The th!nc Foundation

This was published in the Sunday Times of 10 May 2025 The world is undergoing a process of creating a convergence of private sector efficiency, public sector leadership legitimacy, political, and democratic criteria in how societies, countries, and, more acutely, governments are led. This has been an ongoing experiment for several years, and an emerging consensus is that the context of political leadership is inextricably linked with the dimension of interests as the currency of politics underlying all societies. The entry of billionaires into the political leadership arena, where competition standards extend beyond the traditional 'it's about the people' criterion, is a new phenomenon that countries with a significant inequality gap, such as South Africa, must reconcile. Leaders have transformed into brands. As branded figures, whether icons, legends, philanthropists, or others, their character ultimately reveals itself during their time in office, influencing the return o...

This was published in TimesLive 07 May 2025 The prize of politics, including liberation politics, is state power through government. Post-liberation Africa has been unable to integrate liberation objectives with state power. Fortunately for South Africa, the political settlement was anchored on the liberation promise being part of the new democratic and constitutional order. Equally pressuring the context was the pursuit of freedom by those who opposed equality, non-racialism, democracy, social justice, economic justice, and human rights.  Aside from the promises of liberation, the fundamental currency of anti-apartheid and anti-colonial politics, the interests of power brokers emerged as the new central currency of politics. In politics, accumulating social and political capital is essential, as transactional business or commercial capital relies on stability. As the significance and attractiveness of political and social capital become confined to the columns and rows of the gene...

 This was published in TimesLive 30 April 2025 The May 2024 election outcomes have increased the prospects of South Africa having a government without the ANC for the foreseeable future since 1994. Its inability to garner a fifty-plus-one majority has redefined how political power can be used to advance its political agendas. The 2024/25 budget year's reversal of the VAT increase and reopening of the fiscal framework negotiations indicate that political power sharing is a South African reality until one of the parties reaches the threshold to govern alone.  The public service, which the Constitution expects to execute the lawful policies of the government of the day loyally, in this case, the GNU, is scrambling to react to the new guidelines emanating from a profoundly reconfigured body politic. As much as it is essential to pass a national budget for the state to function, how the DA, as part of the GNU, reacted to the budget demonstrated the arrival and influence of a new ...

Gaetano Mosca, an Italian thinker and politician, submits that "in all societies...two classes of people appear: a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolises power, and enjoys advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first." His theory is that people are not always born elite; elites can be manufactured from each class or caste.  In South Africa, this class reality was interrupted by race as the dominant vector in class analysis. The ruling class is an outcome of racio-social engineering.  It is fascinating that even within the racial enclaves, society hierarchised itself regarding the ruling and ruled classes.  Unfortunately, this has established a rule that, as a practical matter, things should neither be nor could be otherwise, save that elites must be protected.    Inevitably, the elites grew into an in...

The edited version was published in the Sunday Times, 27 April 2025   A simple search about the purpose of tax yields “to fund social and economic programmes, and to provide public goods and services, such as schools, universities, hospitals, clinics and roads, as well as defence and security. " Taxes make the Democratic order sovereign and functional. They represent the income side of the state revenue account. Embedded in the purpose of tax is the question of who has the ultimate authority to decide how to tax society. Our Constitution provides that this authority is derived.  Firstly, the authority originates from the electoral mandate that our freely elected representatives receive from "we the people" when we cast our votes. Consequently, the public representatives serve at our pleasure for a five-year term and must account for and renew their mandate. Secondly , the public representatives elect a State President who holds the executive authority of the repub...

The idea that the ANC is a broad church is born from its support at its founding by Christian Church leaders. Its founding President, elected in absentia, was a practising clergyman, Reverend John Langalibalele Dube.  Its character as a church raises the question: What is its great commission for its members? “ The primary task of the ANC remains the mobilisation of all the classes and strata that objectively stand to benefit from the cause of social change. The dictum that the people are their liberators remains as relevant today as it was during the days of anti-apartheid struggle ”. “ For it to exercise its vanguard role, the ANC puts a high premium on the involvement of its cadres in all centres of power. This includes the presence of ANC members and supporters in state institutions. It includes activism in the mass terrain of which civil society structures are part. It includes the involvement of cadres in the intellectual and ideological terrain to help shape society’...

Published in the BusinessDay of 23 April 2025  The ensemble that the tariff wars have lurched global trade into chaos might have rewritten how smart democracies should deal with geopolitics. The new foreign policy theorems of transactional international relations are starting to procure private C-suites as the global trade-facing brigades for countries to define trade and diplomatic ties. The appointment of Mcebisi Jonas as one of the comprehensive C-suite is, in conceptual terms, one of a string of innovative interventions by President Cyril Ramaphosa, highlighting the crucial role of the private sector in shaping international trade.    There may be challenges or personality deficiencies. Still, getting those at the touchpoints where it matters in geopolitics and international trade should be welcomed. In any event, the G20 conversations and trade protocols that will be signed at the ultimate summit are currently in the domain of private sector C-suites from different...

For over a century, the ANC has been the central force in South African politics, a dominance that extended to thirty years of government control following the 1994 non-racial elections. Despite a few political parties challenging their absolute power, the ANC remained the nexus of political influence. However, its internal succession battles have been a primary cause of its divisions since unbanning.   Running the RSA democratic order requires significant and sophisticated competencies. The political economy, despite being under the firm control of the minority, prefers to deal with tried-and-tested political leadership. The economic system, which relies on the predictability, sustainability, and certainty of the political system, the rule of order, and the country’s fiscal framework, holds the democratic order together.    Until the leadership succession challenges within the ANC started to produce new and, to a large extent, comparatively unusual breeds of...

  Since the SACP announced that it has decided to contest the local government elections independently of the ANC, there has never been a public discourse on what this means for the tripartite alliance. The ANC is on record as the force of the left. Its core political rhetoric is still left. It won't be easy to imagine the ANC as an ideological construct outside the prism of a leftist posture. Its ideological centrepieces borrow a lot from leftist vocabulary. Leftist rituals, such as May Day Workers Day, most of which were integrated into the ANC program, will henceforth be overtly celebrated in their leftist character and mainly thought-led by the SACP. The time for the ANC to come out in the open about its true ideological north and thus its identity arrived with the SACP's decision to go it alone. The ANC has been bleeding its liberal right, nationalists, libertarians, ultra-leftists, Christian nationalists, and several other ideological orientations to its multiple adver...