DA needs to make principles relevant to SA

Tony Leon | 7 September 2014 | The Sunday Independent

Johannesburg - Twenty five years ago this week, on September 6, 1989, I was elected for the first time to Parliament. Admittedly, this event was a great moment to me personally and, just perhaps, to my constituents in Houghton, Johannesburg, who had entrusted their parliamentary interests to a then 32-year-old local city councillor, than to the nation.

South Africa was back then a country at war with itself – and largely isolated from the world which had turned its back on the apartheid state.



Tony Leon during his days as leader of the opposition in Parliament. Now, looking in, he warns his former party that they must take measures which will improve people s lives and life chances. Picture: Sophia Stander

The central feature of politics then was the failure of government to set in train the basis for a negotiated resolution of democratic rights for the majority, who at the time of my election were excluded from the magic circle reserved for whites (and in lesser form for Indians and Coloureds) to freely choose their public representatives to institutions which mattered.

Even the centrality of the sovereign parliament to which I had just been elected to enact meaningful legislation and process executive regulations was deeply contested, and not simply by the extra-parliamentary opposition at home, in the form of the surging United Democratic Front (UDF) and the liberation movements, principally the ANC in exile and in prison .

A previous leader of my party, Dr Van Zyl Slabbert had dramatically resigned less than four years before the hinge-of-history 1989 election declaring that the Parliament to which I had just been elected was “a hopelessly flawed and failed constitutional experiment (which) does not begin to solve the problem of political domination; in fact it compounds it”.

The Democratic Party (DP), on whose ticket I had been elected, broadly agreed with this analysis but believed that the legal platforms for participation should be used to fight for change.

However, while retrospect makes the pathway forward seems obvious, there were no clear indications in September 1989 that South Africa was about to undergo the most profound change in centuries.

The most important consequence of that election was the inauguration of a new state president. I arrived in Parliament directly from lecturing at the University of Witwatersrand.

The reason for the overwhelming white face of the student body was a result of government policy enforced by its conservative education minister, named FW de Klerk.

Thus, when Parliament gathered for its first sitting day on February 2, 1990, to listen to President De Klerk, few on the opposition benches inside and the far mightier anti-NP forces outside, had any great expectation of change.

The major opposition in Parliament was on De Klerk’s right flank, in the form of the rejectionist Conservative Party which had in two elections eaten into the NP support base and constituted a much more significant electoral threat than the reformist DP.

In one 40-minute speech, De Klerk did something which not one of his five NP predecessors had done: like them he could read the proverbial writing on the wall; unlike them he did not presume it was addressed to someone else.

De Klerk’s acceptance of change and a process of constitutional negotiations with the real leaders and movements of the majority changed this country forever and, other – doubtless unintended – results would see him removed from the presidency within four years. But he also upended the terms of trade for the opposition.

By 1994, the Conservative Party, whose tactical inflexibility was entirely in keeping with its inflexible ideology, had ceased to exist in any parliamentary or political form.

And the 1994 election also saw the near-extinction of the DP which made it into the first democratic parliament only because its own proposal at the Kempton Park negotiations, that a 5 percent threshhold be reached for any party, had been rejected.

The DP’s political near-death experience was a result of two related political realities: part of its existing support base reasoned that since the NP had adopted most of its programme and could, in much stronger form protect their interests, they might as well vote NP.

The other part of its base, those whose moral repugnance for apartheid had caused them to reject the NP, even in its rejuvenated form, could now vote for the clearest alternative to it, the ANC .

After the 1994 election I had the task of picking up the shattered pieces of the DP when I was elected its leader, at a time when few thought there were realistic prospects for its survival. Yet within a decade, the NP would also join the elephant’s graveyard occupied by once dominant parties which could not adapt to changing circumstances.

Something very similar had happened to the once dominant United Party, which had governed South Africa for decades before 1948 and had been the party of opposition choice for whites for three decades thereafter. It had disappeared entirely by 1989.

Outside of white politics, something very similar happened later to the once hugely relevant Pan Africanist Congress and the intellectually impressive Black Consciousness Movement, both today relics of history.

Fast forward to today, and the forces of opposition are at once familiar and very different. The DP’s successor, the Democratic Alliance, holds the position of official opposition.

