Wednesday, 10 September 2014



I’ve recently acknowledge the imperativeness of power sharing on Governance.
I wrote this letter to concede people of South Africa, about the role of “Power sharing and Decision making” in running of the country between the compasses of government. South African Constitution which was adopted on 1996 functions has following;   The Constitution is a law agreed by the people’s representatives that sets out how the state will be constituted and run, our rights and responsibilities as citizens and the creation of particular institutions to support and safeguard our “democracy”. Reason why I anxiety the notion of Democracy is that, they are dissimilar kinds of Democratic paradigm, which we not take to account the model of democracy in pattern. I don’t condemn the notion of Democracy but I wanted to be vague and straight.
 The power sharing in South African context is divided into 3 sphere of government which is the Executive; in short Executive is authority is consigned in the President of South Africa who is head of state and head of government, and his Cabinet. The President, Deputy President and the Ministers make up the executive branch of the national government. The President and Ministers are Members of Parliament who are appointed by the President to head the departments of the national government. The president is elected by Parliament from its members. The Ministers individually, and the Cabinet collectively, are accountable to Parliament for their actions.
Furthermore permitting to Supreme South African Constitution the Legaslature is bicameral Parliament which brands up the Legislative branch of the national government and Provinces. It consists of the National Assembly which is the lower house and the National Council of Provinces which is the upper house. The National Assembly consists of 400 members which half of the members are elected from parties' provincial lists and the other half from national lists. National Council of Provinces doesn't play such essential role in fuctioning of the country due to its fiat.
 The thrid branch is that of the National government is an Independent Judiciary. The main mandate of the judicial is to interpret the laws, using as a basis, the laws as enacted and explanatory statements made in the Legislature during the enactment. Also the Provincial Legislature consist of it different Executive and Legislative brances but one Independed Judiciary and each legislative body, the party or coalition of parties holding a majority of seats forms the government. The largest party not in the government is recognized as the official opposition.
Here the issue rises; our Democracy is protected by Constitution which can be changed on the National Assembly if they vote and harmony on 2 thrid majory. Out of 400 members; African National Congress (ANC) holds 249 seats followed by Democratic Alliance (DA) holds 89 seats, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) holds 25 seats, and Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) holds 10 seats and lastly other parties which are present consisting of 27 seats.
Legitimacy is ability to be defended with logic or justification by definition. It is rational that one can conclude that government is holding legitimacy. Above on the figures, it is vague that, understanding of power sharing can be perceived as the theoretical riddle. One might even assume the gap between constitution and reality which is true. The Constitution as shown that it gives those who are in power authority to discuss status quo.

It been 20 years of Democracy and we have parties like Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and Democratic Alliance (DA) which has been there for quite some time, but failing to persuade the bureaucracy to be held responsible and accountable; due to the reason of well-thought-out power sharing and also government holding precarious position. The prevailing issue in South African Parliament has been there for long-time and prior 1994 the system had I ways to ensure it powers and even now it is still visible. In recent event Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) said to turn Parliament into caucus yet, if we are being genuine, the way how status quo is being debated is the cause of all issues and not long ago, in Ukraine Members of Parliament were fighting physical showing how things are in other countries, also in South African Parliament, when the leader of Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) stormed the Parliament in 1993.

The issue of how power is aligned is the cause of all the annoyance. We have crises where our Constitution grand us power yet out government grant us opposition toward power. The dynamic of how show we share power should be reshaped if; Parliament is looking toward better development and better lives for the people, since power is shared among few individuals.
The Gap between Constitution and Reality!!
One should ask if they is State with our country.     
 

