Give that man a medal. General Leroy Mapiyane. His Miami Vice-style arrest of journalist Mzilikazi wa Afrika was a classic tipping point. It turned the debate around, it made it an international story and, putting the ANC on the back foot, it gave the media the much-needed space to argue its case.
It also turned it into a far bigger public issue. No longer a matter of professional parochialism and about whether the media’s self-regulatory system was strong enough to withstand the call for statutory regulation, it was now about whether South Africa was heading towards 1970s Latin America, with “generals” bundling investigative journalists into unmarked police cars in broad daylight.
So, while some are calling for his resignation, I would pin a great big gold one on to Mapiyane’s chest labelled “in the service of the constitutional right to free speech”.
This was not, however, a case of a government deciding to crack down on the press. To expect such cogency of policy-making and implementation is, alas, an increasingly futile exercise. Rather, it was a further symptom of the factional warfare undermining the legitimacy of the ruling party, in this case Mpumalanga’s rotten hand reached into the national polity to pluck out Wa Afrika.
And so, too, the response inside the ANC has been led not by those of the progressive centre-left, but by representatives of competing factions who wish to capitalise on the clumsy blunder by Mapiyane and his political backers to pursue their own agenda against the province’s premier, David Mabuza.
Secrecy Bill
Instead, it has been Zwelinzima Vavi who has been lobbying ANC MPs on the ad-hoc committee on what the civil society campaign group has effectively re-branded as the “Secrecy Bill”. Cosatu knows only too well that its own campaign against corruption in government will be neutered if Parliament passes legislation with such a scandalously wide definition of national interest, because it will drive a coach and horses through both the constitutional right of access to information and the broader strategy to open government to public scrutiny and account.
Where, one must ask yet again, is the progressive ANC voice on these issues? Sidelined apparently and outmanoeuvred by the ruthless conservative wing of the organisation. This is what can happen when you adopt a catholic approach to political accumulation. Over the years, the ANC has opened its doors to all manner of political waifs and strays, many of dubious ideological provenance.
On the ad-hoc committee, for example, the ANC chairperson is Cecil Burgess, a former member of the Independent Democrats, who crossed the floor after the 2004 election. He earned his chairpersonship as a reward for his skilful legal handling of the Travelgate claims against a bundle of ANC MPs. They owe him now.
Alongside him, enthusiastically vigorous in her executive-inclined defence of the bill, is Annelize van Wyk, a former apartheid-era cop who has had more political parties than she has had hairstyles in the past decade. Infamously, as the clock ticked on one of the floor-crossing windows, she was about to join the Democratic Alliance (from the United Democratic Movement) but made a last-minute decision to join the ANC instead.
As I say, people of real principle and political conviction — mongrel political organisations are always likely to yield mongrel politics and policy.
In turn, an ANC Youth League nominee to parliament, Thandile Sunduza, offers pearls of wisdom such as when she argued that the provisions of the Secrecy Bill relating to commercial confidentiality were there to protect the guava juice recipes of the ordinary South Africa streetseller from the unscrupulous attention of Mozambican competitors.
Bush years?
Thus, it is not so hard to understand the unholy alliance of reactionary interests that forms between the securocrat hawks in the intelligence department in government and the parliamentary committee.
South Africa has clearly entered its “Bush years”. Matters of political economy and democratic right are overlapping — the greater the scale of the plunder, the greater the need to cover up and hide what is going on.
So, what to do? The realignment of the opposition that DA leader Helen Zille claims will follow from her party’s acquisition of the ID is hubristic wishful thinking. As the Congress of the People continues to implode, the distinctive De Lille brand will be lost, whereas the DA is unlikely to gain much in terms of votes.
Far more interesting is the recalibration of civil society. Heeding the words of Mamphela Ramphele, who rightly scorned us all with her telling remark last year that the curdling of political culture during the Mbeki years “happened on our watch, activists are waking up to the need to adopt new strategies with new formations”.
The Social Justice Coalition and the Equal Education Campaign, quasi-social movement mimics of the Treatment Action Campaign’s model of combining mobilisation and professional advocacy, are two examples.
Earlier this year, a new non-governmental organisation called Section 27 emerged along with a Socio-Economic Rights Institute. And a new Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, to be launched next month, will add to the range of potentially powerful new voices arguing in defence of a brand of progressive constitutionalism that is now under serious attack.
Can the ANC, or at least the progressive rump, reach out and forge strategic alliances with such formations in a way that it has disdained these past years? A strategic coalition between progressive forces in the ruling alliance and civil society, and with intelligent business leaders, is what is needed. And without delay, because this is no time to dally.