The two South African Nationalist movements, the African National Congress and the National Party, established a year apart in 1912 and 1913, have been the dominant players in defining the anti-colonial struggles that unfolded from the beginning of a constitutional state in 1910 until the ultimate non-racialisation of South Africa’s democratic order. Their collective effectiveness in implementing their political objectives as political parties or movements can be concentrated from 1949 to 2024, where both oversaw the State's Executive Authority.
The National Party built an apartheid state, which culminated in the establishment, in chronological order, of the First Republic, albeit with a deliberate intention of sustaining it as a mainly whites only democratic arrangement. The declaration of the Republic, by a National Party-led government in 1961, decoupled South Africa from the formal colonial grip of Britain, notwithstanding that the colonial character of the new Republic became a background of permanence.
The arrangements with which those who took charge
of the post-1961 state agreed to govern themselves were based on a consensus
that negated a reality that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, and
that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of
all the people. Race became the dominant vector of statewide planning,
opportunity definition, posture towards human dignity, social and economic
justice, equality before the law, relationship of the state and justice, and how
the state determined the quality of life for citizens.
The apartheid was constructed out of the templates set by British
Colonialism. The intensification of state-sponsored and race-based social
engineering triggered responses from the excluded Black majority, and
consortiums of civil society movements and political formations sought
political alternatives to apartheid colonialism and created rival ideological
contexts. The Freedom Charter of 1955 emerged as the alternative vision for
South Africa, and the thrust it advocated was the de-weaponisation of the state
against the people it should be serving. It was the logic of transferring power
to the people and establishing a democratic and open society in which
government is based on the will of the people that elevated the ANC as the leader
of the anti-apartheid movement, liberation movement, and curator of all efforts
to establish a National Democratic Society.
Conceptually, the struggle to transfer power to the people, where
such power is political, economic and social, represented a National Democratic
Revolution (NDR). The end state of the NDR, which is still the global consensus
of all who were opposed to apartheid, remains a non-racial, non-sexist, united,
democratic, and prosperous society. The normative appeal of the NDR objectives
mutated to become the core substrate of South Africa’s constitutional and
democratic order. The construct of human rights, also traceable in South Africa
from the African Bill of Rights adopted at the 1923 ANC conference, is now the
currency with which human freedoms are guaranteed.
The ANC's commitment to human rights, particularly its liberation movement character, constitutes the pursuit of a human freedom fighting journey that redefined the world’s relationship with most forms of chauvinism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, land dispossession, and genocide. On paper, the moral rights to
shape global justice and human dignity are derived from the normative appeal of
the ANC’s policy declarations that straddle all its monumental documents. This
unwavering commitment to human rights reassures us of the ANC's moral standing
in the global political arena.
The rise of global authoritarianism, arguably in all regions and
continents, and worryingly in the United States of America, has been receiving
the treatment that apartheid got at the height of the world anti-apartheid
movement. Iconic and rallying the cause was the release of Nelson Mandela, the
unbanning of the ANC, and the granting of universal suffrage to all citizens in
the RSA. The tangential inclusion of RSA in the global tariff tensions between
the USA and China, and the drawing in of the restitution issues in South Africa,
have ignited an international movement that begins constructing a narrative
with the US and colonialism in the same sentence. The International Criminal
Court victory on the GAZA genocide case has positioned the US on the
unfortunate side of an evolving history.
South Africa's experience masterminding any cause whose objective
is ending human suffering could, if deployed as part of its soft power,
potentially, civil society-led, tilt the balance of power in the unfolding sour
relations between RSA and the USA. The resolve by West Africa to dissociate
with France, the growing appetite by regional powerhouses to be included in the
BRICS community of nations, and the developing alliance within the G20
countries to pledge solidarity with countries South Africa has institutionalised
their cause as a global justice matter, positions RSA as a new node of
influence. This potential for influence makes us optimistic about
the ANC's future in global politics.
The disintegration of a unipolar world and superpower mentality
has led to a cloud of self-determined nations redefining the centre away from
hard power geopolitics. These nations are demonstrating some power, primarily
soft, to shape geopolitical outcomes, notwithstanding the limited capacity to
act unilaterally. Trade and moral high ground have been crumbling barriers to
power and undermining big brother authority. Known hard-power democracies have been resorting to personalist power for a while, which has constrained their
capability to survive the rules of the new diplomacy playbook dictated by the
Global South. The non-aligned posture experience of the ANC has become a handy
facility with which it will be able, if it concentrates, to ward off the perceived
power of many of its adversaries, acutely on the home front, to undermine its
rising global soft power superpower status. The moment is now.
Comments
Post a Comment