MPs should be accountable to the four Cs - Dene Smuts

20 Apr 2014 | Dene Smuts | Original Publication:  PoliticsWeb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

14 Apr 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

Democratic Alliance MP Dene Smuts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Magical realism lives on in tales of the election

22 Apr 2014 | Tony Leon  | Original Publication:  BDlive

Shrugging off Nkandla and … often indifferent delivery … the voters apparently intend to keep faith with the ANC, writes Tony Leon

APPROPRIATELY in the week when both the Jewish Passover and Easter have been celebrated, we have been much preoccupied with miracles and wonder.

Passover concerns the miracle of the Jewish exodus from bondage in Egypt and, aside from inflicting 10 plagues on their oppressors, the Lord miraculously parted the Red Sea to make good their escape. In the New Testament, we have the record of the agony of the crucifixion on Good Friday and then the miracle of the resurrection on Easter Sunday. These beliefs have sustained the Judeo-Christian faiths for thousands of years. Looking at the hundreds of thousands who gathered in Moria, alongside a gaggle of politicians, on Sunday, they remain alive for millions of South Africans today.

Appropriately, perhaps, between these two festivals came the announcement of the death of Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Regarded as one of the giants of 20th-century literature, he popularised, in his exquisite writings, the genre of "magical realism". As critic Jonathan Kandell notes, this was the form in which the miraculous and the real converge. Garcia Marquez’s cast list ranged from vicious dictators to revolutionary romantics and, of course, star-crossed lovers.

Less miraculous than any of the above is the latest opinion poll from global market researcher Ipsos, published in the Sunday Times at the weekend. Or perhaps, in its detail that the African National Congress (ANC) is on course to another overwhelming victory in a fortnight. There is a touch of wonder in those numbers. Shrugging off Nkandla and the mushroom clouds of corruption and often indifferent delivery engulfing the state and its officials, the voters apparently intend to keep faith with the ANC.

Garcia Marquez does provide some clues for this political levitation. This dialogue in his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, has some local application: "You can’t eat hope," the woman said. "You can’t eat it, but it sustains you," the colonel replied.

And although his first major novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, established Garcia Marquez’s reputation, he said that his best work was The Autumn of the Patriarch. There is, in its story line, something of local resonance as well. Set in a mythical Latin American state, it describes a dictator who has ruled for so long that no-one can remember what life was like before him. In between failed attempts to block Democratic Alliance advertisements, the state broadcaster provides a vivid celluloid reminder every night now of just what life was like during the long oppression of apartheid. Doubtless the celebrations on April 27 will be a further warning of what ANC deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa cautioned last November: "If you don’t vote, the Boers will come back."

Cut from the cloth of one of Garcia Marquez’s romantic revolutionaries, Ronnie Kasrils also re-entered the lists, stage left as it were, last week. He managed to extend his cabinet shelf-life a decade ago by playing the safe role of the ANC’s in-house Jewish anti-Zionist. Now, in what the decrepit, indeed ageing, ANC Youth League (its interim president is apparently north of 40) has declared a "blasphemy", Kasrils has become, in the holy week, an apostate. He called for either an anti-ANC vote or a spoilt paper to register dissatisfaction with the party to which he has dedicated most of his adult life.

Will it make any significant difference? There will be some vote loss and some opposition gain in the next poll but, despite the tectonic plates that might be shifting below the feet of the ANC, on the surface it would appear as though there is a remarkable continuity in the ecology of the electorate and the fortunes of the ruling party.

Why? Back to Garcia Marquez: he was also a soccer fanatic and even wrote a short story about the beautiful game, The Sworn In. While South Africans might be unfamiliar with the Latin American teams, over here Manchester United has, as befits its global following, a huge local following. It also happens that this year, under the more pedestrian management of David Moyes, it is enduring one of its worst seasons. Of course, the fans would rather the winning Alex Ferguson was still at the helm, but when the Red Devils play at Old Trafford and elsewhere, the supporters still root for Manchester United and do not don Liverpool jerseys. Some might be disaffected and apathetic, but the power is with the team and the brand. Not forever, perhaps, but for a while to come. Our political results also follow the team, rather than its leadership, apparently.

