Not our darkest moment but an ominous forewarning

16 Feb 2015 | Tony Leon | Original Publication: Business Day

Julius Malema has chosen to participate in Parliament, yet regards himself unbound by its rules and precedents, writes Tony Leon

THURSDAY night’s debacle in Parliament reminded me of a spectacularly bad football match. Instead of focusing on the man with the ball, the spectators’ attention pivots to the activities away from the centrepiece — the offside players, the deliberate fouls, the baying crowd and the biased referee.

Indeed, even before play commenced for the state of the nation address, the police water-cannoning of opposition supporters outside Parliament and arrest of an opposition MP salted the clues for what was to follow. Never mind the fist in the velvet glove, the country and the world would soon see just the unfurled fist.

Stripped of subtlety, South African Communist Party boss and Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande announced after the melee of storming policemen and injured MPs, his fist apparently hitting his palm: "We had to show them who is in charge." And so you did, Blade, so you did.

Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema. Picture: PETER MOGAKI

Indeed, the government’s enchantment, or the enthusiastic security cohort within it, for all things Chinese was also on display. "The great firewall of China" — historian Niall Ferguson’s slogan for the communist government’s blocking of unwanted social media — also descended briefly on Parliament.

Persons unknown — but one can hazard a guess — jammed cellphone signals out of the National Assembly. In one of the few clear goals scored by the opposition on Thursday night, and not on offer in China, Democratic Alliance chief whip John Steenhuizen invoked the constitution to persuade the speaker to restore it.

A decade or so ago, the opposition which I then led and the government of Zuma’s predecessor actually had a debate of sorts, without assistance from the police. I used the reversible raincoat rhetoric which seemed apt for such sonorous events as the state of the nation debate. "There’s nothing wrong with the nation," I declaimed. "It’s the state that’s the problem." Both before, and especially after, last Thursday both seem to be in crisis. But how deep is the crisis and what does it tell us, to borrow Will Hutton’s title of a book of his, "the state that we’re in"?

The day after the address I received a call from former newspaper editor Tim du Plessis, a thoughtful veteran of our tumultuous past 30 years of history-in-the-making. After agreeing that the last rites being read by some for our fledgling democracy were a mite premature, he reminded me of a brutal page from our recent past. It was in that most fateful of years, 1993, between the assassination of Chris Hani in April and the finalisation of the interim constitution in November. One June morning at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park, the buffoonish but sinister Eugene Terre’Blanche and his Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) right-wing forces invaded the talks venue with an armoured car and men on horseback. The latter-day burghers succeeded in smashing part of the glazed façade of the conference centre, and, for a while, took charge as delegates scurried to safety.

Du Plessis noted that, on that afternoon, everything seemed far more at risk than it did after last Thursday night. I then remembered that my late predecessor, Zach de Beer, told our delegates’ group that he doubted "whether even the Archangel Gabriel, were he to descend among us, could reason and restore peace between the government and its right-wing foes".

In far more earthly and recent form than the archangel, the country noted the failure of Pastor Ray McCauley to repair relations between the African National Congress and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose tactics bear more than a passing resemblance to the fascists of the AWB.

Of course, history now records that, as with other right-wing ruses of that time, the sound and fury and the real fear invoked by them did little to retard the momentum of the process they tried in vain to stop.

But there are other big differences between then and now, which offer a less reassuring prospect for the future. First, there is the biggest disrupter of all, Julius Malema and his EFF. Business thought leader Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School has written an entire book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, on the power of disruption. Or, how bad and cheap products can usurp long-settled brands and market leaders. One example he cites is how in the 1950s, the cheap and tinny and initially bad-quality Japanese transistor radio in short time overwhelmed the established radiograms of my grandmother’s era, which would soon disappear entirely from the shelves.

In some ways, the EFF is a classic disrupter. But unlike the AWB, Malema has chosen to participate in Parliament, yet appears to regard himself unbound by its rules, conventions and precedents. Strip away, for a moment, Zuma’s ducking and diving on the Nkandla questions and the shield offered to him by speaker Baleka Mbete and the way she puts the opposition to the sword. How should Malema’s disruptions be dealt with in a parliamentary democracy, where the rules of robust engagement are not a licence to pillage parliamentary privilege and bring down the House?

Presumably, and perhaps fatefully, the speaker and her party colleagues decided to confuse means and ends. Parliament and the people who elect it are indeed entitled to demand proper debate and not the one-trick-pony antics of serial disrupters. But when armed heavies, signal jamming and the full apparatus of the PW Botha iron fist are unleashed, then it may be said that they "destroy better than they know".