It is an amalgam of the DP and NP and has added a slice of black voters to its traditional base. But it is neither populist nor particularly ideological. It offers to protect the constitution and does so in its parliamentary role and, increasingly, through the legal processes such as its successful endeavours to obtain the “spy tapes”.

It is opposed to the ANC but has, simultaneously, adopted many of its policies in an attempt to obtain greater traction among wavering supporters of the ruling party. It is also hemmed in by demographic realities: despite having a deeper bench of viable black leaders, it remains vulnerable to siren calls that it is a “white party”.

Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) – whatever his ethical shortcomings – is uninhibited by any of these constraints. He does not have a diverse support base whose interests have to be carefully balanced. But he also has a much larger potential electoral hinterland than the current, much bigger, DA.

He is, as the country and the world witnessed three weeks ago, unconstrained by the niceties of parliamentary convention. His ideology, largely borrowed from his hero, Venezuela’s late Hugo Chavez, is economically unsustainable, but has the appeal of instant gratification to the many economically dispossessed in low-growth, under- skilled and job-shedding South Africa.

Might he then be the next leader of the opposition, and how does the DA prevent itself following the road to irrelevance of so many other once dominant, now extinct, political movements in South Africa?

Van Zyl Slabbert once warned that “you can’t out Mau Mau the Mau Mau”. That is the first lesson which the DA needs to adapt.

It can’t out EFF the EFF nor fight on the ground which the ANC chooses for it.

Second, it needs to make its principles relevant to the realities of South Africa today. It needs to fashion its once distinctive ideology of freedom, equality of choice and opportunity – three of whose pillars neither the ANC nor EFF bother with at all – and take them into the thick of the fight now raging around this country’s future.

And these are not simply slogans. They need true believers and leaders, think tanks and measures which demonstrably will improve people’s lives and life chances.

It’s not easy but it can be done. The alternative is questions around relevance which, as our history suggests, leads over time to oblivion.

* Leon is SA’s former ambassador to Argentina. He was an MP from 1989 to 2009 and leader of the Democratic Party and Democratic Alliance from 1994 to 2007.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers

 

DA needs to meet challenge posed by EFF’s antics

03 Sep 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

Malema actually stands for something, writes Tony Leon, who is not sure if the official opposition greatly supports any causes

YOU would need to be a very old South African — about 80 years old — to remember the last time the official opposition in Parliament won an election and went directly from the opposition side of the aisle to the seat of government.

Leaving aside the issue of the racial, restrictive franchise that pertained here until 1994, the last occasion when the largest opposition party in Parliament made this transition was 66 years ago, on May 26 1948. This was when DF Malan was elevated from leader of the official opposition to prime minister.


DA national spokesman Mmusi Maimane outside the Western Cape High Court on Tuesday

Of course, there was a change in both national and party power when Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress won the 1994 election and swept Malan’s successor movement, the National Party (NP), from its 46-year occupation of the government. But that required the entire previous system to be scrapped, via the so-called "negotiated revolution", before it could happen. This underlines the glacial nature of in-system electoral change here.

After the end of the first session of South Africa’s democratic parliament in December 1994, I led a small delegation of Democratic Party (DP) MPs to a lunch meeting with then president Nelson Mandela in Pretoria. On the agenda was our concern with various start-up problems affecting the workings of the National Assembly. Since Mandela famously had both an open door policy towards some of his democratic opponents and a lively regard for Parliament and its workings, he seemed the right person to address these concerns. No one at that meeting could have imagined the pit into which parliamentary proceedings would descend 20 years later.

But what I had not quite appreciated that day when the DP lunched with the president was what a close study Mandela had made of South Africa’s parliamentary history. As we listed ailments then affecting Parliament, trivial from the vantage point of today, Mandela brought the lunch to a stop. He disarmingly reminded us that the ANC had transitioned from struggle to power without the benefit of any preparation. As he put it that day: "The ANC went straight from the bush into power." By contrast, he recalled: "The NP served a long period in opposition in Parliament before assuming power."

