Helen Zille is 'fighting back'? I thought the DA banned that phrase

1 December 2014  | Tony Leon | Original Publication: Rand Daily Mail

As the tide of woeful news grows, predictions of a dire future are gaining strength with some notable exceptions

Where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit. It's really quite amazing how the very same set of facts lead to radically different conclusions about what they mean. Take the travails afflicting South Africa at the moment. They make a long and depressing list and you're spoilt for choice on which to highlight.

Our ever-weakening currency - or the country's share price, as it is sometimes termed - has fallen more than 70% against the surging greenback in just over four years. The public service wage bill now gobbles up 42.2% of all government (read taxpayer-funded) expenditure and three million civil servants make the government the biggest single employer in South Africa by far.

Yet, across a swathe of functions, the state is barely functioning, from supplying electricity anywhere to safe drinking water in Gauteng.

 

The flagship national airline is the scene of boardroom battles even as it battles to stay aloft. The South African Post Office cannot deliver letters and even the much-admired South African Revenue Service is mired in allegations that one of its units ran a brothel.

Property rights, one of the key compromises in the constitution, are under threat, and not just from the land grabs by the Economic Freedom Fighters in Pretoria. A flurry of laws are excavating under the foundations so carefully constructed at Kempton Park in the early 1990s.

Our growth rate has dropped from the 5% achieved a decade ago, and the once-mighty tripartite alliance has been rent asunder.

The day after Nelson Mandela died, in December last year, the parliamentary speaker of his time, Dr Frene Ginwala, noted that in place of his normal batik-style shirts, South Africa's first democratically elected president "always wore a suit to parliament as a sign of his respect for the institution". And it wasn't just his sartorial choices that mattered both there and in the courts of law. He arrived, did his duty and even took the occasional judicial and political bullet that went against him.

The scenes of chaos in parliament two weeks ago - especially the fateful decision to send the police into its inner sanctum - show how far we have fallen since then, not least in our own estimation and in the eyes of the world, which has long since moved beyond the "miracle rising" narrative we once gave to a globe in need of heroes.

But is it a tipping point into failed-state status or simply a fork in the road to more competitive politics? Despite its enormous numbers at the moment, is the ANC staring long-term decline square in the face?

Of course, the governing party will reel off a host of statistics, from three-million houses delivered to 16million social grants deposited every month, to justify its claim that life is better today than it ever was.

But even for those sitting far away from government, commentators reading the tea leaves predict different futures. Just last week, two of these scenarios were on offer.

Financial analyst Magnus Heystek read the last rites for the rainbow nation on the back of what he called "jackbooted thugs in the most hallowed halls of democracy". I never thought of my former place of work in such sacrosanct terms. His conclusion set the Twitterati ablaze. Forecasting the demise of offshore investments, Heystek prognosticated that within five years the effects of weakening economic growth and further currency decline will see the "jackbooted bankers" from the Reserve Bank - "overnight and without warning" - switch off the offshore investment tap.

So, if you think your rand-hedged investments are a safe haven, think again, he suggests. He ends his cheery note with this zinger: "There are only two types of ex-Rhodesians in the world. Those who took all their money out of the country and those who wished they had."

DA leader Helen Zille is made of sterner stuff than this "apocalypse just now" scenario. Strangely, she describes herself as "exhilarated" by the recent events inside and outside parliament. She reads into the "deep crisis" in party and state the seeds of a campaign of "fighting back" (long after I thought the phrase was banned by the party) by civil society and through the accumulation of actions and pushback, "a prefect storm for fundamental change".

Her reference point is the Leipzig Moment in East Germany 25 years ago, when the people's demands for reform and freedom became unstoppable and eventually toppled the government and the Berlin Wall.

Of course, a major factor beyond "people power" in that revolution was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's decision not to use force to prop up his satellites. Locally, Marikana suggests that a different scenario could unfold here.

But what certainly links the collapsing Soviet empire with our state, apart from ideological nostalgia, is that when the money runs out, all settled futures become unknowable.

As US scenario consultant Ian Wilson said: "However good our futures research may be, we shall never be able to escape from the ultimate dilemma that all our knowledge is about the past, and all our decisions are about the future."

Perhaps before either packing your bags or at least sending your assets offshore while you can, the more earthy remark of former editor Steve Mulholland might chime with both history and expectation. He said: "Ever since I was five years old, I was always told that South Africa had five years to go before it exploded. Well, I'm 78 and we're both still here."