Throw in the fact that one-third of all South Africans in work are employed by the government at various levels and the further statistic provided by the South African Institute of Race Relations that the state is the biggest single source of income for almost a third of all households in South Africa. Prosaic explanations, not magical realism, could just explain the next election result.

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

 

 

ANC fights on against its worst enemy: business

15 Apr 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

The acquiescence of the National Planning Commission as its plan dies a slow death is strange, writes Tony Leon

IN APRIL 1962, President John F Kennedy, at a dinner he hosted for the then living Nobel Prize winners of the western hemisphere, said: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Jefferson, the third US president, had an extraordinary and wide-ranging intellect. He left to posterity many aphorisms that seem far more contemporary than when they were written more than 230 years ago.

For example, he wrote: "When people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." Just how much South Africa’s ruling party has to fear from the people will be revealed when the votes are counted after May 7. If opinion polls are accurate, it need not fear much at all.

For South Africa’s private sector, a different set of expectations applies, and the verdict against it has already been delivered, apparently.

It is the enemy, or at least that section of it that has not submitted to the government’s itch to control it.

Anthea Jeffery of the South African Institute of Race Relations has produced research that examined 11 items of legislation in immaculate detail — from tightened rules for black empowerment to controls over mining and offshore gas and oil exploration to mandatory gender quotas for the boardroom and reduced protection for foreign investors and local property owners. She headlined her research, "the ANC government’s war on economic rationality". The Economist magazine — presumably well read by the foreign investors desperately needed to realise the National Development Plan’s vision of 5.4% economic growth, as opposed to our less-than-2% present growth path — weighed in.

Its verdict was harsh, but accurate. Last week, it opined: "These business-bashing bills are part of an ominous trend … the common thread is that they weaken property rights, reduce private sector autonomy, threaten business with draconian penalties and undermine investor confidence."

Undeterred by any such warnings, two weeks ago, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform made its own contribution to this heady brew. It proposes that all farmers (or the fewer than 40,000 large-scale commercial farmers remaining) will be required to hand over 50% of their farmland to their workers. Never mind the constitution and food security, the real deal here was the process followed in this "final policy proposal" or, in this case, not followed.

At the weekend, I met one of South Africa’s largest and most politically progressive farm owners. Like other more thoughtful members of his tribe, he told me the department had engaged with him and other farm owners and they, in turn, had made very significant proposals to create a more just land order in South Africa. "And," he advised, "when the department published their new proposals, not a single item had been changed from the original draft."

More or less exactly the same happened to the oil and gas provisions, despite the lengthy process of parliamentary engagement, of the controversial Minerals and Petroleum Resource Development Amendment Bill (disclosure: I consult in this sector).

On this page recently, Rhodes University’s Gavin Keeton pointed to a striking fact: South Africa’s still relatively good standing in the international benchmarked global competitiveness index is almost entirely attributable to the "spectacular performance" of the private sector’s contribution to it and, conversely, is weighed down by the underperformance of our public sector, other than the Treasury and the Reserve Bank. And then along comes Public Enterprises Minister Malusi Gigaba, whose only regret is that the government ever privatised anything! Go figure this one out.

But competing for space in the parallel universe, heedless of how the real world really works, up comes African National Congress secretary-general Gwede Mantashe. He informed a business gathering last week that the government’s solution for small business was to create a new ministry. As if the installation of yet another layer of bureaucracy will assist. As Clem Sunter, who knows something about the practice of business and the scenarios for a better future, archly noted: "In most countries, a red carpet is rolled out for investors. In South Africa, we roll out the red tape."

As for the much commented-upon loud silence of South Africa’s business leadership as its interests get trampled in the dust of the legislative and regulatory steamroller, perhaps the fact that more than 60% of the top JSE-listed firms earn most of their revenue offshore provides an explanation. The acquiescence of the members of the National Planning Commission as its plan dies a slow death by a thousand cuts of legislation and regulation is stranger. If we do not have a clear explanation for the silence of these lambs, Jefferson at least left us a warning. He said: "All tyranny needs to do to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."