Friday, 1 August 2014

 Review of Leftism infant of South Africa with Achille Mbembe

Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters is arguably the most intriguing, if controversial, political movement to emerge in the aftermath of apartheid. It has fired South Africa's cultural imagination, attracted unprecedented levels of curiosity and raised high levels of expectation, while being subjected to enormous scrutiny.
But with its unsteady brand of parliamentary-cum-insurrectionary politics, there is no doubt it also represents a potential threat to the status quo. One only needs to indicate the hostility it has elicited and to the manner in which, from the official left to the established right and the ruling party in particular, its adversaries have attempted to stigmatise and delegitimise it.
In an attempt to reject wholesale the EFF project, they have turned Malema's years of unscrupulousness over matters of public money into a weapon designed for an all-round assassination of his personality. Of late, a slanderous method has consisted in dubiously associating him with three forms of historical nightmares typical of the 20th century: fascism, Stalinism and Nazism.
From a purely tactical point of view, it is unlikely such abuse – or for that matter the harassment and physical intimidation of its representatives in provincial legislatures – will be enough to keep the EFF away from those who, tired of the ANC and the Democratic Alliance, are longing for a radical alternative to the status quo.
Vague moralism, haughty contempt or Pavlovian condemnations won't suffice either. They are of no help to those who want to understand what the rise of this movement tells us about the state of our democracy.
It might well be that the EFF has concocted a "radical" political programme it has no hope or intention of realising. It might be that it has no real principles of its own and simply dresses itself in the ideological costume it thinks will be most attractive to the masses.
It might be that, if implemented, its proposed policies might merely suppress, without solving, the contradictions of "white monopoly capitalism", which the party has identified as its primal enemy.
It might even be that in donning a pair of gumboots here, a workman's overall and a domestic worker uniform there, or a beret and other pseudo-revolutionary adornments, and in decking itself out in half-baked theories, the EFF is simply simulating identification with the proletariat and, in the process, trying to con the poor. But this doesn't necessarily turn it into a fascist organisation unless we now agree that fascism, Stalinism or Hitlerism are but vague and general terms of abuse.
A fascist scenario under current South African conditions is simply implausible. For the fascist hypothesis to be considered seriously, we need to have reached a stage when one section of the bourgeoisie is objectively at risk of fighting another.
The EFF will have to be turned into an armed anti-labour militia in the pay of big business with the task of terrorising the workers' organisations. Its brand of anti-capitalism will have to take the form of a sham battle with international finance capital, which in its rhetoric will be given a Jewish flavour.
Subsidised by big business, the EFF will have to win mass support from the ruined middle classes. It will have to be on the verge of taking power by default rather than by revolutionary overthrow. Finally, the person of Malema will have to arouse religious exaltation, and mysticism will have to bind together the heterogeneous and conflicting social groups that follow the commander in chief. For the moment, none of these conditions have been met.
The real question is therefore not whether Malema is Hitler reincarnated and the EFF a riotous brand of black fascism. It is why such a movement has emerged now and in this form, and what its emergence tells us about our model of democracy. As this is a movement still in the making, to answer these questions requires greater nuance and precision than we have displayed so far.
The EFF is garnering support, including in sections of the black professional classes, for one single reason: the ANC is undergoing a profound crisis of hegemony. Because of its centrality in South African society and politics, a crisis in the ANC is de facto a crisis of South Africa's democratic model.
Indeed, 20 years after the end of apartheid, many are those who no longer take democracy's promises as self-evident. To delegitimise the ANC and the increasingly sterile narrative of the struggle it keeps peddling, the EFF wants to bring this state of disillusion to a crisis point through a series of small-scale and, at times, antagonistic confrontations.
By fostering a new wave of politicisation and radicalisation of ­subaltern classes and by escalating political contestation, it ultimately seeks to open an unprecedented ­historical phase marked by the possibility of insurrectionary events.
It is helped in this effort by three structural factors. The first is the ANC's failure to break with the historical patterns of capitalist accumulation that heavily depended on racial subsidies for their sustainability. This failure partly explains why South African society is still racked by extreme levels of black poverty; the extraordinary hold that the idea of "economic freedom" has on black cultural imagination.
The second factor relates to the growing inequalities of income and wealth. The new extremes of inequality have initiated a vicious cycle that is now undermining democracy altogether. Because money is fast becoming the most fungible political resource, corruption is no longer just bribery. It is creeping rot.
Unlike during the times of the struggle, the people as a category no longer stand for an idea waiting to become an event. Under ANC rule, the category has been thoroughly depoliticised. The people have become a succession of numbers, countless services to be delivered by a clientelist state that treats its citizens as dependants.
The third factor – potentially the most explosive – has to do with the politics of property. Having failed to resolve the question of racialised property (of land and mines) in class terms, the ANC is now trying to fix it by reactivating the native question. In so doing, it runs the risk of engineering the kind of ethnic and tribal consciousness that has led to the disintegration of many an African postcolonial state. It has resuscitated the tribal borders created by the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 to define the boundaries of communities.
Chiefly powers have been further entrenched in government policy (as evidenced by the Communal Land Rights Act of 2003, the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act of 2004, and the recently drafted Traditional Courts Bill), paving the way for the consolidation of patriarchy in rural areas. Economic powers have been extended to traditional leaders.
In a number of instances, ownership of communal land has been transferred from the state to "communities" and traditional councils generally headed by chiefs (or traditional jurisdictions) whose role in customary law is recognised by the Constitution.
Indeed, new laws have tended to entrench apartheid versions of chiefly power. Traditional leaders might now be in a position to capture for their own benefit various profits from land sales, mining deals, development projects, restitution claims, and tourism and heritage ventures.
Meanwhile, the old mining industry is racked by instability and its future is clouded with uncertainty. Forced to mechanise and to reduce the size of labour, it is literally under siege. With few exceptions, communities have only minimally benefited from mining activities on land they own or that is contiguous with mining operations. Where payments of royalties, profits from various investments, joint ventures and share transactions have been the rule, new kinds of contestations and rivalries have emerged.
The EFF has fully grasped the dilemmas of the moment. It has understood that political equality without property is not only fragile, but also fictitious. It has also understood that, more than being a social fact, the people are primarily an active historical force; a force that acts in order to disrupt the order of things. And the EFF wants to be that movement that disrupts the order of things by giving the people a voice again. This new movement is therefore a dramatic manifestation of the structural incompleteness of South Africa's democracy.
Insofar as it is both the symptom of a real distress and the expression of hope – however misplaced this might ultimately turn out to be – it is a populist movement in a classical Marxist sense. It is born out of a combination of political disillusion and a social disarray linked to the ANC's failure to resolve the social question, which, in South Africa, remains that of racialised property.
As for the EFF itself, one of the many challenges it faces is how to translate the social dynamics briefly described above into a genuine political strategy. To relish biting the calves of those in power is but a start. In its attempt to radicalise the current crisis it faces a real choice: insurrection or the electoral path.
To keep straddling both sides as it is currently doing might well lead to its early demise. Instead it must actively create the ideological conditions for an eventual alliance of the forces of labour with the youth and other segments of the subaltern classes. Only such an alliance is likely to open the way for the emergence of a new, post-ANC historic bloc.
The advent of the EFF singularly complicates the institutional left's political equation. For the left to emerge as a genuine counter-hegemonic force, it will have to forge a modus vivendi with the EFF. This will not happen if it does not get rid of its at times sectarian reflexes.
The ANC can still fend off the EFF's threat. For this to happen it must wake up from its dogmatic slumber, a mixture of corruption and complacency, arrogance and intellectual vacuity. Twenty years after freedom, what can progressive government possibly mean? What would it take to complete the project of democracy? How do we make certain that power is obliged to render an account of itself?
The proper response to the EFF challenge is not to harass, intimidate, physically abuse or suppress this voice. It is to turn South Africa into a new, genuine laboratory of democratic experimentation.
Achille Mbembe is with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand

