entering an age of post-liberation rhetoric and politics, a bewildering new phase that necessitates adaptive leadership. A political party's unique value proposition will determine the patterns of voter attraction strategies, ushering in a future of hope and inspiration. The age of post-liberation rhetoric politics is a phase in which political discourse and strategy shift from the liberation narrative to contemporary issues. It is a time of unprecedented risk for history, dogma, and nostalgia-dependent political parties and individuals. Political parties that represent victoriousness associated with managing a revolution that results in a new democratic order will not find relevance unless it is about maintaining the new order. Transitionocratic mindsets, entrenched ways of thinking that resist change, will suffocate the new appetite for policy frameworks that move society from referencing its past more than what the future should look like...

South Africa's history is a tale of profound injustice, often untold. It's a narrative of state-sponsored land confiscation from Indigenous people, a story of wars fought over land dispossession and its defence. The basis of commerce is the state's use of land as a resource for development, which was unjustly taken from its rightful owners.  In its quest to forge nationhood between conquerors and the conquered, South Africa has been working on a project to expect those with a conqueror mindset to voluntarily surrender the spoils of the conquest without a post-war treaty. The ANC-National Party accord, which preceded the CODESA negotiations and the 1994-1996 legally mandated constituent assembly, remains the only agreement with the force of a post-war treaty. It justifies South Africa's belief that it operates in a peaceful settlement firmament.    The 1996 Constitution, the outcome of the constituent assembly, places a weighty obligation on the state. It must act ...