• 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

The merger that fell victim to vanity and naivety

04 Feb 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

Even before the shortest-lived union in SA’s political history was over, commentators were already suggesting that Mamphela Ramphele is the political equivalent of Zsa Zsa Gabor, writes Tony Leon

LAST WEDNESDAY evening, Cape Town’s Mount Nelson Hotel was the venue for the launch of a homage to the grand dame of South Africa’s old opposition, Helen Suzman.

Agang SA leader Mamphela Ramphele

And the past, present and future leaders of that project were gathered for the event: former president FW de Klerk, Inkatha boss Mangosuthu Buthelezi, this columnist, and the youngest leader of the parliamentary opposition, Lindiwe Mazibuko. But all eyes that night were on two of the speakers, Helen Zille and Mamphela Ramphele, whose political betrothal had been announced just the day before. Within days, they would breathe new life into the cliche, "Marry in haste, repent at leisure."

Robin Renwick’s concise and affectionately penned book, Helen Suzman — Bright Star in a Dark Chamber, relies more on anecdote and research than on critical analysis. The book and the launch speeches dwelt on one part of the Suzman story: the immense reserves of character and conspicuous displays of courage and wit of a parliamentary David, who went up against the Goliath of the apartheid order.

But it leaves unexamined the paradoxical simplicity of that difficult task. Suzman had principle and a righteous cause on her side. She was in opposition to a system that, while popular with white South Africans, was universally opposed by the black majority, much of civil society and most of the world.

In electoral terms, to continue her work, Suzman needed the support of just one constituency out of 166 in white South Africa — Houghton. As I discussed with her daughter, Frances Jowell, after the event, despite the fact that she was certainly the most famous member of her party, she never sought, and in fact resisted, the idea of ever becoming its leader.

As a conviction politician, Suzman’s work was relatively uncontaminated by the messy compromises of party management and the need to expand the base of her movement.

With South Africa’s attention riveted by the off-on-off parachute jump by Ramphele into the top slot of the Democratic Alliance, it is easy to forget quite how unenthusiastic Suzman was every time her beloved Progressive Party felt the need to merge and reinvent itself to meet the expectations of opposition voters, who, then as now, craved the unification of a fractured opposition and the injection of some political glamour to refresh the project.

Renwick’s book does not mention the hostility between Suzman and Harry Schwarz, leader of the Reform Party breakaway from the United Party, which resulted in the Progressive Reform Party, later the Progressive Federal Party. And when that formation had reached its electoral sell-by date, the Democratic Party (DP) was formed in 1989.

Renwick writes, appropriately for a diplomat of long and distinguished standing: "She did not take kindly to suggestions that, to try to widen its appeal, the new entity should try to shed the Progressive Party image of which she was understandably proud."

Actually, when the DP was formed with its ill-conceived troika leadership, she had a much earthier response: "This is the biggest hijack since Entebbe and there are no Jews around to rescue it." When the decision was taken in 2000 to merge the Democratic Party with the New National Party to create the Democratic Alliance, I was the recipient of Suzman’s incandescent fury. She reluctantly accepted the electoral logic of the arrangement, but told me, and then repeated in public, that it should have been a pact, not a full-scale merger. One can only speculate on her reaction to the events of last week.

On hearing the news of Ramphele’s accession into the DA, I thought it tactically smart but strategically questionable. It seemed to breathe excitement and enthusiasm into the opposition ranks.

In the long or even medium term, I thought it bequeathed the opposition with more problems than solutions to the quest for refreshed leadership and policy coherence. And then, even before the shortest-lived political union in South Africa’s political history was over, the controversies erupted. Across the board, commentators and insiders suggested that Ramphele was the political equivalent of Zsa Zsa Gabor. The latter was "famous for being famous", the former for high offices she had achieved rather than any significant achievement in them.

Then came Ramphele’s calamitous weekend interviews, in the Sunday Times and Rapport. In both, she presented herself as a narcissist on steroids. But Zille and the DA leadership had been led to and dropped at the altar by Ramphele once before.

It brings to mind the aphorism: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Surely the key issue was to tie down Ramphele in explicit terms to signing a DA membership form before the announcement? Without that, it’s like selling your home without confirming the price. On the one hand, a fatal combination of vanity and naivety. But, on the other, it is better to cut your losses than to double down on a huge mistake.

• Leon is the author of The Accidental Ambassador (Pan Macmillan). Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

DA at sixes and sevens over racist employment bill

05 Nov 2013 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

In seeking to offer itself as an agent for redress and to attract a new base, the Democratic Alliance is far too scared of having the antitransformation label stuck on it, writes Tony Leon

GEN Colin Powell achieved some notable firsts in a star-spangled career. He was both the first African-American chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff and later secretary of state. He also offered some singular advice for business and political leaders: "Be prepared to be lonely."

