11 Feb 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication: BDlive
Opposition showed lack of
self-confidence when it tried to parachute in a new leader on eve of
election-date announcement, writes Tony Leon
IN 1948 at Carnegie Hall, New York, Arthur Koestler, the most famous
communist apostate in western intellectual circles, made an influential speech.
He noted: "You can’t help people being right for the wrong reasons ... The
fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity;
it is an expression of lack of self-confidence."
Koestler was referring to the liberal critics of communism, who were
often afraid to voice their opinions in public for fear of being "tarred
with the brush of reaction", as the social democratic historian Tony Judt
says in Postwar, his history of Europe since 1945.
Thus it was that as the first major show trials in Eastern Europe were
being held and as Joseph Stalin’s tyrannous and murderous fist expanded beyond
the Soviet Union, the cheerleading for the Soviet Union and the mute silence of
most European intellectuals against its atrocities was a standout feature from
those times.
Judt gives a compelling explanation for this lack of backbone: "The
Left had the wind in its sails and history on its side…. At the core of the
antifascist rhetoric of the official Left was a simple binary view of history.
They (the fascists, Nazis, Franco-ists, nationalists) are Right, we are Left.
They are reactionary, we are Progressive. They stand for War, we stand for
Peace. They are the forces of Evil, we are on the side of Good."
Since no one wanted to be seen, even inadvertently, in the bad company
of fascism, now defeated in the Second World War, this "tidy
symmetry" worked to the communists’ polemical advantage:
"Philo-communism, or at least anti-anti-Communism, was the logical essence
of anti-fascism."
The official opposition here showed its own lack of self-confidence when
it tried to parachute in a new leader, from a rival party, on the eve of the
election-date announcement. Botched as that attempt might have been in its
execution, it does demonstrate just how comprehensively the African National
Congress (ANC) dominates the rhetorical space. Rebutting the fear of the
"return of the Boers", to borrow the phantasm conjured up last
November by ANC deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa, was apparently front and
centre of the strategic thinking on this move.
And that uncontested domination extends into the ideological space as
well: do not expect this election to provide a serious debate on rolling back
the welfare state (now set to reach 17-million recipients of social grants this
year, on the back of just 6-million personal-tax payers) or a push for the
privatisation of useless, mismanaged state-owned assets. Interrogating racial and
gender quotas and the distance we have strayed from the protection for
minorities embedded in the constitutional settlement of 1993 will also be off
limits for fear of being accused of nostalgia for apartheid. Rather, there will
be a bidding war to see which side can offer more entitlements and expand the
reach of government at the precise moment when the machinery of state has
seized up.
Unbowed by such state failures, it might be said that some of our
political masters and mistresses suffer from the political equivalent of
Tourette’s syndrome, or involuntary outbursts of inappropriate speech. In a
crowded field of competitors, the prize for inhabiting a parallel universe
utterly detached from reality must be jointly awarded.
First, there was Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu. Her
"Little Miss Sunshine" appearance at the Mining Indaba was something
to behold. After violent strikes in the platinum belt, and huge industry
concern with the latest amendments to mining legislation and its incoherent
regulatory framework, she offered another set of meaningless promises on top of
what Songezo Zibi called "a terrible record of poor performance".
Noteworthy was the silence from the panjandrums of the mining industry,
fearful, no doubt, of the cost of speaking out.
Then there was Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa lauding the public-order
policing units as "among the best in the world". Perhaps, in
comparison to North Korea or Ukraine. But, should it ever finish its work, the
Farlam commission on Marikana might just disagree.
Finally, flogging a dead horse, with yet another taxpayer-funded
injection into state-owned South African Airways, Public Enterprises Minister
Malusi Gigaba drew an Alice in Wonderland distinction between a
"bail-out" and an "equity injection". But fear not, the
difference this time, he told Chris Barron in the Sunday Times, is that there
will be more government intervention in its operations. That’s reassuring.
In an interview last week, US President Barack Obama said: "It’s
definitely a good thing that the president of the US cannot remake our
society." Our local political overlords and ladies are seized of much
greater ambitions than the leader of the most powerful country on Earth.
But who will point out that the emperor’s clothes are threadbare?
• Leon is the
author of The Accidental Ambassador (Pan Macmillan). Follow him on Twitter:
@TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA
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