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

 

 

Fast food chain is a sign of peace in our time

08 Apr 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

The presence of fast-food hamburgers tells us more about our national economic and political wellbeing than we might think, writes Tony Leon

WHAT does the presence of fast-food hamburgers, specifically the Big Mac, tell us about our national economic and political wellbeing?

More than you might think. An item in the Washington Post at the weekend caught my attention. It reported that the three McDonald’s restaurants in Crimea, recently "abruptly annexed by Russia", are now closed. The Ukrainian McDonald’s branch said the closure was for "technical reasons" — although, as the reporter waspishly noted, this was "perhaps referring to the difficulty of supplying your restaurants when they turn up in a foreign country overnight". And the closure appears permanent as McDonald’s has offered to move its Crimean employees to other jobs in Ukraine and has thrown in three months’ free rental for good measure.

When I retweeted this nugget, if you’ll forgive the fast-food pun, one Struan Lloyd responded: "They should close everywhere — no nutrients." My former colleague, Douglas Gibson, suggested Crimeans could now "eat Russian sausage instead".

I was immediately reminded of something else entirely. In 1999, when globalisation was the new big thing and Russian expansionism appeared at an end, the influential polemicist Thomas Friedman published a fat book on the subject, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. I was impressed with its take on the unprecedented integration of finance, markets, nation states and technology and his account of how a new international order was replacing the Cold War order.

Some of Friedman’s assumptions have been proven wrong, not the least his underestimation of the rise of Cold War warrior Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. But one, at least, has been triumphantly vindicated, as the weekend disappearance of the Big Mac from Crimean menus proves.

Friedman devotes a chapter to "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention". Having travelled the world back then and munched hamburgers throughout, he came to a fascinating, if somewhat indigestible, conclusion: "No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s."

He even tested this idea with executives at (I am not kidding) "Hamburger University", McDonald’s research and training facility in Oakbrook, Illinois. They confirmed his thesis, that "when a country reaches the level of economic development where it has a middle class big enough to support a McDonald’s network, it becomes a McDonald’s country. And people in McDonald’s countries don’t like to fight wars anymore, they prefer to wait in line for burgers."

Crimea is an imperfect fit for this thesis, but it roughly works. The closure of the burger chain happened there after the forcible annexation by Russia, but it broadly suggests that peace is the prerequisite for the continued existence of the golden arches.

One of the postapartheid dividends was the arrival of the Big Mac in South Africa in November 1995, only after the first democratic election and South Africa had bedded down its new constitutional order.

The company’s website says the roll-out — we are approaching our 200th McDonald’s store — had been unprecedented, with 30 stores opened in a record 23 months. Of some interest, and undoubtedly useful for his pension pot, is that African National Congress supremo Cyril Ramaphosa has been, since March 2011, the development licensee here driving its expansion. If he has as much success in harvesting votes as in his investment in flipping burgers, then perhaps his party will do better next month than predicted.

With the weekend news that the Nigerian economy has overtaken South Africa’s as Africa’s largest, I decided to apply Friedman’s thesis to this country of 169-million people.

There is not a single McDonald’s in Nigeria. According to McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson, the company was only now "looking at Nigeria".

Perhaps this underscores how not just fast foods but also national statistics should be accompanied with a giant health warning. For Nigeria relies almost entirely for its economic wellbeing, or at least for 80% of government revenue, on its vast oil resources.

And the recent forced departure of its central bank chief, Lamido Sanusi, by President Goodluck Jonathan, tells its own sorry tale. He was fired, essentially, for presenting to parliament evidence that more than $20bn had gone missing from the state oil company, and that a figure close to the president was a suspect in this misappropriation.

So, for South Africa, our addiction to fast food triggers both health and economic warnings. On Monday, Peter Bruce eloquently explained our chronic dependence on foreign investment, and Business Day’s editorial was a baleful reminder that we can’t consume and spend our way out of our economic difficulty. Still, when you next see the golden arches of McDonald’s, it’s worth remembering they are evidence of our peace dividend.