I remember feeling quite lonely in Parliament in August 1998, when the Democratic Party and I went against the African National Congress juggernaut and led the opposition to the Employment Equity Bill. That legislation was the first, and by far the most powerful, signal that the nonracial prospectus of the new South Africa would be undercut by the compulsory race classification by "designated employers" of their workforces on pain of criminal sanction for noncompliance. Other than labour minister Tito Mboweni, who did not use racial invective, most of his caucus dismissed our stance as "antitransformation" and worse.

Shortly after the bill’s approval in Parliament, I received a call from the doyenne of the movement which I then led. It was Helen Suzman, never shy about expressing her approval or disapproval — both privately and publicly — for the party that she supported, often critically. This time she was in staunch support of our position and told me that, in her capacity as a member of the South African Human Rights Commission, she had submitted a minority report opposing the bill on exactly the same grounds as I had articulated in Parliament. The legislation was antiinvestment, racially coercive and fundamentally illiberal. She also advised that she intended to go public in her opposition.

As good as her word, a few days later, on September 6 1998, she was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune. One of the questions she was asked, with reference to her close relationship with Nelson Mandela, was why she did not join the African National Congress (ANC). After offering some kind words about the Democratic Party, her answer was very instructive. "I didn’t join the ANC because of its alliance with the Communist Party and because it introduces bills like the Employment Equity Bill. You don’t sacrifice efficiency, competence and merit."

Last Saturday, at a rally, the Democratic Alliance’s (DA’s) premier candidate in Gauteng, Mmusi Maimane, invoked the name of Suzman, alone among a pantheon of former ANC and Pan Africanist Congress leaders he cited with approval. Yet, just a few days before, the DA parliamentary caucus voted in favour of a bill that strengthens and increases the original penalties of the Employment Equity Act. The amending bill widens ministerial discretion, ramps up criminal sanctions for noncompliance and leaves unaltered the compulsory racial classification basis of the legislation.

The crisp question is: why has the party of Suzman embraced the very policies that she in her lifetime so resolutely opposed?

It should be added that a far less consistent (in terms of partisan support rather than any slide away on liberal principles) former leader of the party, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, was even more vehement. In June 2006, he was the keynote speaker at a conference held on "The Revival of Race Classification in Post-Apartheid SA". He offered both a warning and a prescription. On the one hand, he called for South Africa to move away from its "stubborn obsession" with race, and he predicted that "if you make yourself hostage to a racist past, you can bank on a racist future". The intervening years have proven those words eerily prophetic. The solution to the issue of redress, he suggested, was to use the socioeconomic backgrounds of people rather than the blunt instrument of race as the best means of transforming the country. The DA’s flip-flop on employment equity suggests that whatever its other lapses, the ANC now comprehensively dominates the intellectual space and defines terms of the debate within it. This brings to mind an observation of Argentinian strongman Juan Domingo Peron. He said, "Argentinians might belong to different political parties, but at the end of the day we are all Peronists." A weekend DA statement cited no fewer than 10 problems with the legislation which the caucus had just voted in favour of, but added that the party remained committed to the cornerstone of the legislation.

Apparently it will now seek to amend some of its provisions in the National Council of Provinces. This confusing position brings to mind US Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s convulsions in 2004, when he tried to explain how his initial vote in favour of the invasion of Iraq was replaced later by his opposition to the war. "He was in favour of the war before he was against it," his Republican opponents pilloried him. The lesson here is: if you make a mistake, own it.

In seeking to offer itself as an agent for redress and to attract a new base, the DA is far too scared of having the race and antitransformation labels stuck on it. Van Zyl Slabbert offered another warning: "You can never out-Mau Mau the Mau Mau.

• Leon is the author of The Accidental Ambassador (Pan Macmillan). Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pistorius is a metaphor for our own national story

26 Feb 2013 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

Oscar Pistorius’s fall from dizzying heights to the precipice of criminal infamy is a metaphor for our national story, writes Tony Leon

THE late, great South African lawyer, Ernie Wentzel, had an arresting turn of phrase. He opined in 1981 that the problem with being an advocate was that "there are too many magistrates who think they are judges, and some judges who ought to be magistrates".

As I was drawn into the Oscar Pistorius bail hearing, I couldn’t help think that Wentzel’s observation had, happily for our international reputation, been inverted, with the truly magisterial judgment of Desmond Nair in Pretoria on Friday. For all the cruel light the shoddy forensic work of the former investigating officer, Hilton Botha, had shone on the inadequacies of our policing, along came the chief magistrate of Pretoria with a closely reasoned and impeccably researched ruling to repair the battered image of our justice system.

