12 Feb 2013 | Tony Leon |
Original Publication: Bdlive
Mamphela Ramphele would do
well to visit her local cinema and view the epic Steven Spielberg movie
Lincoln, writes Tony Leon
ARGENTINIAN writer Jorge Luis Borges memorably described the 1982
Falklands War between his country and the UK as "two bald men fighting
over a comb". This is an apt metaphor for the court case of the Congress
of the People (COPE) being fought between its founding leaders, Mosiuoa Lekota
and Mbhazima Shilowa; that is, to the extent anyone, other than a handful of
its captive public representatives, cares about the outcome.
How different things seemed just more than four years ago, in November
2008, when COPE was launched in Sandton, cheered by thousands of enthused
delegates and buoyed by huge media support. At the outset, it enjoyed the
approbation of other opposition parties and paraded a deep bench of credible
leaders (including, in time, South Africa’s former deputy president Phumzile
Mlambo-Ngcuka). The wind in its sails as it set course to chart new waters in
South African politics was not simply filled with the normal political bombast.
Objectively, here was the first serious and much-anticipated split in the
African National Congress (ANC) since its legalisation in 1990 and its ascent
to power four years later.
The fact that the party was revealed over time to be a grab-bag of
political nomads, clinging to the wreckage of Thabo Mbeki’s vanquished
presidency, was not apparent when South Africa went to the polls six months
after COPE’s formation. The party, despite severe financial constraints, won a
very creditable 7.3% of the vote, and its 1.3-million supporters secured it
third place in the new Parliament. Its subsequent immolation, caused by
leadership rivalries, an infirmity of tactics and its absence of a survival
strategy, soon enough consigned COPE to the elephants’ graveyard of our
politics.
This unquiet resting place, where so many other political formations lie
just beneath the stony soil of our politics, provides us with examples of what
it takes to found, lead and, crucially, sustain a political party in addition
to South Africans’ hunger for a credible alternative to one-party domination.
Contrary to present beliefs and some of the gushing admiration from some
media at the much-anticipated, much-delayed announcement of the political
intentions of Mamphela Ramphele, there has never been a shortage of aspiring
new opposition leaders in our country.
Back in 1997, the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) elected Bishop
Stanley Magoba as its president. His Robben Island years, leadership of the
Methodist Church and leadership role in the National Peace Committee, on the
surface, constituted all the right stuff to arrest the declining fortunes of
his ailing party, which had an impressive struggle biography. Nice man that he
was, he had zero effect on Parliament and the "slow puncture" of the
PAC, in the sharp put-down of Jeremy Cronin, proceeded apace.
There was much expectation, in the same year, when the man who topped
the polls in the election of the ANC’s national executive committee, Bantu
Holomisa, was expelled from the party and founded the United Democratic
Movement. Using his base in Transkei in the 1999 election, he secured 500,000
votes and 14 MPs for his party. In the intervening 15 years, however, Magoba
and the PAC have disappeared from the political scene, while Holomisa remains
today in Parliament bestride a rump of just three other MPs. His constituency
has shrunk to a quarter of its original size.
As a citizen, I welcome the arrival on the political scene of a new
political force in the form of Ramphele, especially in these fraught times. As
a former leader of the opposition I know what it takes, however, to sustain
such a movement. Irritated though she apparently is at me for offering gratuitous
advice, I will bear the burden of her irritation by making one further
suggestion.
She would do well to visit her local cinema and view the epic Steven
Spielberg movie Lincoln. His ultimately successful effort to enact the 13th
amendment to the US constitution, the prohibition of slavery, was purchased at
considerable cost. That story, about the high-mindedness and low skullduggery
of 19th-century US politics, applies in our own political realm 150 years
later.
A heroic biography takes you only so far. You crucially need roots, a
clear philosophy and, especially, a machine to deliver votes. You also have to
undergo what I used to call the "chemotherapy of politics", the dirty
business of fundraising. Every opposition leader has visited the house of Gupta
or worse. Then there is what Colin Eglin called "long-haul politics"
— the sheer ability to stick it out as an opposition politician, with a short
gravy train and limited patronage. Often you have to build the foundations of
future success without enough straw for the bricks to construct it. Being a
political leader might feed one’s vanity in the initial phases, but, as former
UK politician Matthew Parris observed, over time "it starves your
self-respect".
Perhaps the latest political force in our land will defy these odds.
Time will tell.
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