Or perhaps they — the current rulers — know only too well and simply do not care, which brings us to the second fork in the road set out at Kempton Park in 1993. Although the parliamentary building, even the Tuynhuys presidential office next door, were designed to the architectural specifications of PW Botha, the democratic furniture of our new order was cut from new and radically different cloth. We were meant, among other things, to replace the culture of authority with that of persuasion; democracy in place of brute force. Yet what was unveiled on Thursday night was far too reminiscent of the old era and seemed to bury the new.

But one group of people who have powers in the new era they never possessed in the old is the judiciary. Conspicuously, as armed police entered the chamber, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng exited it. One of the judges president present was also reported as shouting at a policeman: "If you’re armed you had better get out of here." The chastened policeman duly left. In such small events we can derive some comfort.

Perhaps even more extraordinary was the very public demand of Malema that he be treated as a liberal. He demanded of the speaker that she judge his MPs and their behaviour as "individuals and not as a collective". Hugo Chavez, his late inspiration, must be spinning in his grave.

Finally, what of the player at the centre of it all? When Zuma finally rose to speak, he faced an open goal, after so many on his side had netted own goals. Doctors are confronted with a trick question during training: "What treatment is offered by ear in an emergency?" The correct answer is, "words of comfort".

Zuma’s nation had watched the spectacle before he spoke, dismayed and appalled. He would have scored big had he even alluded to it and, as the man at the apex of our now damaged democracy, offered words of comfort, reassurance and repaired the breach. But he laughed and said not a word about it.

 

 

What Julius Malema and Nigel Farage have in common

Tony Leon | 03 December 2014 | Original Publication:  Rand Daily Mail

They have mastered the shock tactics that keep them in the limelight

AT FIRST blush these two politicians have absolutely nothing in common.

The one is a sleek, silk-suited former city banker who quaffs a pint and proclaims the virtues of “little England”. Many of his supporters are fuelled by an anti-immigration anger which resonates with fed-up white voters.

The other is rotund, wears red overalls, has had no career outside of politics and wants “our mines back”. He is supported by marginalised poor black voters, many of whom would be delighted to see the back of the whites who “stole our land”.

But at second glance, both Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, and Julius Malema, boss of the Economic Freedom Fighters, have far more in common than either might admit, even though they have never met each other.

Welcome to the world of populist “anti-politics” which has taken centre stage in Britain, across Europe and is now firmly planted on our own shores as well.

It provides the rocket fuel for seething electoral discontent both here and abroad and makes the prediction of future election outcomes a mug’s game. Both parties have also shaken the very foundations of the political establishment.

They have forced the traditional parties to switch tactics and strategies, and sometimes junk entire policies to meet this new challenge to the political order.

 I arrived for a recent visit to London the day after Farage’s candidate  in Rochester and Strood, Mark Reckless,  had won the second by-election in a row for the surging insurgent party.

This was after Prime Minister David Cameron had boasted that his Conservative Party, from which Reckless had defected, would “kick his fat arse out of Westminster”. Well, he certainly didn’t do that.

The Conservatives were saved from complete ignominy only by the Twitter activity of Labour MP Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney general. She had  tweeted a photo, without any adverse comment, of a house in the constituency on by-election day, draped in St George’s flags and with a white panel van in the drive.

In an uncomfortable echo of the Twitter storm here caused by Steve Hofmeyr’s silly comment and the Helen Zille “refugee” tweet, the Labour lady was denounced as a “snob”.

She was all the proof needed that the Labour Party was “out of touch with patriotic working class voters”, and  that the one-time champions of the proletariat were led by a “metropolitan elite”. 

Just to ensure that this narrative remained dominant,  Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, who resembles a dithering geek and goes from one stumble to another like Mr Bean on a bad day, fired her from her post.

The UK Independence Party  has the ability now, with Scottish Nationalists and even the limping Liberal Democrats (who managed their worst performance yet in the same by-election, netting less than 1% of the vote) and the Greens  to prevent either main party from winning and to require a three- or even four-party coalition to govern after next year’s election.

Back home, the EFF has mastered the tactics of parliamentary shock to such an extent that it has left the ANC flat-footed and caused the DA to change its normal parliamentary procedures to appear  more aggressive and nasty.

We have yet to see what impact the EFF’s media dominance has had on electoral outcomes, but the 2016 local government elections will provide some clues and some big dilemmas.

DA leader Zille noted  that based on the results of this year’s national election, the ANC is already below 50% in Port Elizabeth and Tshwane and hovers just over that in Johannesburg.