Of much lower media wattage, on the same day as Nair’s ruling, was the decision of the Judicial Service Commission to exclude Jeremy Gauntlett from the Constitutional Court short list yet again. Doubtless, Gauntlett can now reflect on the observation about Oscar Wilde that he "would lose his best friend for an epigram". His witty put-down of Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng along the lines that, unlike the latter, he did not feel that God had called him to judicial service, was not drawn from How to Win Friends and Influence People, the Dale Carnegie bible on getting ahead. It was also strange that while Gauntlett’s intellectual independence is unassailable, his "campaign" for office roped in nominations from opposition leaders Helen Zille and Mangosuthu Buthelezi. I can just imagine how uncomfortable some would have felt had a nominee for judicial office included a nomination from, say, African National Congress secretary-general Gwede Mantashe. Meanwhile, given some of the strange appointments to our bench recently, and some of the more startling omissions from it, Nair should be considered for an early elevation.

But all of this sits low in the cumulus clouds of national and international attention. Pistorius alone inhabits the stratosphere — and the world is drawn in, with voyeuristic fascination, at our home-grown combination of the OJ Simpson trial and the death of Princess Diana. You also cannot but contemplate, as Pistorius moved in less than a year from the pinnacle of Olympic achievement to the pit of the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court, that lurking inside his fall from a great and dizzying height to the precipice of criminal infamy is, less dramatically as well, a sort of metaphor for our national story.

Last weekend, I completed a fellowship in the heady atmosphere of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, one of SA’s most impressive (and most hidden) centres of thought excellence. Among a firmament of academic stars in residence was Prof Bo Rothstein of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is an international expert on "the quality of governance" and its baleful twin, corruption. He disarmingly put it: "I don’t have expertise about the South African situation, but I can say that the quality of governance and the absence of corruption in certain African countries are higher than it is in countries like Greece and Italy."

He recounted at a seminar that a US student had expressed surprise that a Scandinavian studying corruption was akin to a "nun running a strip club". However, the observation he did offer about our national projection abroad, a la the morphing of Pistorius from hero to zero, is that there has been a steady depletion of SA’s moral capital in the world. He noted that, like a successful corporation, if a country has prodigious amounts of what Harvard professor Joseph Nye termed "soft power" — or the power of its example rather than the hard stuff, such as the example of its power — then "you should be careful not to diminish it". And we certainly have fallen hard in recent times.

Rothstein has certainly not studied our National Development Plan (NDP) and doubtless ministers Lindiwe Sisulu and Trevor Manuel, who last week championed its key recommendation of creating (after 20 locust years) a professional, corruption-free public service, are unaware of Rothstein’s presence in SA. But the three of them are actually in agreement. And so is the NDP.

Rothstein cites the example of that most life-essential delivery of all, the provision of drinkable water. He notes: "A conservative estimate is that 14,000 people die every day in the developing world from water- and sanitation-related illnesses." Yet the shortage here is neither an absence of engineering technical solutions, but rather corruption and "other forms of bad governance".

Given that the Pistorius case sucked up most of the media oxygen, President Jacob Zuma’s announcement that the NDP will now be front and centre of all government policy-making received little attention. But if this wish translates into real reforms, then we could climb slowly again up the summit of achievement and admiration.

• Follow Tony Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA

The key dilemma facing the DA

23 Jan 2013 | Tony Leon | Original Publication: BDlive

Former party leader says challenge is to grow into new markets while retaining faith with core values and old voters

Remarks of Tony Leon to the Democratic Alliance Sandton, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Rosebank, Johannesburg, January 23 2013

"Opposition Then and Now"

I have not sought specifically in interviews, writings or speeches since my return to this country last October to assess the general prospects and future of opposition in this country, and specifically the role and outlook for the Democratic Alliance (DA), which party I led for seven of its twelve year existence.

However, since this is the first DA platform I am speaking on since arriving back from Argentina last year, it seems appropriate to offer some observations and even pre-empt some of the questions which will arise in a forum such as the one you have convened for me to address this evening.

The other day that enfant terrible of our politics, Julius Malema bewailed his current isolation in the political wilderness, noting that ‘his friends had deserted him in droves.' I was tempted to suggest that he remember the wise words of President Harry Truman, "If you want a friend in politics, get a dog." But then fairly recently our President apparently suggested that dog-loving is UnAfrican, so perhaps that is not such a good idea.

I am always wary when people use ‘culture' as either a club or a shield- whether to justify rent-seeking riches or to denigrate minorities - since part of the founding settlement of our democracy was specifically to champion and celebrate and protect multi-culturalism and the individual choice to adopt as many cultural identities and practices as consistent with the injunction of ‘do no harm to others.'

