INLSA
Max Du Preez
One of the most foolish political statements of the year came from the Minister of Higher Education and leader of the SA Communist Party, Blade Nzimande, last week. The Democratic Alliance is nothing else but the party of white madams and white bosses, he said.
Nzimande’s words were still floating in the air when the DA congress elected two bright, charismatic young black politicians, Mmusi Maimane and Makashule Gana, as federal deputy chairmen.
Even Nzimande must have felt a bit idiotic if he watched the newly elected top leadership on stage at the weekend: Helen Zille, Lindiwe Mazibuko, Wilmot James, Maimane, Gana and Anchen Dreyer.
This is the quality of leaders the ANC is not attracting any more. And it is showing.
Almost at the same time this scene was playing itself out, the ANC had its own public moment. ANC president Jacob Zuma bused in 15 loads of supporters to his luxurious Nkandla enclave to feast on 12 cows he had slaughtered for them. He donned his leopard skins for a dance and called on his ancestors to help him get re-elected at Mangaung. A Mercury reporter was manhandled, his notebook destroyed and he was driven away in a police van.
The DA’s national congress was an orderly if exuberant affair and the elections for a new leadership were concluded without any nastiness or controversy, despite being fiercely contested.
The ANC is also preparing to elect a new leadership at its congress in a few weeks time.
There are weekly reports of intimidation and even violence at branch meetings where nominations are discussed; the party is struggling to verify which branches were legitimately constituted and which not; there are suspicions of money changing hands to secure nominations; dirt on political opponents is leaked to the media; and the senior leadership is so preoccupied with the vicious infighting that the governing of the country is suffering.
Even staunch ANC supporters have to agree that all the signs point to the DA being a party of the future and the ANC increasingly a party of the past.
My gut feeling is that, unless things change radically in the next year or so, the DA could actually meet its target of a third of the votes in the 2014 election. Add the votes going to smaller parties like Cope, the ACDP and Freedom Front Plus and the ANC could get less than 60 percent of the vote for the first time.
As the public face of the DA changes and credible black leaders become more prominent, it is becoming an increasingly attractive alternative to many in the black middle classes, especially younger people with no emotional attachment to the ANC as a liberation movement.
The recent defection to the DA by the former ANC premier of the Eastern Cape, Nosimo Balindlela, was dismissed as insignificant by the ANC and most commentators. The fact remains that every black leader who joins the DA makes it easier for others to follow and undermines the ANC’s charge that the DA is a party only fighting for white privilege.
Zille is clearly serving her last stint as party leader and will be replaced (probably by Mmusi Maimane) after or even before the next leadership election in three years time.
Zille has her failings, but history will remember her, not as the “white madam” or the “dancing monkey” which the likes of Nzimande and Julius Malema have called her, but as a politician who had fundamentally changed the political discourse and assembled the closest we have to a non-racial political movement since the demise of the UDF.
She has weakened the ethnic glue in our political affiliations more than any politician since Nelson Mandela.
Zille clearly also realises that the DA’s aim to remove the ANC from government after the general election of 2019 will remain a pipe dream unless there is some political realignment and a new co-operation between opposition forces. Only time will tell if she has the tact and strategic acumen to facilitate this process.
The DA must pray every day that Zuma gets re-elected at Mangaung. His track record is appalling and millions of ANC supporters (outside his ethnic stronghold in KwaZulu-Natal) are deeply embarrassed by his shenanigans. He is so clearly not the kind of president a modern constitutional democracy like South Africa deserves.
But the looming possibility that Cyril Ramaphosa is going to be elected as his deputy could change that.
Whether the motivation to nominate him had that in mind or not, Ramaphosa will undoubtedly emerge as an actual prime minister, even more so than was the case with Mandela and his deputy, Thabo Mbeki.
If Zuma becomes more of a ceremonial head of state and spends more time at Nkandla and Ramaphosa is given enough room by Luthuli House, this could restore the ANC’s credibility in the eyes of many.
