06 May 2014 | Tony Leon | Original
Publication: BDlive
The contrast between the
‘ancient’ political leadership of young democratic South Africa and the younger
leaders of the old world is revealing, writes Tony Leon
A BIG difference between our "negotiated revolution" that
preceded the April 27 1994 elections and the "Velvet Revolution" that
swept Eastern Europe five years before was the positioning of the communists.
In the crumbling Soviet Union and its Iron Curtain satellites, they were the
oppressors; here at home, they were a mainstay of liberation.
A chronicler of the Polish struggle for democracy from under the
tyrant’s heel was historian and newspaper editor Adam Michnik. He observed of
the struggle: "Most revolutions have two phases. First comes the struggle
for freedom, then a struggle for power. The first makes the human spirit soar
and brings out the best in people. The second unleashes the worst; envy,
intrigue, greed, suspicion and the urge for revenge."
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| President Jacob Zuma, right, shares a platform with US President Barack Obama at a press briefing at the Union Buildings, Pretoria, in June last year. Picture: GCIS |
He could have been describing, with great accuracy, our country’s uneven
trajectory over the past 20 years. And on Wednesday, when South Africans vote,
the African National Congress (ANC) will hope to be rewarded again for its
leading role in the first phase, while the opposition will hope that voters
will hold the government to account for the second phase. Not least of the
multiple paradoxes of South Africa and the dominance of the ANC is its
responsibility for both of them.
But there is another echo between the undemocratic and anciens
régimes of Eastern Europe and the democratic leaders at home whose smiling
faces will greet voters on the ballot papers on Wednesday. A striking feature
of both leaderships is their relative elderliness. One of many reasons for the
fall of the Soviet satellites was the out-of-touch decrepitude of their rulers,
who could not fathom the yearning for freedom of the restless young
demonstrators who confronted them. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general
secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union in 1985, he was the last
in his line, but also the youngest (at 54). He intuited better than any
predecessor that the old way of doing business was unsustainable and needed
reform.
In South Africa, a youthful democracy and a country with a famous
"youth bulge", the present political leadership is pretty ancient:
the Inkatha Freedom Party’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi tops the age scales at 85
years old, followed by the ANC’s Jacob Zuma (72), Agang SA’s Mamphela Ramphele
(66), the Congress of the People’s Mosiuoa Lekota (65), and the Democratic
Alliance’s (DA’s) Helen Zille (63).
For a ruling party that obsessively practises the policy of reflecting
national demographics in all areas, it is just as well it has not used age as a
yardstick for leadership, given this near monopoly of sexagenarians and
septuagenarians at the top of the leadership pile. Strikingly, only 8% of the
electorate is more than 60 years old.
The exception in this group is the enfant terrible of our
politics, Julius Malema, who is destined to become the third man of our
politics when the votes are counted on Wednesday night. At just 33 years old,
he bucks this trend, but then again, his ideas are so old and discredited and
borrowed from Venezuela’s late Hugo Chávez that he compensates for his youthful
vigour with the dead hand of failed policies lifted from a failed state.
The contrast between young democratic South Africa and the old world is
again revealing: US President Barack Obama is just 52 years old, British Prime
Minister David Cameron is 47 and even German Chancellor Angela Merkel is younger
than 60. In the nondemocratic world, both China’s Xi Jinping (60) and Russia’s
Vladimir Putin (61) are younger than all our leaders, bar Malema.
This election, then, will be the last fought by the present leaders, and
their replacements, over the next few years, will tell us a great deal about
the future politics of South Africa. But that is the concern for the days after
Wednesday, although the staleness of the present political debate indicates
that some leadership refreshment would move things along.
What about Wednesday? The ANC goes to the polls in its most defensive
position in 20 years. The decades in power and the compromises and corruption
of high office weigh upon it, although these will only dent its huge support
base somewhat.
Only the DA, which, despite uneven messaging and the early Agang SA
debacle, has managed to project both strength and diversity in its campaign,
can mount any form of credible challenge against the ruling Goliath. The ANC
has pumped its "good news to tell" story, although as Wits University
vice-chancellor Adam Habib pointed out last week, this is pushing against an
open door. Noting the inarguable improvements in life here since 1994, he said
waspishly: "But that’s a comparison with a system which was declared a ‘crime
against humanity’."
If you set the bar at ankle level, it’s easy to jump over it.
While we know the overall, and even all the provincial results, in
advance of the ballots being counted, exact percentages could still surprise us
and might breathe some fresh life into our somewhat sclerotic democracy.
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