The th!nc Foundation

Published in TimesLive 26 March 2025: In search of Mandela: the urgent dilemma of SA leadership succession The leadership question in South Africa is again coming into the spotlight as society considers who will lead the country after Ramaphosa. The infamous "we all have smallanyana skeletons in the closet" resonates whenever the discourse on leadership succession arises. We ask how smallanyana is ‘so-and-so’s” skeleton in the closet so that we can entrust the country to them. As the GNU advances deep into the intricacies of governing and understanding that all of humanity is fallible, this question can now be asked across the board without giving it a domicile.   As the oldest liberation movement in Africa and a key player in South African politics, the ANC continues to shape our understanding of leadership. However, the shift in power dynamics has introduced new players, altering our leadership perspective. The closets of GNU partners are now part of our search destinations...

Lynching is explained as a method of social and racial control meant to terrorise a caste or class into submission or inferior status. This method is commonly used to subvert a rules-based process that the lynching mob and individual know would outlaw. Lynchers administer torment and torture (physical or mental) to the victims or their kin to levels where their entire being is fractured into pieces.  The significance of lynching transcends the specific issue raised as the reason for it. It is, in essence, a ritual that makes those being lynched representatives of their kin, kind, clan, tribe, or perceived and manufactured caste. The entirety of the act generally serves as a warning to the lynched and their kin never to challenge the manufactured supremacy of those who carry out the lynching.  Lynchings had an impact only when they were public events. They required suitable platforms and audiences to convey their genuine ideological intentions. The lacerations were so dee...

Published in TimesLive 20 March 2025 The decision by the Afriforum and Solidarity to dare the Ramaphosa-led GNU and mastermind a US-backed campaign to extort outstanding concessions from the CODESA settlement marks a new ideological turn since the 1914 Rebellion against the involvement of the Union of SA in the First World War. This misconstrued De la Rey moment costs the economy substantial value regarding its investment destination prospects. The Trump-in-the-White House reality is exerting pressure on the GNU using AGOA as an incentive to embark on policy reforms. The global consensus against racism, apartheid as a crime against humanity, land dispossession and occupation, and the use of genocide to pursue territorial expansion has shrunk the political legitimacy of conquest as the basis of justifying ill-gotten rights to dispossessed property. The inability to legitimise colonial deeds of title written in terms of the occupier property relations law has put landowners in all previo...

On its way to negotiating with the apartheid regime between 1985 and 1990, the ANC was already under pressure to seize the moral high ground of the struggle against apartheid rather than hope for a hard power type of advantage. The perceived triumph of the liberal order with the US as its node and the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as well as the rise of 'verligtes' in the Afrikaner Nationalist Establishment, marked the existence of a vacuum of power which needed to be filled in South Africa without a need for an outright victor. The rise of liberalism, including its liberal right dosages, triggered increasingly complex systems and networks within the ANC and the global governance institutional setup, overshadowing the role of the collective in determining the destiny of the NDR and, by default, the ANC as its custodian.  Equally monumental as this shift was the rise of the sovereign individual, propelled by Mandela as a liberation icon and a node of concentrated m...

  A defining feature of freedom is that as the frontiers of society's knowledge about it are extended, new mysteries beyond the frontiers become the sharper focus. Post-1994-South Africa is entering a stage where its freedom is gradually getting unencumbered to individuals, institutions, organisations, and political parties that played a role in its attainment. The deeper society gets to experience the joys of determining its arrangements on how to govern itself, the more the democratic and constitutional order offers fears, conjectures, and hopes about what lies ahead. The sheer thrill of reconfiguring political power arrangements through a vote gives society greater insight into how democracy enables it to use the universal franchise to its advantage without being beholden to dogma, nostalgia, and ideology.  In RSA, the prospects of the political system becoming vulnerable to the influence of individuals or personality cults who can create cataclysms are neutralised by the...

South Africa celebrates its Human Rights Day as a divided society. How we see each other puts the meaning of humans to the test. The founders of our constitutional order committed us to a society anchored on fundamental human rights. Being human comes with rights. Rights specify entitlement and confer power. The status of being human implies the inalienability of human rights. Wherever humanity is found, the universality of rights obtains. Unless violated, rights are assumed. The concept of human rights democratises human dignity. This context liquidates the pursuit of rights for exclusive categories or types of humans generally following race, creed, colour, and, lately, sexual orientation.    The 1996 Constitution fundamentally reshaped our society, acknowledging our troubled past. This legal document made human rights an integral part of our sovereign existence, ensuring equality for all South Africans and extending its influence to every facet of our lives.  ...

TimesLive 07 March 2025 South Africa has steadfastly assumed the unique role of being the new global advocate of a rules-based international governance system. By courageously confronting apartheid wherever it rears its head in the world, RSA has emerged as a beacon of hope on matters of racism, equality, decoloniality, and the respect, promotion, protection, and fulfilment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The conduct of its struggle for freedom and equality, which culminated in a constitutional order whose human rights thrust dictates its international relations and cooperation, has pitted it against powerful forces whose geopolitical interests have a troubling relationship with freedom and equality for all of humanity.  Inarguably, RSA is now a force to be reckoned with when it comes to the use of international institutions of global justice and peace to advance its national interests. Having been the protagonist and beneficiary of the United Nations International Co...

The decision by the US Secretary of State to declare RSA Ambassador to the US Ibrahim Rasool, a persona non grata, is unprecedented and consequential in USA-RSA relations. Given the post-Trump inauguration tensions between RSA and the Trump administration, South Africa faces one of its consequential post-1994 foreign policy challenges and conundrums. Compounding this is the pro-Palestine positions it has taken, which have had the most impactful outcomes on the Palestinian self-determination journey than almost all UN resolutions taken together.  It would have been expected that the USA would react on behalf of Israel in a way that sends a global message to all that seek to reverse Israeli territorial gains in Palestine. While RSA relied on the global governance institutions established to ensure that a rules-based international order prevails, the geopolitical interests of superpowers have come through as the context of all contexts about global peace and security.   ...

Steve Biko stressed the need for South Africans to liberate themselves psychologically and become self-reliant to change South Africa fundamentally. South Africans need to remember that the historical and structural roots of racial inequality and privilege run deep. Notwithstanding that they are less visible, they lie beneath the surface, and institutional templates spread their resilience. The ‘united-in-diversity’ protagonists and advocates of a concentrated space for those who conceive themselves as Westerners on the southern tip of Africa, despite their ‘conveniently manufactured progressive conceits and the best of intentions often, and not always, do not see themselves as part of a race-dependent system of human co-existence. In their arguments that they are not racist or at the least discriminatory, their constituencies argue that hard work, determination, and living according to the rules of competition will result in fair treatment. What they often overlook is how the template...