The uncomfortable truth draws near.

 This was published in TimesLive 02 April 2025, headlined: Tipping point: the uncomfortable truth draws near.

The end of post-liberation hegemonic politics is with us. Society is preoccupied with a search for a stable political order, and what we have is deteriorating. The post-May 2024 convulsions have created a desire for something new in the political landscape. The country yearns for a centre that holds. A call for leadership that inspires hope beyond the bar set by incumbents is in the open. 

The country needs men and women loaded with skillful statecraft to move beyond the current stalemate. What the country needs is a human-constructed intervention. The time for tribe-driven or party-political solutions has passed. Individuals within political parties must break loose and occupy the leadership space. 

 

The eventuality of a South Africa led by a reconfigured government of the day is no longer theoretical. The balance of power that has underpinned political power in RSA since 1994 has been imbalanced. The ANC, which was for the longest time since the crisis of the apartheid state began until 2016, is struggling, if not failing, to adapt to the demands of the democratic and constitutional order it is supposedly leading. Things are indeed going, falling, and coming from apart.

 

Fundamental to its encroaching weakness is the capability and energy to tolerate internal anarchy and chaos by those who lead it in structures closest to the voters. The faltering wills and political career ambitions of those who must lead its rebirth as a new political creature stand in their way to survive the free fall from glory to a possible date with oblivion. The people society expects to stand up and out are reluctant to step up to the challenge and shout 'not in our name'. 

 

The suppressed conversation within the liberation movement is that its expiration results from a prolonged deterioration. There are distinct factions or internal coalitions within the movement that refuse to recognise that its old self is never coming back, and efforts to resurrect it will be in vain. The choked youth imagination within its ranks, the starvation of and about contemporary political education, and the movement's moving forward by looking back on character constitute a march to the gravesite of political movements. 

 

Notwithstanding the suffocating conditions in which the movement finds itself, the inconvenient reality of the almost irreversible decline of the ANC as a central hegemonic influence of RSA politics should not mean that chaos and calamity are inevitable within its ranks. It is how its resilient members and leaders bounce back which matters. In these convulsions, there are ingredients for building an organisation that can last another century. The wreckage that some of the movement's branches, zonal structures, regions, provinces, and nodes of influence within the NEC is what the movement needs to call a bluff at those who defend the retention of the status quo. 

 

The GNU's taking of political cover should be understood as a context created to manage the agreement that RSA needs rescuing, even if each political party supports the GNU for its own reasons. Crudely put, to the ANC, the NDR was at stake, and to the DA, reducing the velocity of the NDR was at stake. The GNU is more about the viability of the democratic and constitutional order than rescuing an ailing liberation movement. 

 

Notwithstanding the desire to obliterate the movement from history by the ideational substrate of its GNU partners, the reality is that without the ANC at the centre, RSA's political cohesion might be a risk the country is not ready to handle. The haemorrhaging of the ANC, notably as a consequence of the formation of the MK Party, has upended the balance of power that has been the foundation of the ANC's continued hegemonic hold of RSA. As a cocktail, the above and the stubbornness of the national socio-economic conditions are enough to justify a new movement with which the country can be reimagined without the ANC at the centre.

 

The spread of energy the local government elections would require will be a consequential test of the liberation movement's organisational prowess and volunteer management system. Fifty two substrates of competence and capability camped at regional offices would be required to communicate a different message to voters. This system must preside over 4000 voting districts and wards to register an impact. What is certain is that in the decentralisation process, political power might find good handlers and thus not return. 

 

The inherent power shifts that came with the loss of absolute power to govern alone have triggered a new wave of the federal design of RSA, which the movement is not discussing. Ethnonationalism is rising as the prospect of a disintegrating centre becomes real. Party institutions and structures fail to adapt to the disintegration. The local government's results will either embolden or reduce the ultimate thrust to effect a total removal of the ANC from the centre of power. It is a prospect that has attracted international interest. Given poverty, inequality, and unemployment, the ensemble can lurch into chaos and, ultimately, a convergence of political catastrophe.