How does this history lesson sit with the present leader of the opposition and the 15th holder of the post since Malan, Mmusi Maimane of the Democratic Alliance (DA)? He has some advantages and, perhaps, more disadvantages. While he had no parliamentary experience before his appointment, the party he leads has long experience in opposition and parliamentary tactics. He leads a team of 88 MPs in the National Assembly, slightly more than FW de Klerk’s National Party had in 1994.

But the NP in opposition, and two of its three predecessors as official opposition — the Conservative Party of Andries Treurnicht and the United Party of De Villiers Graaff — provided a salutary counterpoint to the illusory comfort the strength-in-opposition numbers seemingly provided. For different reasons, those parties disappeared entirely from the political scene when their political relevance became the dominant narrative. What lessons might Maimane and his lieutenants draw from their demise?

The first was offered to me by then NP secretary-general Roelf Meyer shortly after the lunch with Mandela. He confidently asserted that the NP supporters secured by his party in 1994 — just more than 20% of the electorate — would stick with the party "because they have nowhere else to go".

The DP had other ideas and, despite being 10 times smaller than the NP, would within five years eclipse it, take it over and effectively remove it from the political scene entirely. This was not due just to the more muscular approach to opposition politics that the DP adopted compared with the supine ambivalence of the NP of the time. It was essentially because, shorn of power and bereft of ideology, it had little to offer. Its central role in the system of apartheid also weighed it down.

Maimane and the DA’s dilemma — of having the largest number of opposition seats but being knocked off the front pages and social media spaces by the antics of the enfant terrible of the new politics, Julius Malema — is a question of asymmetry. Size does not always count in either life or politics. This was relayed to me the other day by a former colleague, herself a veteran of decades on the opposition benches and now retired.

She told me how she was listening on the radio to this "most articulate man … who perfectly captured my own thinking around (President) Jacob Zuma, Nkandla and the public protector". Then, she said, "to my horror the interviewer thanked Julius Malema for the interview".

So even those who would never dream of voting for him, bedrock DA supporters, find in Malema’s advocacy, and even perhaps some of his shocking tactics, points of agreement, even admiration. Malema will not poach from the DA’s voting pool, but if the party’s supporters perceive it to be ineffectual, some may simply drift away from political participation. But Malema’s advocacy will have a direct and negative effect on the DA’s ability to reach beyond its present base and tap into the growing pool of disaffected ANC supporters, precisely the group needed to ensure that the DA is not marooned forever, like Graaff and all his successors in title, on the opposition benches.

In Vladimir Lenin’s famous phrase, "What’s to be done?" the DA needs to reinvigorate Parliament. Its MPs need to "own issues". This is not about issuing press statements, but waking up every morning and determining how to find a credible issue, become the expert on it and spend time with other experts. They need to have the passion, the knowledge and the commitment to be the lead voice on the matters that matter.

The other asymmetrical problem Maimane faces is peculiar to his party set-up. He leads the opposition in Parliament but he does not lead his party outside of it. Whatever the merits of this arrangement originally, it is now way past its sell-by date.

Finally, there is the matter of ideology. What inspires the average DA MP? Is it job security for the next four years? A yearning to change things? A dislike of the ANC or the president? Perhaps all these things. But what great causes today does the DA stand for?

Malema, his theatrics aside, actually stands for something. It’s radical, impractical and ultimately ruinous. But it does resonate with many in the ranks of the dispossessed and the left-behind in South Africa.

The DA certainly is in opposition to the ANC but seems to have embraced large chunks of its philosophy, from transformation to the black economic empowerment scorecard. Though it wants the terms of trade changed, it is not confident enough to provide an entirely different world view. If you are in a 51-49 political outcome, such fudging of ideological barriers makes tactical sense. But given the 40 points separating the DA from the ANC, it does not.

There are many examples of this, but one will suffice — the crucial question of jobs. The ANC offers 5-million "job opportunities", while the DA promises the same number of "real jobs". This is a semantic distinction few understand. Better, as Clem Sunter suggested, to be the voice to create "1-million businesses" or become the champion of the market (not just business) to offer real economic liberation. That provides both a distinction and a difference.

A real alternative, to borrow a phrase, needs to offer a choice, not an echo.

• Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela (Jonathan Ball) Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

 

 

Don’t feed a gossip fire, try to starve it of oxygen

20 May 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

 

The furious pushback by the DA does not advance the party’s cause or the interests of its voters who so recently placed 4-million votes behind it, writes Tony Leon

THE Saturday morning after the 2004 election results were posted, I was rather tired and was enjoying an unaccustomed lie-in.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) had — in the teeth of the fiercest opposition infighting, the newly arrived Independent Democrats on its left, the vengeful New National Party on its right, and the huge African National Congress everywhere else — posted a creditable result and increased its support from five years earlier.

Any relief I felt evaporated when I reached the op-ed page of the Weekend Argus. It was dominated by an article under a large headline saying "Tony Leon must go". I seethed with indignation at its unfairness, especially when the article quoted several unnamed "party sources and insiders" who had fed this particular narrative, suggesting the party had reached the end of its road under my leadership. I was tempted to dash off an immediate response.

Before I reacted in fury, I sought the counsel of two people I could rely on for unvarnished advice, chief whip Douglas Gibson and strategist Ryan Coetzee. Both provided a context to the article and stayed my hand. Gibson, not for the first time, counselled: "Don’t feed a fire started by others, it will only spread; better, starve it of oxygen."

Coetzee pointed out that the two journalists, pens dipped in a combination of bile and vitriol, were "deeply embedded in the African National Congress (ANC)". I took their advice and someone lower down the party food chain was deputed to pen a replying, but subdued, letter and set out the objective facts, as we perceived them.

Just how embedded those journalists were would be revealed in the "cash for articles" scandal that engulfed the Independent Newspapers group, and the authors of this hatchet job were revealed to be in the pay of the ANC premier of the Western Cape, Ebrahim Rasool, and were forced to leave their posts before I left mine about three years later.

Last weekend, instead of savouring their sweeping victory at the polls, the ANC’s elections head, Malusi Gigaba, vengefully turned on the media: "You campaigned hard against the ANC and we beat you. We defeated you," he harrumphed. On Saturday, at the Franschhoek Literary Festival, veteran journalist Max du Preez pointed out that, during the election, the ANC had the fawning and opposition-censoring South African Broadcasting Corporation in its corner, plus the support of a Gupta-owned newspaper (The New Age) and TV channel (ANN7), and a self-acknowledged ANC supporter in charge of all Independent Newspapers titles. In reality, the ANC had "beaten just three or four newspapers: Business Day, Sunday Times, City Press and the Mail & Guardian". "They totally ignore the Afrikaans press," he added.

These past two Sunday mornings have been excruciating for DA leader Helen Zille. After just 72 hours of positive reporting on her and the party after their impressive election result, parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko dropped a bomb by announcing in the Sunday Times that she was departing from her post and these shores to continue her education. Barely a day later, former DA insider Gareth van Onselen penned an acidic column on the "real reasons" for Mazibuko’s departure and fingered Zille for it.

Just as that report and the furious pushback by the DA against Van Onselen subsided, another even more thermonuclear device was detonated in last Sunday’s newspaper. The Sunday Times led with the headline: "Mazibuko nothing without me — Zille". The report culled various leaks from the small (fewer than 30 members) party federal executive meeting, which suggested that Zille had launched a root-and-branch attack at the meeting on her former protégé, Mazibuko.

Within hours, Zille had published a special edition of her newsletter under the headline, "The abuse of media to drive internal agendas in the DA." She provided a blow-by-blow version of her recollection of the meeting, which she said had been distorted by the Sunday Times to advance "the succession agendas" of certain unnamed party leaders. Let me add that the reporter concerned, Jan-Jan Joubert, does not practise "cash for articles" or any other unethical versions of journalism.

None of this is pretty, and none of it advances the party cause or the interests of its voters who so recently placed 4-million votes behind it. Nor does it do anything to help the cause of the new parliamentary leader, who will take over in what are now the most difficult of circumstances.

I am not sure that seeking meetings with newspaper editors to change the narrative or expose the agendas, or whatever, will really do much to staunch the leaks, an age-old phenomenon which Zille herself, as a political journalist in the 1970s and 1980s, benefited from in her own reportage.

Rather, heed the advice of Tony Blair to his fractious, but electorally successful, Labour Party: "When you look inside you lose, when you look outside you win."

• Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela (Jonathan Ball) Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

This sclerotic democracy in need of fresh blood

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."

