The th!nc Foundation

These were the loudest words said to one of South Africa's billionaires, Patrice Motsepe, at the African National Congress's National General Council in Birchwood. Patrice Motsepe was 'recognisably standing' in the 'front row' as the ANC's Secretary General, Fikile Mbalula, was also 'standing' and courting the 'attention' of delegates, some of whom were in an 'attentive interactive conversation' with Mr Motsepe. Behind a 'standing' Mbalula were Deputy President Paul Mashatile, Treasurer Dr Gwen Ramokgopa, and Deputy SG Nomvula Mokonyane, none of whom were 'standing' but seated on the podium reserved for the top seven officials of the ANC.  When the SG 'asked' a 'standing' Patrice Motsepe to 'sit down', meaning he 'should not be standing', the literal 'instruction' carried more profound implications than the physical implications of the statement on the conference floor. The frami...

It’s not the reality of Cde Squire's passing that makes us feel this way. It is the lens we are going to use to get to grips with life without him that we should contend with. A literally larger-than-life individual who had one of the most stable and rarest internal loci of control has left us. The thief that death is has struck again.  Reading the notice with his picture on it made me feel like I could ask him, "O ya kae grootman, re sa go nyaka hierso." In that moment, I also heard him say, "My Bla, mfanakithi, comrade lucky, ere ko khutsa, mmele ga o sa kgona." The dialogue with him without him, and the solace of the private conversations we had, made me agree with his unfair expectation for me to say, vaya ncah my grootman.    The news of his passing brought to bear the truism that death shows us what is buried in us, the living. In his absence, his life will be known by those who never had the privilege of simply hearing him say 'heita bla' as...

It is increasingly becoming difficult to believe that the 1994-1996 democratic breakthrough and political settlement ushered in a post-race constitutional order as a vector of social and economic justice. What it has instead ushered in is the ability of racist individuals, institutions, and community enclaves to weaponise the very Constitution to make racism, through several of its adjuncts, a right for those who want it.  While institutional racism, represented by the apartheid ideology, amongst others, suffered moral liquidation and was declared a crime against humanity, and sharing global abhorrence with genocide and xenophobia, its templates, scaffoldings, and psychosocial programming persist in differently packaged forms. This raises questions about how these remnants continue to influence society today, which is crucial for understanding the depth of systemic racism.   The historical and structural roots of racial inequality still run deep, although less visib...

This was written on 30 April 2009 (it was only language edited for this 2026 posting) Did the Jacob Zuma ANC victory either expose an apparent dearth of rational discourse in our democracy or reignite the discourse? Rational debates are by their nature expected to assume a scientifically justifiable objectivity, particularly in the often-muddy political theatre. The importance of academicians as a supposed repository of proven knowledge and previously recorded best practice, as well as the initiation-cum-generation of new knowledge, has been sharpened by the ‘psychological two-thirds’ majority Jacob Zuma ANC victory. The noticeable rise in the significance of specialists, experts and political analysts during this saga can be attributed to a myriad of reasons. Central to all these is the need to provide an answer to what most political scientists are unable to answer. The seemingly unanswerable question of what makes most of our voting population continue supporting the ANC and, by e...

Beyond the recklessness of scholar transport drivers, the unregulated nature of the booming scholar transport industry, and the general road safety challenges in South Africa, the deaths of schoolchildren in the Vaal are a bigger local government issue, a spatial injustice. The real problems are not surfacing for decisive policy action or intervention. At best, there will be a race of funeral undertakers volunteering to make the send-off for victims of spatial injustice look grandiose to levels of death admiration, without addressing the many who might be waiting in the queue for the same fate . As part of the ritual, politicians will be in front row seats as national chief mourners, arguably representing ‘we the people’ who voted them in. Spatial justice is about ensuring the fair and equitable distribution of resources, opportunities, and quality of life across geographical spaces; the opposite is spatial injustice. The trickiest outcome of urbanisation is access to agglome...

The African National Congress, arguably the nexus of all political life in South Africa, is under pressure from history to undergo one of its most consequential reviews since its formation. History has bestowed on it, throughout its existence, the obligation to be a leader of society amid a vortex of competing interests. What is becoming apparent is that the way the ANC structured itself to execute the anti-colonial struggle cannot be the same as the way it structures itself as a governing party. As the nexus of politics influencing public policy, the efficiency within the ANC will always determine the stability or otherwise of South Africa as a democracy. Whilst the CODESA outcome was underpinned by a liberal democratic construct, the post-liberation rhetoric within the ANC has not matched the exigencies of the Constitution it has agreed to. The normative guidelines imposed by the Constitution on the public administration system are of a liberal democratic nature, and the ideologica...

In 1912, on this day, a group of Black Middle-Class men convened to establish what would become Africa’s most influential liberation movement, the ANC, laying the foundation for a movement rooted in African nationalism and democracy.   The intellectual prowess concentrated in Mangaung crafted a vision whose reach remains elusive to the modern-day heirs of its leadership. Shaped by intellectuals who became nodes of mobilisation through their privileged mission school education, which connected them to university education overseas, the ANC became the ideational Mecca of African politics.    Funded by a then land-owning class of traditional leaders, black labour brokers who traded with the then mining magnates, attracted by both the Kimberly diamond finds and the Pilgrim's Rest-cum-Witwatersrand gold discoveries, its agenda could only be liberal and Wilberforcean in outlook. The preponderance of religious leaders, in the main African Independent Churches, dictate...

The succession contest to lead the ANC after Ramaphosa is more about leveraging the advantage of such a victory than securing the country’s presidency, which is the ultimate goal in South African politics.  Since the 2016 Local Government elections, when the urban vote began showing signs of a possible coalition government-driven democratic order, the ANC has been declining as a majority party. It had already begun dismantling its basic units of organisation, branches, as nodes of interaction with communities or voters, through the strange, yet left to reign, member-of-member gatekeeping system. The linking of in-party political office with offices that accrue after an election made being an ANC leader about the benefits of such positions to the individual rather than to society.    This untenable situation benefited the growing opposition complex. Unlike the early post-1994 years, by 2016, there were more political parties with the requisite social and demographic ...