- 期刊
- OpenAccess
A Tale of Two Legacies: The African National Congress as Ruling Party in South Africa
摘要
The South African Native National Congress (SANNC), established in 1912 following the 1910 Union of South Africa, was comprised of the African middle class - professionals, property-owners and the educated kholwa, fruit of the missionary schools. This educated elite met to organise against racial discrimination and to advocate for equal treatment before the law. They were constitutionalists and active members of society - establishing schools, newspapers, and civil society organisations in service of their communities. In 1948 ethnic partisanship became radically legislated under apartheid. This radicalisation of South African politics was met with the eventual radicalisation of the now African National Congress (ANC). As the proxy-Cold War played out on the African continent, the Soviet Union found a willing convert to its socialist imperialism in the ANC, while the ANC found in the Soviet Union a needed ally - finances and military support. The effective conveyance of communist ideas and values has meant that even post-1994 the now governing ANC persists with partisan governance, the deployment of loyalists, and a national project of centralised control over the state, society, and economy. In a democratic dispensation the ANC has found its partisan governance at odds with the impartiality principles of the 1996 Constitution, and its centralised control, justified using promises of transformation, stifling the potential of a burgeoning economy. In doing so it has undermined the democratic project and kept the citizens of South Africa from their primary stated need - work. This article argues that the ANC's rule can be divided into two dispensations, each with its own historical roots and contemporary consequences. The Mandela and Mbeki period (1994-2008), identified as the constitutional dispensation, can be traced back to the transfer of Christian-based and constitutional values of the founders, while the Zuma period (2009-2018), identified as the neopatrimonial dispensation, can be traced to the opportunistic use of Soviet values from the 1960s. The two dispensations are compared through measuring the perceptions of South African citizens of the political and socio-economic outcomes of these periods of government.