On the subject of friendship, I am pleased to recognize old political comrades here this evening and to have retained many old associations in this Party, and perhaps more significantly to note how many more people and new leaders have emerged in it since I left active party politics on stepping down from Parliament in 2009.

Someone defined ‘'leadership success" as the "success of the leader's successors". On that definition, and looking at the current track record and trajectory, I suppose that my many years leading this party and its predecessor could be termed "successful."

I am also mindful of Queen Elizabeth's injunction that "distance lends enchantment." Four years outside the clashing conflicts of party and parliamentary combat and three years away from South Africa does lend both physical distance and subjective perspective which can be refreshing and clarifying.

With this as background, allow me to make the following brief observations of the political and opposition terrain I had to navigate during my time at the helm and the opportunities and dilemmas I think you confront tonight and in the years ahead:

On Saturday week, 2 February, we will note the twenty third anniversary of the famous speech of FW De Klerk in Parliament, which was in political terms of such thermo-nuclear intensity, that we are still living with its after effects today.

One of the lesser consequences of that event was that it blind-sided the liberal opposition Democratic Party, among whose new members of parliament I was at the time, the freshly elected MP for Houghton. In essence, the conservative president of the country and leader of its National Party, in one swoop, appropriated most of the platform and manifesto of our party.

Although the DP during the negotiations' process inaugurated by that speech played a significant, at times, disproportionate role, in truth when the ANC and the NP commenced negotiations, we had a bad seat at the table and a difficult set of cards to play.

This positioning was well summed up by the then ANC chief constitutional negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa, who defined the "sufficient consensus" - which Codesa required to reach its decisions - with breathtaking candour: "Sufficient consensus means that when the ANC and NP have agreed to something, the rest of the parties can get stuffed."

Outside the negotiations' process the DP had a torrid time of it. The party couldn't decide whether it should accommodate itself in the slipstream of the ANC (as some of its defecting members decided to do); seek common cause with, and the protection of, the NP (as most of its voters decided to do in the 1994 election); or soldier on alone.

The majority of the party and its leadership decided to hew an independent liberal course, more out of duty to its principles than out of any expectation of electoral reward. In the event, the results of the election -a triumph for the country and a disaster for the party - were pretty well pre-ordained before the first ballot was cast on 27 April 1994.

Although I was not the party leader at the time, I was pretty much its chief campaigner around the country. And when we could get a hearing at all (most of our meetings in townships and on university campuses were either broken up by ANC rowdies or ignored, although we had more success in the suburbs), few voters believed in the message that, in an election based on proportional representation, the quality of the parliamentary representative and the purity of the party cause trumped considerations of size and history.

In the aftermath of being sent to the new national assembly and constituent assembly with just 7 (out of 400) MPs, a major rethink was required. It was clear that if the party continued along the road it had trod for the previous thirty five years of existence it was headed for the scree slope of oblivion.

I was elected leader of this unhappy and uncertain band. I subsequently wrote that being leader back then was like being given a poisoned chalice. I ruefully noted (in a borrowed phrase) that "at times it tasted like something rustled up by Lucrezia Borgia on one of her more vengeful days." But the one advantage of having few expectations to meet (in truth, most of the media, many of our historic backers and the majority of our  traditional -read English speaking, white and suburban -  voters had written us off) is that you can define your own agenda and determine your tactics after fashioning a strategy without the burden of expectation.

The downside is, of course, relevance: projecting yourself onto a political radar already crowded by the height and glory of the presidency of Nelson Mandela and the weight of the National Party opposition (then consisting of 82 MPs in the National Assembly, more members incidentally than the DP has today) and its dual role alongside Mangosuthu Buthelezi's IFP of power sharing in central government, while each of those parties controlled one province as well, was a difficult task.

This seemed very unpromising terrain on which to rebuild a small party and make it fit for purpose for the newly democratic South Africa. However, amid obvious and objective weaknesses, we had certain strengths which we maximized with vigour and determination: since 94% of parliamentarians were in parties serving in the government of national unity, the opposition terrain was more or less open to us.

Thus our small band, of mostly experienced parliamentarians used the platform of parliament, and the crisis of legitimacy affecting the National Party, to broadcast our message of good governance and answerability, adherence to rule of law principles and the advancement of market-friendly, growth-promoting economics.

With a great deal of hard work and not without controversy (the attraction of some leading and defecting NP members and the "fight back" campaign among others) we were well positioned for the next election. It is also true, that notwithstanding some blind spots of his own, Nelson Mandela's personality and presidency encouraged and gave recognition to the opposition role played by the Democratic Party.

