The South African liberation struggle for a democratic order has
the country’s Constitution as the legal document defining the end and arguably
success of the struggle. The 1996 Constitution is the basis upon which the
Republic of South Africa is considered one sovereign and democratic state.
Constitutionalism seems to be the towering victor of the more than three
hundred years of anti-settler, anti-colonial, and anti-apartheid skirmishes
that characterised South African history until 1994. There are growing calls to
defend constitutionalism, and more acutely constitutional supremacy, as the
antidote to unconstrained majoritarian power, which calls for parliamentary
supremacy. 

Catastrophe theorists
submit that a system, in this case democratic, is an always fragile ensemble
that can suddenly lurch into chaos without anyone anticipating it due to an
accumulation of factors. This, they argue, makes any system a candidate for
instability and the order the system has created mortal. A democratic order,
especially anchored on a constitutional order, can, and through a function of
the human element, be worn away from inside by crises of dysfunction that it
reaches a breaking point where the correctness of its basis is questioned. In
the frustration of fragility, crises, and the potential of failure, humanity
stops asking why but instead questions whether the adopted system was correct
in the first place. 

 

Building
a state requires much more than envisaging “spectacular and rapid
historical reversals” of democratic order consolidation infrastructure,
especially if it is based on the first phase of establishing the order.
Constitutions are human arrangements; they are not supposed to be contracts but
should create institutions with which humanity can contract. They should, at
best, make humanity abdicate its appetite to govern in favour of universal
principles which should govern.