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

 

 

Tony Leon on South Africa: “Days after Mandela’s burial, the unity of the ANC was shattered”

27 March 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  NewStatesman

The former leader of South Africa’s Democratic Alliance talks about the fallout from Madiba’s death on the rainbow nation.



Way things were: Tony Leon (r) shakes hands with Kgalema Motlanthe, then deputy leader of the ruling ANC, 2008. (Photo: Getty)

In November 1997, the old adage in vino veritas was given new meaning after a city councillor from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) was arrested for drink-driving in Cape Town. Councillor Mzukizi Gaba reportedly warned the (presumably white) policemen: “When Mandela dies, we will kill you whites like flies.”

After his arrest and conviction, little more was heard from the politician, though his fly-swatting comment lives on in cyberspace as a justification

for the call to arms of the “South Africa Project” (one of several incubators of racism online), which, from the safety of Louisiana in the United States, urges readers: “Wake up or die, white man!”

When Nelson Mandela died on 5 December 2013, there wasn’t a racial pogrom in South Africa – instead, there was a brief reanimation of the “rainbow nation” spirit that Mandela had so successfully nurtured during his presidency. His loss was mourned by all sections of this often racially fissiparous nation.

However, the passing of Mandela did represent a turning point of sorts for a country that held its first democratic election 20 years ago and sought to build the foundations of a non-racial democracy after three centuries of exclusion and apartheid.

The current president, Jacob Zuma, doubtless hoped that the national mourning and international attention – over 90 heads of state attended Mandela’s memorial service – would bury the mounting criticism of his leadership. There have been multiple scandals on his watch. The £16m in state funds used for “improvements” on Zuma’s private home in Zululand has come to symbolise the pilfering of £1.5bn of public money each year through “misappropriation” and “waste”, in the words of the government’s auditor general. Zuma’s presidency has coincided with the country’s first recession in 17 years, which has contributed to stubbornly high unemployment.

Yet the memorial provided moments of embarrassment when Zuma was booed by large sections of the predominantly black audience, an unusual occurrence in a country that usually treats heads of state with reverence. Zuma’s poll ratings are low. His general approval rating is 43 per cent; among the increasingly restive youth, it is 31 per cent.

Days after Mandela’s burial, the unity of the ANC was shattered. Its largest trade union ally, the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa), announced it was disaffiliating. It is likely that after the 7 May elections, Numsa, together with other political casualties of the Zuma years, will form a party to the left of the ANC.

As well as grumbling at the top, there is deep unhappiness on the ground. In just three months, there have been thousands of “service delivery protests” by people angry at their lack of water, electricity or adequate sewerage facilities.

Still, the ANC’s majority seems unassailable. For black South Africans, who make up over 80 per cent of the electorate, the ANC remains a totem of liberation – albeit a fraying one. It is sobering to recall that the party’s “worst” electoral result was in 1994, under Mandela, when it polled just over 62 per cent of the vote. The spread between the ANC and its nearest rival, the Democratic Alliance, at the last general election in 2009 was over 40 per cent. The first key question for the election is not whether the ANC will lose power, but if it will achieve less than 60 per cent of the vote.

The second is how far left the ANC will move. Recent polls suggest that the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) could achieve 10 per cent of the vote. The EFF’s self-styled “commander-in-chief”, Julius Malema, models himself on the late populist Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. Malema faces corruption charges and is unlikely to take his seat as an MP – but a strong showing from the EFF could prompt the ANC to turn left, which would increase the party’s internal divisions. So expect no change and everything to change in South Africa in the next few months. The ANC and Zuma will be re-elected by a wide margin but it is likely that new and more significant fault lines will emerge, too.

Mandela was this country’s once-in-a-lifetime offer. He was also a contradiction: he was the fiercest political partisan and a staunch believer in multiparty democracy. Part of him would be horrified at the looming disunity in the ANC but the other part might smile at the arrival of more normal politics on these southern shores. 

Tony Leon was the leader of South Africa’s Democratic Alliance from 1994 to 2007. His new book, “Opposite Mandela”, will be published in May

 

Will Zuma leave behind more than Nkandla?