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.

• Follow Tony Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

 

MPs should be accountable to the four Cs - Dene Smuts

20 Apr 2014 | Dene Smuts | Original Publication:  PoliticsWeb

Outgoing DA MP notes that the undiluted list system has been devastating to our democracy

Farewell speech by Democratic Alliance Member of Parliament, Dene Smuts, April 13 2014

I am honoured by the presence of members of the executive of the provincial and metropolitan spheres. But I am honoured most of all by the presence and participation of Tony Leon, and Michal Leon who is a guest in her own right - she is quite simply the wisest woman I know.

It was Tony's vision of the "shining city on the hill" that guided the DA to the point where we can say to the electorate: here is the proof that we can govern, that our ideas work. It was also Tony who built the party to the point where it is poised to break the 20% barrier nationally.

You can't do that unless you can do what a party political leader is supposed to do: bring jou skapies bymekaar, en hou hulle bymekaar. He is revered for the way in which he kept his flock together inside the party, but he is not sufficiently acknowledged beyond its confines for the party political leader that he was.

He was a party political leader, I am a lawmaker and I bid you goodbye in that capacity.

At the opening of Parliament on 13^th February this year I could not help thinking, as we sat in the Chamber awaiting the President's arrival, that South Africa was falling down Alice's rabbit hole into Wonderland.

One female MP undulated across the floor like a giant caterpillar. She is the poor lady whose attire featured in many newspapers after she cut the dress off and wore only the lining. (I am not going to say her name because she is a very nice young woman.) What newspaper stills could not capture was the rippling and undulating effect of flesh under the thin and shiny lining. She was a giant deep yellow caterpillar undulating across the carpet after coming to the NCOP front benches to greet the Premiers. If, like Alice's caterpillar, she had been blue, we would have had a blue wave right there.

My benchmate James Selfe and I surveyed the general scene and agreed we were drifting into a whole different dimension here.

In the front benches proper on the ANC side, Minister Malusi Gigaba was wearing an SAA pilot's uniform and peaked cap. We have witnessed a touch of the Gilbert and Sullivan before, but never before I think, not inside the House, a politician in full fancy dress faked uniform.

At the closing sitting on 13^th March, a month later, to be fair, there was some flamboyance on the opposition side. Graham McIntosh, once of this tribe and now I forget of which, wore his Scots clan kilt and had himself piped out of the Chamber for the last time by the wailing lament of a bagpipe. He had a video cameraman walking backwards recording bagpiper and departing MP all the way to and through the lobby.

But it was Malusi Gigaba who remained in my mind's eye the next day, when four SAA flights were delayed by three hours or so at Cape Town International (while BA flew off at the appointed hours). We were nevertheless assured that the international flights with which we were connecting would wait for us.

As my plane came in to land at OR Tambo, we were told that SAA staff were standing ready to take us to our waiting international flights. Our designated young man had not been briefed but gave my boarding passes for Frankurt and Geneva one look and started sprinting, calling out like Alice's white rabbit that we would be late and also "time is money, time is money".

He left many of the international travellers behind at the pace he was running, whipped those of us remaining through passport control and then disappeared. We all scattered in different directions to find our departure gates, where no planes were waiting and in my case only a lonely cleaning lady could be seen, disconsolately mopping the floor. That left us all lost and each alone somewhere in an empty airport. We had left South Africa. We had passed through the looking glass.

However, this year is not the first time I have found the work of Lewis Carroll useful for comparative purposes in Parliament. Wonderland arrived more or less simultaneously with President Zuma.

For example, the procedures adopted to dispose of a perfectly good SABC Board which however contained two or three Mbeki appointees reminded me (as I wrote at the time) of the Queen of Hearts who insisted at the trial of the Knave of Hearts who Stole Some Tarts that the sentence came first and then the verdict, not that there had been an inquiry yet.

I would think that any impeachment proceedings now would follow the same course. President Zuma, like the Cheshire Cat, is going to vanish quite slowly until only the grin remains, with perhaps a pair of glasses intermittently pushed up the nose.

By then, Julius Malema may be sitting roughly where Prince Buthelezi now sits, wearing heaven knows what costume.

