NDR is not an old idea whose time has passed

It is the only idea that can save South Africa

- BUTI MANAMELA

THERE is an argument, repeated with the ease of a political cliché, that the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) has outlived its usefulness.

That it belongs to an era of Cold War frameworks and liberation movement nostalgia; that it is a relic dragging the ANC into theoretical cul-de-sacs; that South Africa's complex present requires something fresher, more technocratic, more modern.

These criticisms are not new. But they have recently resurfaced with renewed confidence, travelling through media commentary and policy debates with an air of common sense. Yet this supposed "common sense" dissolves the moment one actually confronts the realities described in the NGC Base Document, which opens by observing that South Africa stands amid "a volatile, uncertain and insecure global situation" and faces a "confluence of forces that seek to derail the National Democratic Revolution and inflict lasting and irreparable damage on the ANC and the progressive movement". What the critics call outdated theory is, in truth, the only framework capable of coherently making sense of these crises and mapping a path through them. The NDR's foundational proposition, that South Africa's racial, class, gender and spatial inequalities stem from a system of colonialism of a special type, has not lost relevance. It has intensified. Even the Base Document's most sobering passages show how inequality has deepened to global record levels, unemployment has entrenched generational despair, and social fragmentation has sharpened across every sector.