Shortly after our relatively stunning success in the 1999 election (we increased our voting share by over seven fold and added 31 new MPs to our team and went from being the seventh largest party to becoming the second largest and with it the title of "official opposition") we soon faced an important fork in the road. In the Western Cape, where the ANC had achieved the largest share of the vote, slightly ahead of the NP, we held the balance of power in that province, the only one where the NP, due its retention of Coloured support, beat us.

Notwithstanding our explicit pre-election commitment to forming opposition alliances to hold down the power of the ANC, I was placed under enormous pressure by some of our donors, many independent commentators, and most of the media (who in turn were under pressure from a victorious and very assertive ANC) to do a deal with the ANC and deliver the province to their control, with our party as junior governing partner.

Having two years before, resisted the tempting offer of Nelson Mandela to enter his government, I found the pressure significant, but the suggestion easy to rebut: we had promised the voters strong opposition and we could hardly deliver on this claim by essentially closing down, or significantly compromising, the independent opposition role the voters had entrusted us with.

Thus the deal was made with the NP. Under it, Helen Zille and others achieved provincial ministries and we found ourselves sharing power with a party we disliked, but with our strategic project intact (consolidating the highly fragmented opposition and establishing a governing bulwark against the increasingly hegemonic ANC, then rapidly consolidating its power over the rest of society).

We were able within a year of that coalition to formalize our arrangement - under our leadership and based on our core principles - by forming the Democratic Alliance. By December 2000, the party achieved over 23% of the vote in the national local government elections -a result which took a further eleven years to replicate in the 2011 local government elections.

Of course, what followed was a very rough ride and I will spare you the agonizing details of the immediate period which followed the formation of this party - a history of splits and schisms, bad faith and floor crossing. However, the party that stands today is the inheritor of those early and difficult decisions.

It was in the period of the NNP desertion to the ANC (2001-2004) that the DA faced its most fraught challenges. We were the largest opposition party, but the very space which opposition claimed for itself and which the constitution demarcated was under enormous challenge.

I dubbed this phase "the closing of the open society". Although we identified the "open and opportunity society" as the summary of our policy and positioning, in truth at the height of the Mbeki presidency there were few takers for this position in wider society.

The press, with a few honourable exceptions, had been suborned by the government agenda, and with the exception of the government policy on HIV-AIDS, few leaders and organisations in civil society wished to pick a fight with the ruling party.

Within the opposition itself, parties outside the DA such as the NNP, ID, IFP found it easier to accommodate themselves within the paradigm, if not the formal membership, of the governing ideology. We had a bigger reach than ever before, but getting our message across - and even the concept of robust opposition recognized -had a hard swim in such murky waters.

The winning of the Cape Town municipality and the installation of Helen Zille as its mayor (in the teeth of a virulent campaign against us by the ANC with a co-opted ID at its side), once again as a result of intricate coalition building, turned the tide.

But by then the tide was turning against President Mbeki himself - and the once unified and mighty ANC was starting to divide, a process which reached its culmination in Polokwane in 2007, when Jacob Zuma ousted him as party president.

The very disunity which had so characterized the opposition had now swept right past it into the chambers of the ruling party itself. The elemental forces which toppled Mbeki, like the proverbial genie which could never be put back in the bottle, also released into society and the media a renewed vitality and vigour.

The "trust in government and respect the president "approach, on the back of this event and the multiplying corruption and misgovernance scandals, was fast disappearing from the public space. Against this background, the DA, with refreshed and credible new leadership, performed admirably in the 2009 election and probably might have done even better were it not for the emergence of COPE from the factionalised ANC.

Opposition Today

I have summarized this immediate past history, not to take you on a retro-tour through the DA museum, but to point out that the concept and even he continuance of real opposition in the past twenty years of South African history was by no means a sure thing. There were challenges and obstacles strewn in our path (and doubtless we placed some there ourselves). And the success of the opposition project was the result, at strategic and difficult moments, of making some hard choices and explicit decisions.

Of course the platform you bestride tonight is bigger than the one I and my colleagues stood on. It is also true that, three presidents later and after nearly two decades in power, the ANC has shed  a great deal of the moral armour which Nelson Mandela clothed around his organization back in 1994.

And although the overall opposition strength today is slightly less than it was back then (when two provinces were outside ANC control), the opposition terrain today incontestably belongs to the DA and the wind seems set fair for a resounding electoral performance next year.  

Perhaps because I am no longer directly involved in the affairs of the DA, and with the benefit of some distance from the demands of party and leadership offices, I can signpost some of the challenges which you face today.

