What the scores mean:
A: Take a bow. You’re doing an excellent job
B: Good, but room for improvement
C: You’re OK, but that’s all we can say for you
D: Get your act together
E: Do yourself and the country a favour: disband
F: You’re fired
W: Wie?
African Christian Democratic Party
Grade: C
As South Africa’s sixth-largest party, ahead of both the Freedom Party and the Pan Africanist Congress, the ACDP cannot be ignored. Its public representatives are transparently honest, sincere and hard-working. But it is very difficult to rate because it is a blend of the Rhema Church and the Zionnist Christian Church on parliamentary pay, with a right-wing Christian moral agenda, rather than a real political party. Many of its concerns are peripheral to the key questions of race and political economy around which South African politics revolve.
One example from this year — its parliamentary huffing and puffing about loveLife’s call for school sex education on oral sex and women’s right to orgasm. Far be it from the Mail & Guardian to defend loveLife’s politically correct nonsense. But the country’s collective destiny is not critically affected by whether the Earth moves for its women.
Afrikaaner Eenheids-beweging
Grade: W
The Afrikaner Eenheidsbeweging (AEB) may have to look for another leader soon, as its sole MP, dominee-turned-politician Cassie Aucamp, indicated a wish to turn his party into a new outfit, Nasionale Aksie, which would be open to all races.
Aucamp was among the would-be floor-crossers who jumped the gun. However, he survived a challenge by ex-Conservative Party members in the AEB ranks who are expected to tackle him again during the party congress in early 2003.
With the floor-crossing laws for national and provincial levels expected early in the new year, it may not come to that. Instead the AEB may find itself without a leader, but with a political rival representing conservative Afrikaans-speakers of all hues.
Concerned mostly with farm murders, crime and Afrikaans language protection, the AEB represents a mere 47 000 voters. In theory, it could benefit from an apparent rightward swing among Afrikaners, of which the recent bomb attacks may be a symptom. But the Afrikaner right remains hopelessly splintered.
Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo)
Grade: F
Azapo’s profile was temporarily raised by the appointment early last year of its president and only MP, Mosibudi Mangena, as Deputy Education Minister. Leadership battles aimed at ousting Mangena, or the resignation of senior Azapo officials to form a new Black Consciousness party, have helped save it from utter oblivion.
Azapo, representing a miniscule percentage of voters, has almost no impact on South African politics. As parliamentary speaking time is ultimately based on electoral support, Mangena’s parliamentary replacement, Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, has barely a minute to say his piece.
Azapo’s talks with the Pan Africanist Congress to form a “credible black alternative” to the ruling African National Congress threatened to marry the invisible with the obscure.
The party’s main ostensible purpose is to keep alive the memory of murdered Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, around whom it has built a quasi-religious cult. Its one political intervention this year was to support Zimbabwean land “reform” and insist there was no breakdown in the rule of law ahead of the Zimbabwean election.
Democratic Alliance
Grade: D-
The Democratic Alliance held some New National Party councillors during the floor-crossing exercise, but for the most part, 2002 saw the relentless unravelling of its electoral strategy that began with the 1999 “fight back” campaign.
After regurgitating the NNP into the waiting maw of the ANC, it has lost its two main vehicles for impressing on voters its readiness to rule: the Western Cape government and the Cape Town unicity. During floor-crossing, it lost a clutch of other marginal municipalities to the ANC and the ANC’s funny new friend.
It damaged its squeaky-clean pretensions by appearing to protect its Western Cape leader, Gerald Morkel, when evidence at the Desai commission compellingly suggested Morkel took money from German spiv Jurgen Harksen and then lied about it repeatedly. And although Morkel stepped down as Western Cape party leader last month, he retains his position as DA deputy chairperson.
By precipitating the floor-crossing law and voting for it — it could hardly do otherwise, having fought anti-defection provisions for years — it did the ruling party a huge favour. The acrimonious split with the Nats may also have hurt it among Afrikaners, particularly white diehards who flocked to it in 1999. The Freedom Front’s shock win in the recent Bethal by-election may be a straw in the wind.
