The end of ANC hegemony dooms the Uhuru dividend

 The end of ANC hegemony dooms the Uhuru dividend 

The ANC’s hegemonic hold over South African politics, the constitutional and democratic order, is dying. The regional liberation movements who have historically revered its ideational prowess are bemoaning this free fall. When it declared that in the dock on state capture and corruption it is accused number one, it conceded that it has lost its historical radar to lead society. The denial that it has, in ideation terms, become a shadow of its glorious past choked its known ability to renew itself. 

The ANC has over its … years of existence been on of Africa’s leading think tanks whilst it was executing a liberation struggle. The monumental documents it produced to define a South Africa we live is was the output of intellectual work that is still unmatched. A compilation of these documents constitute a Magna Carta benchmark compendium of political thought to emerge out of Africa. The South African Constitution, a legal convergence point of over 110 years of political thought is the ultimate statute to define a beyond the incumbents liberation promise. A date with posterity is cast in stone. 

In crafting the constitutional order to become the intergenerational framework of the arrangements with which South Africans agree to govern themselves, the Constitution is the compass through which no dialogue of South Africa’s future can be imagined without. At its signing ceremony, President Nelson Mandela, who also presided over the Constituent Assembly that negotiated it, declared that the Constitution “is our national soul, our compact with one another as citizens, underpinned by our highest aspirations and our deepest apprehensions”.

The Constitution is a legal expression of the longstanding aspiration of the liberation movement that the struggle was and has always been about the transfer of political, economic, and social control power to the people who had been the motive forces behind its execution. The objectives of such a struggle have always been the attainment of a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, united, and prosperous society. The state, in all its manifestations, has been construed as an institutional superstructure charged with the obligation to respect, promote, protect, and fulfil the rights of every South African. 

In leading this process of struggle, before it bequeathed its outputs and outcomes to South African, the ANC was the central hegemon through which the aspirations of ‘we the people’ were articulated. The legitimacy of a government based on the will of the people defined the global brand character of the ANC. Its contributions to humanity is captured by Nelson Mandela when he said “we stand today before our people and humanity to present this our new basic law of the land, whose founding principles of human dignity, non-racialism and non-sexism, and whose commitment to universal adult suffrage, regular elections and multi-party democracy are immutable”.

it is therefore no accident that as architects of the Constitution, as far back as the adoption of the African Bill of Rights at its 1923 conference, the ANC ideationally foresaw the inevitability of the unfolding multiparty democracy. It is the extent to which the ANC as the ideational whirlpool out of which the unfolding constitutionalism emerged was able to sustain a cadreship that lived to the bar set. 

The strength, quality, and endurance of a hegemon is a direct function of the quality of the leadership charged with curating or cultivating the hegemony. 

The benefits of ANC hegemonic primacy accrued mainly to state institutions as a system more than the ANC itself as a matching system. The costs of this anomaly, generally borne by ‘we the people’, might be the most expensive collateral if a competing hegemon can occupy the unfolding vacuum. For this reason, the continuing erosion of ANC hegemony, mostly self-inflicted, threatens to deepen inequality as well as political polarization South Africa. What is notable is the battle to preside over the core elements defining the hegemony than wanting to change it. It is unfortunate that the enemy of this hegemony is the quality of leadership thrown at its execution. 

The glaring constitutional illiteracy within the new cohort of leaders across all its levels, notwithstanding pockets of outstanding constitutionalists, is a threat to the state power control ambitions of the ANC and a dagger aimed at the heart of its hegemonic hold over RSA. Indeed, the old ANC world is dying, and the new struggles to be born, it is the time of the hegemony management starved.