Having already lost heavily in Cape Town, Durban is the only major metropole that remains firmly within the ruling party’s grasp.

Given lower voter turnouts in local elections, it is quite conceivable  the ANC could lose out in four of the five largest cities. At least, that’s the theory.

Like in Britain, the moment you chose a coalition partner, the real problems start.

In the UK, the Liberal Democrats were once the party of the protest vote, but also a party of the centre left.  But when they formed a coalition with the centre-right Conservatives in 2010, they lost the bulk of their voters, hence their terrible result in Rochester and Strood.

 So with whom does the DA form a collation?

In all the hotly contested metros here, the EFF will hold the balance of power between the ANC and DA. Yet how could the party of middle-class propertied interests (the DA) form a local government with a party which has declared war on both this class and its interests (EFF)? For the ANC, the dilemma is just as great. With whom to govern: EFF or DA? And this for the ruling party is, in the phrase of international diplomacy, the “land of lousy options and outcomes”.

Meanwhile, for the insurgents in both the United Kingdom  and South Africa, the power of disruption forces opponents onto terrain that is both uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

Welcome to the world of “anti politics”. Its arrival has meant that for the next while,  certain outcomes and “politics as usual” are a thing of the past.

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

 

 

DA faces ANC in a changed environment

21 Jan 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

It was the events around and after the memorial service and funeral for former president Nelson Mandela that revealed a changed reality in South Africa, writes Tony Leon

ENGLISH soccer great Gary Lineker once observed that "football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and, at the end, the Germans always win."

Give or take the ascendancy of Spain and one or two others in soccer, this seems to be a handy user’s guide for watching the unfolding general election campaign in South Africa, and predicting its final outcome.

In horse-racing terms, the African National Congress (ANC) is a dead cert to win nationally, and odds-on favourite to retain its grip on eight of nine provinces.

Gauteng has been put in play through a combination of factors — a fractious ruling party, extremely unpopular e-tolls and spiralling delivery failures, and the energetic and fresh-faced campaign of the Democratic Alliance’s (DA’s) top candidate, Mmusi Maimane. But even Maimane, the new hope for the opposition, perhaps realises how long the odds are in reality.

In the previous provincial poll in 2009, the ANC obtained 63.99% of the vote, a shade higher than it achieved in the home province of President Jacob Zuma in KwaZulu-Natal.

Even dreams of the opposition combining to force the ANC below 50% in Gauteng must yield to the reality that as far as co-operation between, for example, the DA and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) goes, there is, as the meretricious Julius Malema would say, "no way, Madam". Perhaps this caution explains why Maimane himself has apparently taken a two-way bet on the outcome and reserved a place for himself on the DA’s list for Parliament as a form of electoral insurance.

But, of course, beneath the predicted headline outcome, a great deal of the small print in the results will also set the course of our political economy for years to come.

It was the events around and after the memorial service and funeral last month for former president Nelson Mandela that revealed a changed reality in South Africa.

There is no doubt that, in life, Mandela had a significant regard for Zuma.

Back in September 2002, when Zuma was still deputy president and had been obliged by the guardians around President Thabo Mbeki to issue a statement saying he had no ambition to become president, Mandela told me — and doubtless others: "JZ is the key man in the party and the movement."

I thought at the time that this showed the great Madiba to be startlingly out of touch with the national zeitgeist.

Events proved just how canny the old man actually was.

Even in death, Mandela’s touch seemed to advance Zuma further.

On December 5 last year, the ANC was due to commence a difficult national executive meeting at the very moment when Nkandla and the serial scandals around it were raising serious internal questions about the party’s president. Mandela’s passing rewrote the timetable.

It was also a moment for the country and the world to perhaps embrace the leader who stood in Mandela’s stead.

But as The Economist noted, even before the cascade of debacles at the FNB Stadium: "Without the protection of Mandela’s saintly aura" the ruling party and its leaders "will be more harshly judged".

Just how quickly the mantle proved to be nontransferable was revealed when sections of the crowd at the FNB Stadium booed the president, a moment of exquisite personal embarrassment and national shame.

But it might be of (cold) comfort for the president to know that he is not alone in this unhappy league.

I witnessed then-Australian prime minister John Howard being raucously jeered at a packed rugby stadium in Sydney, in September 2001, at the Bledisloe Cup rugby grand finale.

Tony Blair was roundly booed by 10,000 people at a women’s institute conference in London in 2000.

Although neither of them then used national security agents to filter future crowds, both Howard and Blair went on to win hefty majorities at the next elections.