Now it is 13^th April and I depart, having completed five Parliaments. The question is not the one people keep asking me - why I am leaving or how I can leave - but how I stayed for nearly a quarter of a century when the work so consumes a person's life.

I have stayed because it has always been possible to get much and sometimes almost all of what I argued, and where all else failed, to effect damage control. It would have been nice to end on achieving my own two Private Member's Constitutional Amendments on the JSC and the NPA, but the arguments are out and have developed traction.

There are two approaches to opposition lawmaking work: making a noise and making a difference. Sometimes you have to make some of the former in order to achieve the latter, but mostly not. I have never been interested in work that does not have effect, and consequently I have always had a sense of agency.

My advice to an incoming caucus is that it is their job now to wake the ANC up out of ideological Wonderland (the ANC had a worse ideas about public and private enterprises when we started) and that making a noise will get you no more than President Zuma quoting Macbeth to great effect: "it is sound and fury, signifying nothing", he will say, then giggle, and bring the House down.

But my real interest is the caucuses that went before, and I am so happy and honoured to have some of our original people present at this farewell. I think it is worth looking at the reasons why we were successful as lawmakers over the years.

The first reason is the one which Dr Zach de Beer invoked: the long obedience. You will know the quote from Nietsche: "there should be a long obedience in the same direction, there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living". I have Dr de Beer's version of it, in his hand, in ink, somewhere among a quarter of a century's papers.

All of us from the old days know what that means. Our convictions were forged in adversity, because there was no profit and there were no rewards in being liberal before we had the Constitution in place.

On the contrary, there was only trouble. But both the Constitution and the policies produced as the fruits of the long obedience have stood the test of time - to this day we draw on the work of Ken Andrew on issues ranging from affirmative action to the youth wage subsidy, and on the work of Prof David Welsh on, for example, an electoral system.

The second reason why we were successful over the years flows from the first: we each knew exactly who we were, and that makes an effective MP.

The abiding formative influence for me on what a Parliamentary caucus and what an MP should be was the DP caucus after the 1989 election, some forty fiery souls. Everyone was a real MP, a full blown personality. The long obedience was in the same direction, it allowed for different positions and personalities. The battles were of epic proportions given Harry Schwartz's presence.

I thought I was the only person who got on with Harry until I learnt from my friend and relation Adv Izak Smuts, brother to Julia of the Claremont committee, that he was the other one. Our number included Robin Carlisle, Jasper Walsh, the late Tiaan van der Merwe, David Gant. And only Peter Soal and Roger Burrows, with Sandy Slack supporting, could have kept the show on the road so authoritatively and so elegantly.

We were, of course, the babies: Tony, Mike Ellis, James Selfe and I. But after the 1994 election, we were three of the seven left, in the Assembly, together with Colin Eglin and Ken Andrew, Douglas Gibson and Errol Moorcroft.

So what if were only seven? We had in the 1989 election provided the tide on which FW changed history, and we were more effective than far larger parties because the Constitution which we were then completing was itself the fruit of the long obedience and we knew how to use it as sword and shield.

Also, the whole of the seven was more than the sum of its parts because we sparked each other off because we were still real MPs, despite having come in in 1994 on the list system.

The effects of an undiluted list system on political parties is just as devastating to democracy as we always said it would be. The effects are exacerbated by the modern practice of substituting marketing for the political persuasion of voters.

Accountability for an MP should lie to conscience, country, Constitution and constituency. Tony and Mike Ellis and I were perhaps the last of the real, directly elected Assembly MPs, genuinely accountable to the constituencies which elected us.

Tony and I won old Prog safe seats. They were difficult seats to account to. His was Houghton, where I was given a terrible time because I believed in affirmative action from the start. I still do. Mine was Groote Schuur, right here.

I so appreciate the role which Peter Fischer has played in arranging this farewell, and the choice of venue is indicative of the care with which he has worked. It is also poignant and pleasing that the Rondebosch Councillor and general constituency election leader Matthew Kempthorne is the son of my friend and first constituency secretary Vicky Kempthorne. I have known Matthew since he was a boy in our old Mowbray office and I am mightily encouraged by the quality brought not just by him, but also our election candidate from Rondebosch, Bronagh Casey, as well as their new Chairperson Tammy Evans.