I do so in the certain knowledge that meeting these opportunities (and some of the risks implicit in them) which you confront will be quite as decisive for the future of the country as the ones which I had to deal with were determinative for the opposition. Here is my selection of some key areas:

The core constituency (minorities) of the party is diminishing. The last election revealed that the DA has unchallenged support among minority voters; the last census showed that this is a reducing bloc of supporters.

The key dilemma (and it is not new, incidentally, only more urgent) is how to grow the party in a new market (where the majority lives and votes) while retaining faith with core values and old voters.

The latter is less of an issue than the former, since the opposition space is overwhelmingly occupied by this party and there are no identifiable and credible challengers for it. And the argument that liberal ideas and policies are somehow a "whites' only" proposition is nonsense.

But in order to attract more votes from black South Africans the party has to close the distance between itself and the majority, something which has far more to do with tone, familiarity, identity and other intangibles and less to do with objective policy propositions. But there will be a temptation to soft-pedal certain propositions in order not to scare off new potential voters.

"Culture" incidentally is political quicksand. I remember how when the NNP leadership could find no other issue to divide the early and fragile DA, they always hoisted up the fig leaf of "cultural differences and insensitivity" to sow dissension and distrust.

If I were the current DA leadership, for example, I would not get into a bargain of "Africaness" et al. Make your point and move on.

This leads ineluctably to the second challenge: can the DA retain its traditional identity with core values -from market economic sensibility to non-racial preferment to mention two obvious ones - and attract new supporters?

In other words, as the number of supporters and voters increase is there an automatic blurring of vision and values? Can you have both or do you have to make a choice.

I would hazard a view that two things are profoundly important for this country's democratic health going forward:

The first is more competitive politics which means, simply, a larger opposition and a smaller governing party. The second, which is more complicated, is to provide not just another version of the ruling party, but a clear alternative. This entails putting forward a distinct vision, other and better policies, and offering something beyond just "the ANC minus corruption and with good delivery."

The DA cannot be just a patronage machine providing a "catch all" message, and scooping up every shade of disaffected government supporter-from alienated Marxists to losers in the government procurement stakes.

Obviously politics is crucially about numbers. But as the party grows and as some outsize personalities, some carrying a great deal of baggage around with them indeed, are attracted to its ranks, just be sure that the welcome mat is also marked with some clear red lines which new and old recruits only cross at their peril.

I am sure that in facing and responding to these challenges, and the many others which will face you on the road going forward, you will understand quite how important it is for our country, and the wider world which still holds faith in our cause, for the future mission of the opposition to be crowned with success.

 

Resolve opposition’s dilemma for the good of SA

23 Oct 2012 | Tony Leon | Original Publication: BDlive

When former president Thabo Mbeki decided the destruction of the DA was a political priority, he appointed Mosiuoa Lekota as his hit man, writes Tony Leon

WHEREVER in the world former Sasol and Anglo American CEOs Pieter Cox and Tony Trahar are these days, last week’s speech by erstwhile president Thabo Mbeki must have caused them to smile at the irony of it all.

In 2003, both men were at the receiving end of Mbeki’s invective when they said, respectively, that black economic empowerment was a "risk factor" and that the risk factor for South Africa was "starting to diminish, although I am not saying it has gone".

Mbeki accused Sasol of "bad-mouthing South Africa" and suggested that Trahar’s stance amounted to Anglo suggesting that "democratic South Africa presents the business world … with a higher political risk than apartheid South Africa".

What a difference nine years and loss of office makes. In his African National Congress (ANC) centenary lecture last week, Mbeki joined the doomsday chorus in far more direct and stark terms than these corporate titans ever did. He spoke of South Africa being afloat on a sea of troubles, characterised by "a dangerous and unacceptable situation of directionless and unguided national drift".

Mbeki is hardly alone as a latter-day canary-in-the-coal-mine warning of the noxious gases that threaten to engulf the country. The Economist, which recently upgraded Africa from "hopeless" to "hopeful", decided, also last week and after two sovereign credit downgrades, that South Africa was sliding downward toward "sad country" status. Embedded in the article is a central truth: South Africa — at the most recent general election, the spread between the governing party and the official opposition was more than 40 points — is "a de facto one-party state".

I recently noted that it is difficult to establish a real and competitive democracy (and the first adjective is conditioned by the second) on the back of such a huge deficit, especially since our much admired constitution is noticeably weak in its checks and curbs on a super-majority government. Thus the motivating spirit and finer detail of the constitution can be ignored and bypassed by the government for the simplest of reasons: because they can be.

