The emerging political landscape in South Africa redefines how political adversaries compete for voters' hearts, souls, and minds. From the moment the ANC succeeded in chiselling its monumental policy documents as the substrates of South Africa's constitutional order, it had bequeathed the basis of its existence to all South Africans.
The liberation task was legally that of all citizens. While it retained the bragging rights to have led the execution of a gallant anti-apartheid struggle, it was no longer up to it alone to determine how the liberation promise would become a lived experience for all. It has always been a mistake to believe that only the ANC could deliver what the constitutional order promised society; new players with a programmatic approach would have emerged now or in the future.
While the ANC rightfully takes pride in its heroic history, it has at times been ensnared in it, hindering its ability to adapt to evolving societal interpretations of freedom. Competence has often been overshadowed by struggle credentials when citizen contribution needed to be commissioned into the public service.
While the ANC rightfully takes pride in its heroic history, it has at times been ensnared in it, hindering its ability to adapt to evolving societal interpretations of freedom. Competence has often been overshadowed by struggle credentials when citizen contribution needed to be commissioned into the public service. The ANC inherited one of Africa's leading, diversified, industrialised, and sophisticated economies.
However, the extent to which its transformation of society plans was compatible with the demands of the economy it inherited was revealed when public infrastructure started to disintegrate under its watch. The urgency and importance of transformation and change cannot be overstated, and the ANC's responses need to be more pragmatic than ideological.
The ANC, grappling with a constitution that is far more flexible than the democratic centralism it mastered in exile, has faced a formidable challenge. The conception of government as the constitutional order directs has proven to be a hurdle for a movement that understood majority rule from the perspective of the supremacy of parliament. The ANC's decisions during this time have profoundly affected the current political landscape, and understanding its role in shaping the country is crucial to understanding the society we live in today.
The legalising of the National Democratic Revolution through the constitution, the legitimacy to pursue the establishment of a National Democratic Society, and the power to define national interests were enough to scale what it inherited without reinventing the wheel where motion was guaranteed.
Consequently, the constitution, as a political jewel, was and still is left as a dominant social mobilisation platform for the opposition complex to claim as their own. The governing party, including parties that split from it, is more vocal about changing the constitution than the opposition complex.
The constitution's design to have Chapter 9 institutions as research & development entities through which the implementation of remedial actions they recommended as a facility which could drive transformation was not taken advantage of. The reports are lying with solutions to the many in-rhetoric matters raised at every election.
Defined as independent state institutions supporting constitutional democracy subject only to the constitution and the law and obligated to be impartial as they exercise their powers and functions without fear or favour, the ANC has, in the last 30 years, allowed these to dominate headlines as institutions policing the governing party and the new bureaucracy. Instead of these institutions becoming the minds of the state in how to make constitutional democracy work, they were predominantly used, and legitimately so in certain instances, to be extended arms of the criminal justice system.
As the force of truth started to have a relationship with the opposition complex, the idea of establishing a National Democratic Society began to be accurate, and they took it upon themselves to lead the charge. To the opposition, taking charge meant influencing its content and character, managing how it does not upend the established hierarchies of economic dominance, and sustaining the dividends of colonialism in all its versions. The opposition posture was thus changed to protect the political system as it is and ensure that the law, designed based on its rule, stays intact and does not alter the property relations it must defend.
The opposition complex has long abandoned the tight rivalrous relations it was expected to have with the governing party. They saw how dangerous it would have been for the core constituencies they represented if they exaggerated the threat of transformation without fighting it with the tools of freedom the constitution released for all who live in South Africa. A rush to push through new and unprecedented jurisprudence was unleashed, where the apex court pushed the most transformation-choking judgments, thus narrowing the space for future appeals.
As the DA’s hegemonic territory was pushing back the freedom frontiers, the liberal character of the ANC was packaged as what would make it legitimate in the eyes of the proverbial, and yet abstract, market forces. A strategy to capture the brand equity of the ANC was unleashed. Spoilers to the brand were systematically isolated, and the “moderates” were supported to rise, including with funding. The mistake of wanting to remove the liberation party, like the failure in Zimbabwe, from power would be avoided. Instead, the ANC was marked to be taken over as a shell, given a programme, and the status quo would remain.
The rise to the top echelons of the ANC by the Malema-as-ANCYL president and Tintswaloes brings into the ANC's political c-suite an Economic Freedom in our Lifetime dynamic the established templates of economic domination are not ready to handle. The rebuttal of the outcomes of the Zondo Commission, most of which are being challenged and subjected to review, as well as the glaring biases of its periodisation, have introduced prejudice as a characteristic of the entire report. Even where there were truths, the minute errors of vengeance and bending established practices of justice have sunk the whole report into the dustbin of history. The farce of equating economic transformation with corruption is collapsing at all its seams.
The ANC has lost its enemy status in the eyes of the DA. It has graduated into a partner and ideological sweetheart.
As the EFF was being successfully packaged as the enemy of the economic status quo, the courageous entry of the MK Party into South African politics introduced an alternative to the ANC that was so real that it threatened the existence of the ANC itself. The electoral outcome by the ANC, EFF and MK Party when counted together, all of which share one ideological home, became a new and real threat to an established economic order.
The GNU concept, generally used when society declares an emergency that requires national unity, was invoked to problematise the emerging “two-thirds majority” dynamic needed to complete the economic aspects of the liberation promise in the 1996 constitution. This dynamic saw the ANC becoming an attractive coalition partner to the historical opposition complex, including those funded to be its latest appendages.
Consequently, the DA started to see ANC-ness as an ally to the survival of the reigning economic order. The geostrategic significance of a DA/ANC coalition was factored as a critical variable in the economic matrices that determined the outlook of South Africa as an investment destination. This has put the ANC in a situation where it has to choose one of the equally painful routes: its demise in the next election or the beginning of an economically costly transformation of the templates of economic dominance.
The unfolding consultation heritage of the ANC to approve the GNU approach is signal enough that the NEC is deeply divided on this matter and that a National General Council of a special type is being convened. With the sentiments within the ANC membership, the momentum is on the MK, EFF, and ANC coalition sides. The arc of history might be bending towards the courageous move the MK Party of Zuma took. In the process, the ANC has lost its enemy status in the eyes of the DA. It has graduated into a partner and ideological sweetheart.
• Dr Mathebula is a public policy analyst, founder of The Thinc Foundation, and a Research Associate at Tshwane University of Technology.
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