01 Apr 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

As Zuma views his imminent re-election, he might pause to contemplate what his political legacy will be, other than Nkandla, writes Tony Leon

THE Delphic oracle, according to Greek legend, provided answers about the future, on a cryptic basis, via Pythia, the priestess of the god Apollo, and then only on the seventh day after the new moon. No doubt she had reasons for her silence, since she was believed to be connected to the divine.

Some two-and-a-half-thousand years later, give or take, African National Congress (ANC) leader in the Northern Cape John Block announced, according to a report last week, that "walking with President Jacob Zuma is like walking with God". Apparently this might have been mangled in translation or transmission since the local ANC denied the remark was made with reference to the president. That’s a pity, as I thought the remark added some spice to a remarkably lacklustre election campaign to date.

But although Zuma is known for his long silences, and often enigmatic remarks, he is in many ways a leader of tradition who has the misfortune of being a politician in the modern age of instant communication. He couldn’t keep his counsel forever, or for much more than two weeks after the release of the report on Nkandla by the public protector. But his defence of it remained Delphic, or at least question-begging. He was quoted as saying: "I’ve done nothing wrong. Even if they look underneath a tree or a rock they won’t find anything against me. I’m not guilty."

About a decade ago, when he was fending off one or other corruption scandal on his watch, president Thabo Mbeki berated parliamentarians for attaching the American suffix "gate’’ to every local act of political skulduggery or financial impropriety. Then it was "Oilgate"; but no one apparently listened to this admonition as 10 years later, the saga of improper expenditure and undue enrichment in the president’s private homestead has been dubbed "Nkandlagate". Zuma’s line of defence, uttered at the weekend in Gugulethu, in Cape Town, did have a slightly familiar, Watergate ring to it. After all, then US president Richard Nixon memorably said in a major speech on the scandal which engulfed, and ultimately destroyed, his presidency in November 1973: "I have never profited from public service. I have earned every cent. People have got to know whether their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got." Within nine months of that remark, and notwithstanding a sweeping re-election victory in November 1972 (by 61% to 37%, one of the greatest margins in the US) shortly after news of the scandal first broke, Nixon resigned.

Of course, Nixon was not done in by this self-described "third-rate burglary" of the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the famous Watergate building but by the subsequent cover-up and essentially by one so-called "smoking gun" tape which conclusively proved his personal involvement in the scandal and covering its traces. But, in terms appropriate for a Greek tragedy, his downfall was owed to another Grecian term: "hubris" or overweening pride and arrogance. Nixon installed his secret Oval Office taping system in order to capture for posterity his geo-strategic designs to reshape the modern world order. Instead, in a frisson of local familiarity, the "smoking gun" tape revealed that the president and his key aide, HR Haldeman, discussed having the Central Intelligence Agency ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation to halt its probe of the Watergate break-in by claiming the burglary was a "national security operation".

Nkandla — thousands of miles and decades removed from Nixon’s White House and the Watergate building — at least provides political continuity for the disreputable political stratagem of misusing the concept of "national security" — or in local jargon a "national key point" — to cover up a political scandal. But there are probably far more differences than similarities between these two presidencies and the mushroom clouds of scandal which engulf both. For one thing, Zuma is not apparently involved in a cover-up but more in the origins of the Nkandla project itself and on his own version sees nothing wrong with the expenditure of more than R250m on his private residence.

But the other major difference is that while Nixon’s presidency and his persona will be imperishably associated with the Watergate scandal and his name will be memorialised as a synonym for the corruption of high office, it is not the only legacy he left to posterity.

He also achieved what he set out to do in terms of reshaping the world order. He was the first US president to visit both Beijing and Moscow and to have begun the extrication of US forces from the quagmire of Vietnam. It was — in the words of supreme US historian John Lewis Gaddis, in other respects an arch-Nixon critic — "a performance of the great grand strategists Metternich, Castlereagh and Bismarck".

As Zuma views his imminent re-election, he might pause to contemplate what his political legacy will be, other than Nkandla.

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