Tuesday, 29 July 2014

ANC Hate Specch

The tweet was posted by @ANC-Vote2014 on Sunday before that account was shut down.
An official ANC twitter account said that while it supported Palestine, the party did not support anti-Semitic sentiments.
ANC Youth League spokesman Bandile Masuku said: "It is not an official account. It could be anyone."
The SA Jewish Board of Deputies national director Wendy Kahn said the organization had sent a letter of complaint about the tweet to President Jacob Zuma on Sunday.
She said the board had counted 40 cases of hate speech aimed at Jews in the past month.
"South Africa [generally] has low rates of anti-Semitism, so it is worrying." Yesterday morning, another account, @DA4Palestine, tweeted: "Jews must be gassed one more time. Killers of Christ."
The DA immediately distanced itself from the tweet.
The board hopes to meet ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe about a post by Rene Smit, who was involved in running the ANC's Western Cape social media campaign. Smit posted a picture of Hitler on Facebook with the message: "I could have killed all the Jews, but I left some of them to let you know why I was killing them."
The board also complained to the SA Human Rights Commission about the post.

Friday, 25 July 2014

We knew something had to be done. 'Should we; form a pressure-group, a political party, an NGO, influence the ANC to take a left turn?' It was this session that produced the idea of calling a National Assembly on What Is To Be Done and have it on the 26th of July to pay homage to the glorious 26th of July Movement of Cuba that ultimately took power in 1959 under the leadership Commander-In-Chief Fidel Castro. The movement has since grown by leaps and bounds. It strikingly characterize itself as a Marxist-Leninist Fanonian formation. What I like most about EFF is that it does not claim to have a monopoly on truth, intelligence and solutions. It encourages and challenges thinkers of all intellectual traditions and ideological persuasions to critique it, its ideals and policies. I like that when members of the general public talk about EFF, approvingly or disapprovingly, the discussion is without fail always about IDEAS. That alone is major achievement for an infant organization in a country whose body politic had been diagnosed with apathy of enormous proportions due to the sobriety of the masses of the people from the 1994 rainbow nation mega deception.
EFF still has so much more to offer to the country and continent, provided it is able to manage properly its own growth and evolution and that its core practiced principles and values always remain revolutionary. The biggest threat to the organization is the infiltration by careerists who have no interest in the REVOLUTION. Careerists are generally incompetent and inefficient but even those with some capacity are let down by their selfishness and indifference to the plight of the masses of our people. Conscious of their narrow individualistic agenda and lack of capacity, careerists are highly insecure, fearful and paranoid. They're gatekeepers. They thrive on divisive practices, always plotting and planning idiotic moves. Careerists fear talent, purge it and always want to be surrounded by those they consider to be inferior intellectually and otherwise. Even better if the careerist is in a position to dispense certain financial and political favors to the fighters that he/she has reduced to his groupies.

One believes EFF will always have the courage to pause and embark on political stock-taking, self-critique, reflect and correct itself wherever it is necessary. South Afrika remains among the most unequal nations on the planet, where the wealthy are disgustingly well-off and the poor among the poorest on the planet. I don't think EFF has the time and resources to nurse egos, overlook arrogance, create celebrities, become a haven of power-hungry imbeciles.....I should pen a proper reflection piece!!!

ECONOMIC FREEDOM IN OUR LIFETIME!!!!