Key topics:2024 vote marks ANC’s historic electoral defeatBlack electorate hailed as deeply politically sophisticatedCall for a true revolutionary movement by 2029 elections.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Isaac Mpho Mogotsi*How the African National Congress (ANC)’s rule collapsed after thirty years.“When a clown enters a palace, he does not become King. The palace becomes a circus.” A Turkish saying. Since 1994 various local and international media houses, commentators and political experts have claimed that South Africa’s black electorate is unsophisticated, suffers from a herd mentality during election time, cannot grasp the intricate nuances of the formalities embedded in the exercise of the democratic right to vote, were hopelessly married in their voting patterns to the liberation movement which spearheaded the anti-apartheid struggle at the head of which stood the ANC and Nelson Mandela and were completely incapable of overcoming the magnetic hold the ANC was having on their political imagination. The outcome of the recently concluded South African national elections blew all that out of the water. The outcome of that election has now demonstrated to the entire world that in the black electorate of South Africa we have one of the most sophisticated voting populations in the entire world and in the history of democracy itself. This is a very remarkable and hugely significant feat given that we black South Africans started voting only three decades ago. Not only was the African National Congress (ANC) voted out of power in a decisive manner, but our black South African electorate has ushered in a political period in our history comparable only to the stirring and popular urban fermentation of radical and revolutionary politics we last saw in the 1980s. As a result of the outcome of the 2024 elections South Africa has now entered its Second Revolutionary Phase after the first one in the 1980s, thanks to our highly sophisticated black South African electorate. The next five years towards the 2029 national elections will prove to be a period very pregnant with huge possibilities and opportunities for a radical and revolutionary breakthrough in consigning the terrible legacies of slave ownership, colonialism, apartheid, racism and continuing white economic hegemony to the dustbins of our history. We are on a cusp of something very tantalising, great and promising. It is a moment of great revolutionary rapture. The revolutionary genie among our people which the ANC and its backward and ruinous neoliberal policies had bottled up for the last thirty years as the ANC chose to be the bulwark between our revolutionary spirit and the benefits from slave ownership, colonialism, apartheid and racism which accrued to a white minority have broken free. There is no turning back. In historical terms this is nothing short of a Second Liberation moment. The only important question to ask now is: Are there revolutionary movements in our country strong and capable enough and broadminded and selfless enough to seize the day and deliver a revolutionary breakthrough at the next national elections in 2029? That is the most important national question today in South Africa following the outcome of our 2024 elections. The rest is just lazy prattle and empty verbosity. .That the purported Government of National Unity (GNU) being desperately bandied about in some chaotic political cacophony among the ruling elites is a desperate attempt by Thatcherite, right-wing, white liberal and black neoliberal forces in our country to again abort the Revolution, as they did with the sell-out CODESA settlement in the early 1990s, is obvious for anyone with eyes to see. The same goes for the so-called GNU National Dialogue which will be nothing but a glorified CODESA2 streamed via various social media. That GNU National Dialogue, like CODESA before it, will not deliver our dirt poor majority from their ongoing bondage. Yet even this lame Thatcherite and right-wing GNU response is an unacknowledged concession that the Left forces in South Africa remain powerful and present to effect a major progressive change and a thorough break with the ongoing economic patterns of slave ownership, colonialism, apartheid and white paternalism. But is there a revolutionary Moses ready and willing to lead our suffering and exploited people, who have just made democracy itself very proud, out of their unending bondage now that the once mighty, glorious and powerful ANC is on its knees and possibly gasping for air for the last time before its terminal death and final departure from South Africa’s political stage in 2029? It is thrilling and intoxicating to be a South African today following the clear and decisive outcome of our national elections of a few weeks back. It is interesting at this point to look at some of the major political role players to appreciate how we arrived at this epochal juncture – at this rare moment of enormous political rupture – in South Africa’s democratic history. .Read also:Hartford: Election’24 was SA democracy’s ‘second miracle’, but challenges loomMnangagwa’s diplomatic gambit: Is Zimbabwe showing SA how to deal with Washington?DA divided over staying in South Africa’s coalition – Bloomberg.*Isaac Mpho Mogotsi: Founder & Executive Chairman, Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA). Cedia African Times Editor-in-Chief. isaacmogotsi@centerforeconomicdiplomacy.comhttps://centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com