By our standards of glorifying regnant leaders, the FNB Stadium wake-up call signalled the arrival of more normal and less deified politics on our shores.

Barely had Mandela been laid to rest in Qunu than the ANC’s most powerful trade union partner, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, chose to announce its disaffiliation from the ruling party.

The iron unity of old is now more of a circular firing squad.

All this uncivil chatter and churn leads to the central question that remains unresolved: will the ANC be returned with a total greater or less than 60%?

More on this, anon.

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

 

Warriors for race and the socialism of fools

22 Oct 2013 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

PW Botha has a latter-day provincial and tactical successor in the form of Marius Fransman, Western Cape leader of the ANC and a ‘warrior for race’, writes Tony Leon

IN NOVEMBER 2004, I was in New York City the day after President George Bush had won re-election against the odds. Until the day before, the liberal New York Times had been reporting on the multiplicity of factors that favoured his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. They were spoilt for choice between the invasion of Iraq on a false prospectus, a cratering economy and a ballooning budget deficit.

However, the day after Bush won, its columnist, Nicholas Kristof, posed the question: "How was it," he asked, that "unemployed waitresses in Ohio stood in line to vote for tax breaks for billionaires?" For the essence of the Republican economic offering back then — in contrast to its even more hara-kiri tactics today — was a version of "trickle-down economics". Bush had presided over the largest modern tax cut for the seriously rich which, his party suggested, would spur economic activity down the income chain. The increasing number of unemployed and underemployed Americans, including Kristof’s waitresses, suggested otherwise. But many of them, apparently, voted for the architect of their immiseration.

Kristof answered the question by suggesting that the Republicans had borrowed a stratagem first defined, ironically, by the father of false consciousness, Karl Marx: ignore class interests and mobilise people along the lines of values. In that election, by concentrating attention on "God, Gays and Guns", Bush had mobilised support from sections of the population most adversely affected by his economic prescriptions, but whose social views he best articulated.

Locally, the indifferent performance of the African Christian Democratic Party suggests there is no electoral profit in values. But South Africa provides generous returns for race mobilisation. It was ever thus, as countless white elections have proved. And when the war between the then two largest white parties in the 1970s — the National Party (NP) and the United Party (UP) — reached saturation point, the NP Cape leader of the day, PW Botha, found another variant on the theme in a 1972 by-election in Oudtshoorn. He accused the UP of the additional sin of being "Boere-haters". His party’s results improved.

Botha has a latter-day provincial and tactical successor in the form of Marius Fransman, Western Cape leader of the African National Congress. Last week, he claimed that 98% of land and property owners in Cape Town were not only "white" but, in particular, "Jewish". Doubtless Fransman has never heard of the 19th-century German Marxist thinker, August Bebel, who warned that left-wing anti-Semitism was "the socialism of fools". And as to the facts, Fransman could not explain how he knew the racial or religious origins of local landowners, as the former have been expunged from the deeds registry since 1994, and even the benighted apartheid regime did not require the religious identity of property owners to be declared. Anyway, the fires of prejudice and the embers of resentment are always better stoked by anecdote than by fact.

Few middle-class homeowners in Cape Town will recognise any of the favourable treatment that Fransman suggests the Democratic Alliance bestows on its core supporters. The local rates bill has gone through the roof and a mayoral insider advised me recently that only Durban parallels Cape Town in its aggressive redistributionist levies. "Squeezing the rich (and the not so rich) until the pips squeak" might have originated in the British Labour Party in the 1970s, but the idea has now settled below Table Mountain.

And, doubtless, too, in his part-time capacity as deputy international relations and co-operation minister, Fransman will soon enough send out cables to all South African embassies abroad instructing them to celebrate and propagate the 20th anniversary of South African democracy, and in particular the "miracle" of its nonracial era.

Despite the violence this all does to the legacy of Nelson Mandela and 1994, I suppose it makes rough sense: deflect from the facts of sky-high unemployment, double and rising deficits on the current account, the budget and the trade balance, and scarce and increasingly scared foreign investors. Leave that to Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan in his medium-term budget to conjure something up. Anyway, without using race as the whip, how on earth do you keep everyone, from black-empowerment billionaires to unemployed farm workers, in the tent?

Fransman might be a crude race warrior but the launch sounds emanating last weekend from Julius Malema suggest he will soon be outbid on his preferred terrain. Much of the future of South Africa is about its contested past. Somewhere in Simon Schama’s sprawling study on the French Revolution, Citizens, is a useful reminder of what happened to the Jacobins: their revolutionary rhetoric made their future governance all but impossible. There is something very fresh in the old saying that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

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