In this context, the recent call by Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Helen Zille for a realigned and larger opposition is both politically and constitutionally necessary. But as someone who still bears the scars from the last large-scale opposition merger a decade ago, I can attest that it will not be easy.

The only party with which the DA appears to be engaged in serious discussion toward this end is the much diminished Congress of the People, which, because of the 2009 election results and despite its self-destructiveness since then, remains the second-largest opposition force in Parliament, led by Mosiuoa Lekota.

There is deep irony at play here too. Mbeki decided the destruction of the DA was a political priority, he appointed as his hit man the national chairman of the ANC — Lekota. Thus it was that Lekota, with the carrot of floor-crossing and the promise of the Western Cape premiership, tempted Marthinus van Schalkwyk to lead his New National Party rump out of the DA and into the fatal embrace of the ANC.

Four years later, when parliamentary floor-crossing, which probably did more injury to democratic deepening than many other constitutional predations before or since, was at its height, the same Lekota set about personally luring DA members across the parliamentary aisle. In one case, he even offered DA MP Rafeek Shah a "deputy ministry". When I exposed the offer, which Shah informed me of and commendably declined, Lekota telephoned me to tell me "it was only a joke". Presumably, these days Lekota is more seriously engaged in helping to broaden an opposition he once so assiduously attempted to destroy.

From the’s DA perspective, demographics represents political destiny. In last year’s municipal elections, the party’s improved performance in reaching about 24% of the vote was hailed as scaling new electoral heights and proof that the party had, at last, established a small base among black voters. Actually, only the latter but crucially important fact was new. In 2000, shortly after the formation of the DA, the party notched up more than 23% of the national municipal vote. The reason for the standstill in its total over the past decade has not been because of a failure to obtain black votes but because of the rapid decline, demographically, in its core minority — especially its white — base.

Increasing its size remains the vital and unfinished task for opposition leadership. This is a proposition about numbers. But there is another equally compelling dilemma: how to do so and retain ideological and policy coherence and not reduce the clear blue water that separates, or should divide, the opposition and the government.

On squaring this circle, not just the fortunes of the opposition but the constitutional good health of the country depends.

• Follow Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA

Opposition must take on Government

11 Oct 2012 | Sue Segar | Original Publication: Cape Times

Former DA leader backs united opposition

11 Oct 2012 | Original Publication: BDlive
Opinion By Bekezela Phakathi

But Tony Leon also warns that a grand alliance has its drawbacks

FORMER Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon on Wednesday backed calls by the party’s incumbent head, Helen Zille, for opposition parties to unite. However, he warned that a grand alliance had its drawbacks.

Mr Leon said joining forces with other parties could alienate some of the DA’s core supporters.

Ms Zille last month called for the "realignment" of South African politics in a bid to create one large political movement to challenge the ruling African National Congress (ANC). The DA hopes to unseat the ruling party by 2019 — not necessarily on its own, but most likely as part of a coalition.

The party has already joined forces with Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats.

Mr Leon said there was a need for political leaders to have a conversation with the electorate and present them with choices. "If you want to create a bigger party by merging everyone together, that has its own consequences.

"If you create a party that is very strong on values then you might (lose) some of the allies you want to go on with. Nick Clegg got to be deputy prime minister in the (UK) but as far as his voters are concerned he sold them out.

"There are a lot of people who vote for the DA for reasons of belief, ideology and identity — you cannot take them for granted. Equally, the voters and supporters of other parties (do the same).

"The DA has got to do the whole thing (work with other opposition parties); we did it once before (otherwise) the DA would not have governed the Western Cape."

Mr Leon said the real reason the DA governed the Western Cape was because of the coloured vote. Most coloured voters found a political home with the New National Party, which was in coalition with the DA.

"I have got the scars on my back; between 2000 and 2006, we took enormous amount of punishment to create an effective governing party that could govern Cape Town in 2006 and the Western Cape in 2009," Mr Leon said.

The New National Party was in a short-lived alliance with the DA that ended in 2001.

Mr Leon further said that the DA continued to grow and its "diverse leadership" was only good for the party.

The DA has been on a drive to attract more black vote s and some analysts believe that the election last year of Lindiwe Mazibuko as parliamentary leader could give the party "black appeal".

In addition, the appointment of Mmusi Maimane also last year as party spokesman was seen as an attempt to promote more black leaders in the party.

On Wednesday, the party’s youth leader, Makashule Gana, said he would accept the nomination for the position of federal council deputy chairman. "If I am elected, I would like to use this position to strengthen our presence on the ground. I believe I will do well ," he said.

The DA is due to have its national conference next month.

Mr Leon recently returned to the country from Argentina where he had been the South African ambassador since 2009.