Many comrades within the disciplined and other forces of the Left have in the past called for a review of South Africa's constitution.
Such calls, as expected, invited rebukes and rejection from a wide array of public opinion makers including some within the so-called “left”.
Others blame the near “state of anarchy” that a post-apartheid constitution has created in certain respects and that has almost outsourced the power of elected public representatives and subjugated parliament to a junior arm of state to the judiciary.
This near-paralysis of public policymaking has created an almost “law-fare state” where the judiciary, as one of the three arms of state, has been forced — not from choice — to intervene and provide clarity in the interpretation of national policy as encapsulated in the constitution — the supreme law of the land.
All these opinions about a need to review the constitution have roots in the misinterpretation and context of what the Freedom Charter intended.
The constitution is not a dogma like the Bible or Koran and should for all intents and purposes be subject to review. It has been reviewed several times already, often when the judiciary finds policy gaps or ambiguities.
So no citizen should be bullied by people professing to be constitutionalists, as if anyone identifying defects is anti-constitution or anti-rule of law. That is the consequence of reducing the constitution to dogma rather than a living document that is subject to change when the need arises.
The reason the would-be beneficiaries of the Freedom Charter have since 2009 deserted the ANC as its custodian is because ANC leaders differ publicly, or through acts of failure or omissions, to rally the entire nation behind the context and content of the Freedom Charter and its intended deliverables. The dispossessed remain dispossessed and some ANC leaders publicly denounce a call for a radical and transformative approach to access to land by the dispossessed as a base from which new cities, new economies and new civilisations can take root.
The late Nelson Mandela, on becoming state president, denounced himself from the statement he made after his release from prison when he represented the real policy of the ANC — a mixed economic policy that included state intervention and nationalisation of key sectors of the economy.
Mandela is on record denouncing nationalisation as the ANC policy.
Former ANC president Thabo Mbeki also expressed a divergent opinion on the land question and denounced ANC members and, by implication, the ANC national conference resolution on the land question as views that are diametrically opposed to the ANC on land policy.
There were different interpretations of the Freedom Charter by Mandela on nationalisation — and repeated by Mbeki — ironically hardly a year after its adoption at the Congress of the People on June 26 1955. There are other areas in the Freedom Charter that should be collectively understood in their contextual totality or be reviewed or clarified so that the former oppressed can weigh their options on what post-apartheid South Africa should become.
There is clearly a case for the progressive democratic forces to converge in the second Congress of the People before we engage the political thought and spectrums on the national dialogue.
My view on the current confusion among our ranks, leaders and within the masses we should be leading and are evidently staying away from our programme of transformation, is that we need urgently to convene a national forum of progressive activists to map out a national agenda and discourse to defend and sustain the programme of the national democratic revolution.
The policy positions on the correct or contextualised common interpretation of the 10 clauses of the Freedom Charter and RDP should inform the positions that the progressive forces will take to the national dialogue.
Part of the intervention is to set and dictate an agenda for Mbeki’s call, which is supported by President Cyril Ramaphosa, for the convening of “the national dialogue”.
We have called for this engagement in the past and the first deputy secretary-general of the ANC, Nomvula Mokonyane, has called for a review of the Freedom Charter on national television.
One of the preconditions for such a national dialogue is first and foremost to convene all progressive forces that have endorsed the Freedom Charter to review it and its implementation, the challenges encountered by its custodian, and the content and context within which its clauses were drafted.
The ANC NEC must not rush the progressive and disciplined forces of the Left to attend a national dialogue whose participants will include the ultra-left, liberals, neo-liberals, right-wing groups and political parties without common positions on the preamble of the Freedom Charter and each of its 10 clauses.
I am, as I have done before, calling on “the second Congress of the People” to review the road travelled since June 26 1955 and map a clear and common programme for the national dialogue.
The Freedom Charter found expression in the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) and the negotiations that resulted in the constitution. The process towards the national dialogue should be preceded by mass consultations reminiscent of a process that led to the convening of the Congress of the People in 1955.
This means that the policy positions on the correct or contextualised common interpretation of the 10 clauses of the Freedom Charter and RDP should inform the positions that the progressive forces will take to the national dialogue.
The danger, we must warn our leaders as we did before our election defeat, is that any elitist approach to the national dialogue will spell disaster for the disciplined forces of the Left and potentially will result in a rupture and the nation being more divided than the situation pre- and post-May 29 elections.
The outcome of the national dialogue must be a common understanding of what the delegates at the Congress of the People mandated a post-apartheid South Africa to be for her people.
If there is a last moment for the ANC to earn its historical role as leader of society, the call for a national dialogue presents such a moment. But it will depend on whether the battered and weakened ANC will correctly study the balance of forces and the mood of the primary motive for fundamental change for the successful prosecution of the national democratic revolution.
Uhuru Moiloa is a member of the ANC, a former ANC Gauteng provincial executive committee member, former deputy speaker in the Gauteng legislature and former Gauteng MEC of human settlements, co-operative governance and traditional affairs.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.