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It can't be business as usual if ANC wants to emerge out of crisis and arrest decline

Delegates sing and dance before the start of the ANC policy conference at Nasrec. The ruling party's gathering came at a time of political and economic crisis. /Masi Losi
Delegates sing and dance before the start of the ANC policy conference at Nasrec. The ruling party's gathering came at a time of political and economic crisis. /Masi Losi

The ANC's fifth policy conference came at a time of political and economic crisis in the country.

Such a crisis calls for the discarding of the business-as-usual mentality and to take drastic actions.

Democracy is about institution building but this is not a once-off process. Failure to adapt to crisis and changing circumstances can only lead to decline. This is a fact the ANC has not yet come to face with.

Institutions are important because they influence and shape the behaviour, decision-making and actions of the individuals and societies operating within them.

ANC investigates fake membership allegationsThe ANC is investigating allegations of bogus membership ahead of the party’s elective conference in December‚ the Mail and Guardian reported on Friday. 

Naill Ferguson expounds: "Institutions are, of course, in some sense the products of culture. But, because they formalise a set of norms, institutions are often the things that keep a culture honest, determining how far it is conducive to good behaviour rather than bad."

Francis Fukuyama weighs in on the matter, iterating that "institutions reflect the cultural values of the societies in which they are established".

Ferguson and Fukuyama agree that a society's culture and values inform the nature of institutions that it creates. However, Ferguson goes further to suggest that institutions can be created to redirect, recreate or reform a country's culture from what it is to what is more desirable.

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In other words, it may be that a country's culture and values may have been such that it produced institutions that support authoritarian forms of government. But in the event the country embraces democracy, democratic institutions may be established to reform the authoritarian practices of former years.

Therefore, to develop a democratic culture of politics and governance, a country must establish institutions that promote the formation and maintenance of such a democratic political culture.

Consolidating democracies such as South Africa have the advantage of examples to model themselves after, and the privilege of hindsight which enables them to draw lessons from the histories and experiences of those nations that travelled this road before them. The older democracies of the West did not have that luxury.

Fukuyama observes: "Political institutions develop, often slowly and painfully, over time, as human societies strive to organise themselves in order to master their environments. But political decay occurs when political systems fail to adjust to changing circumstances.

"There is something like a law of the conservation of institutions. When the surrounding environment changes and new challenges arise, there is often a disjunction between existing institutions and present needs. Those institutions are supported by legions of entrenched stakeholders who oppose any fundamental change."

South Africa has engaged in an intense exercise of institution building since 1994 and has been working to entrench democratic political practice in both government and society.

But the ructions that are pervading the country's politics and challenging its stability are to an extent an indication of political decay.

If there is a greater tendency towards patronage politics, corruption, maladministration and mismanagement in the state and state-owned enterprises, weaker economic performance, joblessness and deindustrialisation, we must begin to ask questions about the institutions we've built because they are clearly failing to adapt to changing circumstances.

This calls for opening the debate about change and there should be no holy cows - all aspects of our institutional architecture should be up for discussion, from the mandate of the Reserve Bank, industrial policy, the efficacy of our constitution, functioning of state entities, to the powers of the president, and so on.

Rhetoric will not suffice.

 

 

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