The mainstream South
African establishment, including some internal to the ANC, views the ANC’s
permanent ‘we are in a revolution’ rhetoric as not being in step with what
should genuinely be RSA’s national interest. The ANC is inarguably the nexus of RSA
politics, when it sneezes a lot catches cold. It will continue to
command a significant national influence as a political movement, even if it looks like it is running out of runways.
This might mean that even in the unlikelihood of its replacement by the MK
Party, arguably its ideological adjunct, it will only be a change of guard, not
an approach. As one of its longest serving leaders, OR Tambo, is alleged to have said, it can only collapse at its own peril.

Justified as the concerns about its rhetoric are, revolution rhetoric becomes the most potent source of political
and social capital when unemployment, inequality, and poverty, are as high as they are in RSA.  In a constitutional order that allows free political activity all other human freedoms, revolutionary nomenclature breeds all sorts of mavericks.
Pragmatists become an endangered breed of leaders in a self-breeding pool of
mavericks disguised as revolutionaries when society needs reconstructionists
and nation-builders. The breeding of mavericks happens without regard for
right, centre, or left politics. It becomes a context reminiscent of a festival
of ideological vultures and hyenas feasting on a chronically misgoverned and yet extremely progressive constitutional order. The revolution that most
claim to be pursuing is not necessarily the NDR defined by the ANC. 

To be regarded as a
revolutionary in the ANC is earned through your understanding of the National
Democratic Revolution, what it pursues, and your quality as a member or cadre
to be trusted with the revolutionary task. The quality criteria for your cadre status and thus membership of the NDR brigade are articulated in its eye-of-the-needle prescripts and various member
integrity management mechanisms. In facile terms, the NDR is a process of
struggle that aims to transfer (political, economic, and social control) power
to the people. It seeks to build a non-racial, non-sexist, united,
democratic, and prosperous South Africa. Arguably, the 1996 RSA Constitution legally
confers the process of transferring political power, the levers of social
control, and being in the policy-driving seat to facilitate the transfer of
economic power. The revolution continues, therefore, in respect of advancing
its objectives, which is an intergenerational mission optimised by the dialectical material conditions obtaining in a particular context.

The hoarding of
investment leadership to support the cocoon-cracking policy courage of a
Ramaphosa-specific-ANC leadership might imperil the democratic order of South Africa,
which society is still threading. The ANC as a construct has demonstrated its
ideational capability to deconstruct whatever qualifies as a
‘crime or equivalent’ against humanity. If organisations have allergies, to the ANC, oppression of one human by another attracts the worst of its anger and the best of its strategic prowess. Unfortunately, this capability is its
strength and ends at ideation, policy crafting, and mobilisation of support to
massify justification. The challenge it has had is reconstructing what it would
have deconstructed. It is good at liquidating the moral or otherwise basis of an adversary or complex at variance with the NDR objectives, sometimes even if this includes the ANC publicly chastising itself when it gets off the rails it set for everyone. What it still needs to publicly acknowledge is its gross error in understanding, the concept of the new government versus has been a new state. In reconstructing what we called a new South Africa as a government of the day, it might have deconstructed the state and its organs it needed; hence it is now the loudest about the need for a capable state as the basis for its renewal of self and South Africa program. 

With South Africa
growing into a haven of think tanking and evidence-based ideation, the time for
the establishment to be open to alternative views on what defined their current
dominance has come. A closer examination of the revolutionary rhetoric displays
more rants than new content of or about the liberation promises legalised and
entrenched in the RSA Constitution. Those who claim to be revolutionaries and those
they call anti-revolutionaries only differ on how best to implement the
revolutionary ideals everyone else is contesting for political power to
implement: the RSA Constitution. There is, therefore, a case for the Establishment to invest in unpacking and understanding the political or
otherwise appeal of the revolutionary rhetoric to appropriate its worthy
elements to national strategy and collective effort. It is crucial for South
Africa, acutely all shades or factions of its Establishment, to pivot youth
energy and ideational exuberance towards nation-building and national
interests. 

The prospect of a GNU reconfiguring
revolutionary rhetoric into its nation-building equivalent has created a
disequilibrium within the ANC’s ideological complex in favour of pursuing the
ideals of the Constitution and, by fiat, the Freedom Charter. The GNU should
programmatically focus on achieving those service delivery obligations that are
joined with their election manifestos. Unless the GNU emerges as a pragmatic
intervention to deal with rising crime levels, unmanaged immigration crises,
weakened national security management system, bulging youth unemployment,
runaway inequality and poverty levels and a financial services regime that
chokes the development state character of the RSA economy, the emerging
opposition complex will grow in relevance and appeal. South Africa deserves a
sober and realistic debate about the untenable exclusion of Africans in its
economy, save as consumers and comparatively cheap labour. 

The ANC, the leading
party in the GNU and still the liberation movement in RSA, is expected to be
the most capable institution to execute the tasks that history has thrust upon
it. As an institution, it should be managed through a machinery of
ideation-to-implementation second to none, if not a few, in RSA. Its systems
should induct and disciple society into behaviour reminiscent of its democratic
revolution objectives. Its habits as an institution should set the pace and
cadence of all other institutions in the country, particularly the government
as the most active agent of the state and the ultimate prize of politics. It
should, in essence, be the lead institution of leadership. 

Having abrogated to
itself the role of leader of society for as long as it has existed, the ANC
should live up to this claim’s integrity and leadership demands. The quality of
membership it attracts should be beyond reproach, even if the measurement bar
is the minimum threshold it has set. Commitment to its member integrity
management systems, codes of good conduct, the overarching rule of law
principle, and supremacy of the Constitution are non-negotiables without which
it would collapse its already fledging moral high ground to lead.

The bar set by the
Freedom Charter as the summary document of what defines the ANC and the
Constitution of South Africa into which the Freedom Charter and its human
rights demands as old as 1923 were chiselled requires a
through-the-eye-of-the-needle quality leadership and membership. The commitment
to the NDR objectives, human dignity, social justice, fulfilment of the Bill of
Rights, and pursuit of what is in the national interest procures for a
membership core diametrically at variance with what is currently on offer or on
the shelves of the political enterprise called the ANC. If a deep ANC exists,
its visibility should match the calls for renewal. 

A 40% hegemony over
state power, with a guarantee of NDR allies in the new opposition complex,
requires leadership and membership sophistication focussed on what should be
pursued and achieved in the liberation promise the Constitution articulates.
South Africa needs a leadership which will make it a concert of political
coalitions fighting for hegemony to make it a non-racial, non-sexist, united,
democratic, and prosperous society. If the ANC renewal is about that, its
relevance is rescuable. If the GNU is about that, it might gain some runway.
CUT!!!