The 2024 national and provincial elections, a pivotal moment in South African politics, have concluded. The process of forming a government is now in motion and hinges on the configurations of coalitions and the confidence-in-supply arrangements. In their collective wisdom, the voters have set the course of our political landscape. A National Assembly, its members yet to be sworn in, is now a reality. The voters have sent a clear message to the politicians, urging them to prioritise the interests of South Africa over their own party affiliations.
As mandated by the voters, South Africa in 2024 will be a nation that operates within the framework of its constitution. It does not require an absolute majority to thrive. What it does need is leadership that upholds the country’s constitution as the supreme law. We have just witnessed in South Africa that no government can assert authority unless it is founded on the will of the people. The people's will is measured through their votes and nothing else. While the system can still allow tribal formations to emerge as absolute majorities, its design is such that when the tribes become a hindrance for the nation to prosper, it is empowered to dismantle the dominance of the tribe and realign the mandate back into the hands of the nation, as it has currently demonstrated.
In this electoral cycle, the voters have made their demands crystal clear. They are calling for leadership that can heal the wounds of the past and cement a society built on democratic values, social justice, human dignity, equality, and the advancement of human rights and freedoms. The voters are advocating for the creation of a nonracial, non-sexist, united and democratic society. Their call is for an enhancement in the quality of life for all citizens, and the unlocking of each individual's potential, including addressing issues such as unemployment and poverty reduction.
Because voters have not given any parties an absolute majority to be in charge of the state, the voices of those who made it to have a seat in a 400-member National Assembly must be proportionally heard. It is now the sacred duty of the freely elected public representatives in the democratic order or system to respect, protect, promote and fulfil the people's will. We are in a classic government of, by and for the people mode without any single political interest being absolute over the rest. Notwithstanding truisms of freely elected representatives being vulnerable or beholden to funded or otherwise interests, South Africa's minimum standard is the Bill of Rights, which the constitution declares is the cornerstone of our democracy. The National Assembly, as the embodiment of the people's will, holds the key to our collective future.
To execute their mandates, South Africa has established a framework of authorities to be applied according to the people's will. When the gazetted representatives assume their role of being about our will, they are sworn into a chamber with the legislative authority of the Republic. This is the primary reception of public representation; it is the ultimate chamber to impose the people's will. It is the ultimate in the entirety of the public accountability ecosystem. The head of state into whom the executive authority of the state vests can only be elected by the National Assembly, and only after that can she or he constitute a national executive they would exercise the authority with.
The adjudicative or judicial authority of the Republic, which vests in the courts, notwithstanding its independence, is operationally constituted at its high court, appellate, and ultimate constitutional court through the accountability ecosystems established by free elected public representatives acting in the National Assembly. The outcome, process, and certification of the country's electoral system is a five-year activity whose execution sets up scaffolds for our political, democratic, constitutional and democratic order, which stands upon stability and resilience.
The political firmament under which our freely elected public representatives should operate is what the theatrics, and somewhat circuses, political parties which control measurable influence in the National Assembly are busy with. Their theatrics are, arguably, a function of interests that are the currency of politics. With success in establishing a global economic order came the establishment of the economic authority of sovereign states managed by nodal institutions, private sector enterprises, commercial aristocracies and global trade-switching architectures capable of trumping, if not usurping, the will of the people to the extent that it is repugnant to it. This authority has been phonographic in South Africa in dictating public policy, regime construction, and cadence.
The binaries of race, class and state intervention have, for the past 30 years, been foregrounded to keep South Africa as a nation state without a nation. South Africa does not have a nationalist imagination of itself, save when talented citizens and not national interests create the rituals that create an opportunity to embrace the nation state flag all can live and die for. A classic exposition of this context is the periodic display of the old divisive and racial order representing the flag and the burning of the current flag to make a political point, however legitimate.
Out of the 2024 national and provincial elections, South Africa saw for the first time a consolidated African nationalism mandate through the strands of its understanding by political parties that split from the 1912 defined ANC movement. As a firmament, this is consolidated. Manifestos of the political parties in the firmament have commonalities. Only a responsible cognitive institutional framework can thread into a national resolve by collapsing the various political parties into one. In a democracy driven by reliance on logic, evidence, research, and deliberate national interest-driven think tanking, those commanding financial resources would fund the consolidation of emerging nationalism as a core substrate of a thriving nation.
South Africa has been in this condition before. The rise of white nationalism after 30 years of the establishment of the Union of South Africa was on the back of demands to participate in the economic authority of the then country. Monopoly capital was the animating force to create a national socialist racial order called apartheid on the back of a concretising Afrikaner nationalism. When South Africa became a Republic in 1961, the triumph of a narrowly defined sovereign nation started manifesting itself as a racial oligarchy whose continued existence represented a crime against humanity.
The striking similarity between the rise of nationalism and the current 64% proven African nationalism is that a majority ethno-nationalist cohort within the dominant political party drove both. The difference, though, is that the emerging nationalism resonates at two levels; it is flashed to the highest number of people through the passion those opposed to it want to make it rejected; at another level, it has become an individualised expression of affiliation and identity in an otherwise nation-state looking for its nationals. Like in the period between 1930 and 1948, the soft power of Afrikaner ethnic nationalism was responded to with the sharp power (which pierced, penetrated or attempted to perforate the political economy environment, propelling a nationalistic revival of the economically excluded with ethno-numerical power) the general response to the current period equivalent defines the state of the nation state.
None will argue that the process to build the second Republic has found traction, whether you call it a national dialogue, a consolidated 64% Africannationalist voter mandate, matters arising from the July 2021 insurrection, or the final phase of the national democratic revolution, it is now a reality and currency of seventh administration politics. This is an animating force defining the state of the nation state that is searching for its nationself.
*Mathebula is a public policy analyst, founder of The Thinc Foundation, and a Research Associate at Tshwane University of Technology.
