Mamphela Ramphele and Helen Zille in political crouch of games

I enjoy the level-headed, liberal writings of RW Johnson. Today, he speaks about a troubled DA, Helen Zille in trouble, a decaying and corrupt ANC with increasing tribal complications, and the emergence of the EFF who will supplant the SACP. This is a fascinating read on the politics you didn’t want to know but have to know! Here are some excerpts:

DAgang

[For Zille] to thrust the donors forward as the villains of the piece is to break an unspoken compact, particularly since two of them (the Oppenheimers and Natie Kirsh) have been named in the press. And, of course, the duty of a political leader is to tell the donors what is and what is not politically wise and possible: in this case, that an attempted deal with Ramphele was a non-starter.  Zille has, to her credit, said that she bears personal responsibility for the debacle – but in practice she is now throwing as much of the blame as possible onto Ramphele and some more onto the donors. This can’t really work. After all, the worse Ramphele is made to look – and relations between the two women now sound very embittered – the more Zille has to face the question “How on earth could you try to hand the DA leadership to a woman that you now say is completely untrustworthy? After all, you worked with her, you knew her well.” Zille may seem to be shooting poisoned arrows at Ramphele but those aren’t arrows, they’re boomerangs…

ANC

The ANC is that familiar beast, a decaying and corrupt liberation movement. Other examples of the species can be seen in Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe. In all cases they cling to power and fill their pockets with a huge sense of self-righteousness. They tend only to believe in democracy if that is the same as themselves being re-elected. They benefit from the fact that internationally the Left supports them because it likes their socialist and anti-imperialist rhetoric – although a mere glance at their actual behaviour shows how fraudulent that rhetoric is. But the even greater – and more immediate – problem is tribalism. Late last year I conducted an opinion survey in KwaZulu-Natal. This suggested that the Zulu bloc was still consolidating behind Zuma and that the ANC would add at least another 10% to its vote there. At the same time anecdotal evidence reaches me from a variety of sources suggesting a rising tempo of anti-Zulu tribalism in workplace situations in Jo’burg and the Cape. The increased dominance of the Zulu bloc will produce more anti-Zulu feeling and on the Reef this could spell real trouble…

EFF

Malema’s great advantage is that he has made a clean break with the ANC and can thus oppose its leadership root and branch and present a real alternative programme. Moreover, he is an inventive and shrewd politician. He has insisted that the EFF alone really wishes to implement the Freedom Charter which has been betrayed by the ANC at large. At the same time he adopted the red berets of Hugo Chavez (which proved so popular that the ANC was forced to copy them), developed strong links with Robert Mugabe, and was even canny enough to court Buthelezi. True, he still has court cases pending against him but any attempt to jail him now will be viewed as political persecution. Early indications are that the EFF could win 25-30 seats in Parliament. This would be a complete disaster for the SACP, whose political space the EFF would then occupy, and whose militants would look back with anger at the Party’s failure to present its own election candidates from the start. But it would also have a de-stabilizing effect on the ANC which, for the first time, will be outflanked on the Left in every debate and accused of being sell-outs – an epithet the ANC finds hard to bear. Thus the EFF could easily push the whole ANC towards Left populism…

DA

It has begun to look as if Helen Zille will go down as a calamitous leader. She was bequeathed a strong and growing party built on liberal principle but there is now a clear sense that all this is unravelling. This is only partly due to the Ramphele debacle. The real point is that Tony Leon had successfully put together a coalition of white English-speakers and Afrikaners, Coloureds, Indians and a growing African fringe so that even by 2004 the DA was easily the country’s most multi-racial party. All of this has now been greatly muddied. Under Zille the party has opted for racial preferences in both the labour market and business, to the utter consternation of the old Progs, Coloureds, the Solidarity trade union and Afrikaners in general. All these elements are increasingly restive, even mutinous. The Ramphele affair has Coloureds angrily demanding why an African should receive such preference when the DA owes both Cape Town and the Western Cape to Coloured voters? Once one starts to play the game of racial preferences and skin colour, such complications inevitably follow. When Ms Zille declared that the principle of “merit not race” was itself “almost racist” she not only revealed that she had lost all touch with the liberal tradition, but she was simply lost. A truly multi-racial party like the DA can only be run on liberal principles. Once you surrender those for favouritism towards any race, you face a Tower of Babel…

These excerpts are taken from ‘SA’s Political Parties: Twenty Years On’. It’s another masterpiece of sanity by RW Johnson. I highly recommend you read it.