But let me talk to the old people, if you will let me, and turn this into the last report back meeting, also to the spirits of those departed, and also to those personalities who endorsed me, like Morne du Plessis and the friends who ran voting stations for me, like Jenny du Plessis. I think I fulfilled the undertakings I made when I ran for office.

Campaigning then was a personal matter, not a scripted message. I campaigned on a new liberal democratic Constitution, and it was my privilege to be part of the creation of that Constitution from day the first to day the last, alongside Colin Eglin and Ken Andrew, with Tony, too, playing a major part.

If you will further allow me, I want to recall two things I said to the electoral college, part constituency part DP, which way after midnight on the relevant night in 1989 elected me over seven other candidates running against the sitting safe seat MP.

I was reminded relatively recently by someone whose mother was on the electoral college that I said I would be an MP until I was an old lady. That promise too, I have fulfilled. The other thing I said, and which I think may have influenced Colin Eglin to swing the vote my way, was that I saw sitting before me a sea of white faces, and that we needed to change that in the DP just as we needed to change South Africa.

Now tonight, the constituency to which I bid goodbye, is called Athlone 1. The Rondebosch ward and Claremont committee were assigned for some time to other MPs under the present random allocation system, but were recently added to half of the larger Athlone constituency which I shared for some years with Sheikh Shahid Esau.

To the original Athlone, I say from the bottom of my heart, thank you for taking me in. To Shehaam Sims, shukran, shukran, shukran. To Shahid, shukran. To Magedien and his family, shukran. To the chairwomen then and now, Bonita and Konieta, thank you and shukran. To Suzette Little, Zainu Waggie and Anthea Green and Mark Kleinschmidt and Ruth Gordon, thank you and God bless.

It is really good to see how the new wards and the old committees have integrated. Claremont over the years has often benefited from strong Jewish membership and also leadership - to Grace Richman, we will always remember Gerald.

If anyone wants to know why South Africa works, there it is: we are Coloured and white, Jewish, Christian and Muslim. But I think we can say that we live by the motto which our indispensable Constituency Operations Manager Berenice Lawrence features at the bottom of her emails. Taken from George Eliot, it asks: what do we live for if not to make life easier for each other?

Berrie, you are our compass in more than one way.

 

DA’s Dene Smuts a rare bird in SA’s political aviary

14 Apr 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

Democratic Alliance MP Dene Smuts

 Although Smuts always stood for principle, she adapted to meet the dramatically changed circumstance she lived through, writes Tony Leon

ON SEPTEMBER 6 1989, the voters of the Groote Schuur constituency elected a well-known journalist and prize-winning author to Parliament for the first time. Her name was Dene Smuts. She was then 40 years old.

On the same day, more than 1,500km away, the voters of Houghton, Johannesburg, also elected me, for the first time, to Parliament. And thus it was, a few days after that watershed election, which propelled FW de Klerk to the presidency of South Africa, that I first met Smuts in the caucus of the Democratic Party (DP). Smuts is made of far sterner stuff than me and she lasted in Parliament five years beyond my own departure in 2009.

When any career of political significance ends, I believe there are three important questions to answer. I have taken the liberty of posing them and providing the answers in respect of Smuts:

• Did the person who held public office make a difference for the better and leave behind a legacy for others to emulate?

• Did the person fundamentally uphold the first principles of the causes she was entrusted to serve?

• Did the person keep faith with these values, but also adapt to the changed environment so that her contribution would not just be about consistency but also about achievement and relevance?

When we reflect on the performance and the role played by Smuts, we can say with great certainty that her 25 years in Parliament answer each of them with a "yes".

• In all her roles, as the first female whip in Parliament, as a constituency MP, as a front-bench opposition spokeswoman on home affairs, communications, and latterly in justice and constitutional development, Smuts made a huge difference. Perhaps for us, being at the coal face and in the negotiation chamber as the 1993 and the final 1996 constitutions were being inked marked our finest hours. In each of these varied roles, Smuts brought that rare trifecta of attributes to the fore: a keen intelligence, a fierce commitment to, and understanding of, the cardinal issues, and what Malcolm Gladwell calls the "10,000 hour rule": the backbreaking, line-by-line hard work needed to move beyond rhetoric and aspiration toward concrete achievement and credible result. She did not succeed at all times — objectively as a member of a minority party she could not.

