South Africa's Democratic Governance and "the Crisis of Stateness"

The aim of this article is to argue that institutionalisation of executive political leadership in South Africa's state democratic governance desecrated state-society subsidiarity and stateness, exposing people to security contortions. Theoretically, the state is privileged with causal power, which involves the exercise of statehood for the security of the nation. However, stateness resides in the legitimacy of exercising such power within the state-society subsidiarity principle. The state is not independent; instead, it remains vulnerable to fascist manoeuvres. This article holds that the crisis of stateness relating to disorder, illegality, and instability manifests when the state, a potent, omnipresent teacher, breeds contempt for the law. A literature survey demonstrates that African states' democratic governance has for years become case studies that anchor analyses of institutionalisation of executive political leadership and desecration of state-society subsidiarity with real-world situations about greed, corruption, economic misery, uneven development, and collapsing modern state and governance power relations inequities. South Africa is not an exception to the norm. Beside the decade-long state capture, South Africa's parliamentary conduct in the Nkandla and PhalaPhala scandals points to entrenched executive political leadership and the disintegration of stateness. The article concludes that de-institutionalisation of people, attendant to suppressing criticism, denigrating accountability, undermining rule of law, decimating state-idea, and political corruption, is the opposite side of the institutionalisation of presidential godfatherism, desecration of state-society subsidiarity, and erosion of stateness in South Africa's state democratic governance. The article recommends that South Africa's democratic governance needs to restore the balance of power relations in the state-society subsidiarity in order that the state may only be strong enough to serve and protect people's interests, and people strong enough to maintain sovereign control over the state, as entailed in the concept of nation-state.