But if you look at the attempts to carve out a coherent and modern communications policy, the Bill of Rights in the constitution, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a proper process for judicial appointments, the independence of the legal profession and latterly the significant improvements in the Protection of State Information Bill, you might wish to go to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. And not just because it is both beautiful and was part of Smuts’s first constituency. If you wander around, you will find the burial stone of its pioneering botanist, Henry Harold Pearson, who died in 1916. His epitaph reads: "If ye seek his monument, look around."

Smuts has a singular advantage over Pearson as she is still happily and vigorously with us. But if you look into the detail and depths of her legislative and constitutional achievements, those words provide an apt and living tribute to her accomplishments.

• On the second question, Smuts and I probably had as many disagreements as we had meetings of the mind. But when she and I and other colleagues clashed with her, it was always about a big issue, not about personal slight. In a political world where disagreement and dissent are often a synonym for disloyalty, I can attest to the fact that not once did Smuts ever advance a point to gain personal advantage or ingratiate herself with the leadership. But she always advanced her view, often in the teeth of immense resistance. When I think back to the most difficult days of survival for this party and its cause, when Smuts and I were two of the surviving seven MPs after 1994, I never had to watch my back as leader, because she always had it covered.

And when fortune or the electorate smiled much more favourably upon us in 1999, she took not just a front rank in the caucus of the official opposition and Parliament, but provided a role model to new and inexperienced MPs, a mentoring role she continued to play after 2004 and 2009. And as this party expands further in size after the May 7 election, new MPs would do well to emulate another of Smuts’s attributes when the party machine makes demands of its MPs and reduces the role of the individual legislator to a sort of glorified constituency manager. It is this: there are two types of politicians. You can either be a weather vane or a signpost. If you are the former, you will twist in the wind, depend for your key adviser on the last person you spoke to and try to suck up to those in power and trim your sails to the prevailing winds. That is the easy path of least resistance, but it usually leads, over time, downhill. Or you can be the rarer bird in the political aviary, a signpost, which does not bend to the vagaries of the moment but stands for a cause greater than personal advancement or temporary vote-winning, for an enduring set of principles and beliefs. Beyond argument, Smuts belongs in the second category.

• The answer to the third question appears to be a contradiction of the second answer, but on examination it is not. Because, although Smuts always stood for principle, she adapted them to meet the dramatically changed circumstance we lived through. Whether it was the modernisation of old Afrikaans institutions such as her alma mater, the University of Stellenbosch, or the placement of second- and third-generation rights in the constitution, Smuts was a modernist. And so, to create a liberal and democratic state of meaning to the bulk of South Africans, you had to, in her view, make it relevant beyond the traditional and narrow confines of simply containing the power of the state, important though that is.

But I don’t want to simply reflect a worthy political life of high achievement and no light-heartedness. Smuts can be uproariously funny. I leave you with two nuggets I can repeat in public. On the 1996 local government election day in Cape Town, Smuts and I were visiting the Fernwood polling station. Our reception from voters was very muted and Smuts waspishly observed to me: "Ja. You know why those people were looking at their shoes instead of at us?" "No, why?" I responded. "Because they know they should be voting for us, but actually they are going to be voting for someone else."

Around the same time, we were having a tiresome debate in Parliament about the underperformance and maladministration of the Gender Commission — a chapter 9 institution, then, as now, of some constitutional importance but, in practice, of unsurpassed uselessness. The chair of the commission came to Parliament and demanded a larger budget. Smuts’s response was classic: "You don’t need more money; you need a good brain between your ears and a good pen to write with!"

Although we associate her with the southern suburbs and much of her public life has been conducted in English, it is worth recording that she is "’n trotse Vrystater" of origin and her mother tongue is Afrikaans. So allow me to conclude with one of the great poems from the canon of Eugene Marias:

’n Druppel gal is in die soetste wyn;
’n traan is op elk’ vrolik snaar,
In elke lag ’n sug van pyn,
In elke roos ’n dowwe blaar.

• This is an edited version of a speech by Leon at Bishops (Diocesan College) on Sunday night.