But viewed in another light, the DA may have bottomed out. It is back to being a 10% party, but has shed many NNP deadbeats and, hopefully, the folie de grandeur that propelled party leader Tony Leon into the ill-starred alliance.
Leon, who is known to have considered stepping down early this year, has shown unexpected reserves of toughness and seems less cocky nowadays. In his footsie-footsie with the Inkatha Freedom Party — the DA and IFP cooperate at local level and have formed a majority coalition in KwaZulu-Natal — he should beware of repeating the errors of the numbers game. The DA can best serve South Africa as a coherent liberal party of opposition.
Freedom Front
Grade: B (for effort), E (for impact)
It is not impossible, with the apparent resurgence of right-wing Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa, that the FF may have a future. It finished 2002 by surprising itself: it won a municipal by-election in Bethal. The DA lost the seat and about 600 votes — about half its 2000 tally. This, the FF hopefully claimed, was “the beginning of the end of the Afrikaner’s flirtation with the DA”. The NNP candidate won 51 votes.
With only three MPs, the party diligently raises its voice on everything of concern to white Afrikaners, from Minister of Sport and Recreation Ngconde Balfour’s cricket blapse to government’s stance on Zimbabwe.
But its impact is minimal. It continued its forlorn campaign for an Afrikaner volkstaat and to raise objections to state policy on Afrikaans-medium education and language issues. It complained bitterly that the ponderously named Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities Rights Bill ignored Afrikaners, particularly by giving the president the right to appoint members of an advisory board.
Other low-lights this year: it was the only political party and Afrikaans organisation awarded the certificate for promoting multilingualism by the Pan-South African Language Board; and it petitioned the South African High Commission in London through the local FF branch (yes — it has spread its tentacles to Europe!) to allow South Africans abroad to cast their ballots in the next election.
Inkatha Freedom Party
Grade: C
Firing two ANC MECs from the KwaZulu-Natal coalition cabinet is the most drastic political statement the IFP has made since walking out of the second session of the Codesa talks in 1992.
The sackings appear to be a veiled plea to the ANC, which has been provoking and slighting thin-skinned IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi for most of the year. By daring to oust firebrand housing MEC Dumisani Makhaye, the IFP did manage to grab the ANC’s attention. But replacing the two ANC men with DA members has enraged the ruling party, and is unlikely to force concessions.
Egging on the IFP is a conception of itself as bolstering the waning fortunes of opposition. After years of living in the ANC’s shadow, and incessant complaints about its ill-treatment at ANC hands, the IFP looks as if it is finally growing up.
After losing a considerable portion of its support base in KwaZulu-Natal to the ANC in the 1999 elections, the IFP staged a surprise recovery in the 2000 municipal poll.
It must strengthen its threatened position in KwaZulu-Natal in 2004 if it is to play a meaningful political role. This will be additionally vital if Buthelezi finds himself out of the national cabinet in a retaliatory move by the ANC.
The coming year will be critical for the IFP. Looming legislation that will allow provincial and national MPs to change parties could be detrimental to its health. Many pundits believe it will try to tie up the Bill while calling for provincial elections. This would give it the opportunity to consolidate its base.
New National Party
Grade: E-
Marthinus van Schalkwyk boastfully sports on his office wall the M&G poster “Leon has Marthinus by short and curlies”, which appeared on the day he broke from the DA. The M&G must admit it got it wrong. For “Leon”, the poster should have read “Mbeki”.
Van Schalkwyk deserves recognition for the artful way he eluded DA leader Tony Leon’s strangling embrace.
He is a much wilier politician than the derisive nickname “Kortbroek” implies. His stroke of genius was to see that he could leave the DA if the Constitution’s anti-defection clause was scrapped, and that he had the political capital, particularly in the Western Cape, to trade for such an amendment.
Van Schalkwyk has bought an extension of his own political life and that of NNP leaders loyal to him. Temporarily, at least, their position has improved. Under its pact with the ANC, the party now has the Western Cape premiership, two deputy ministers and joint control of a number of councils, including the prize of Cape Town.
But it cannot now control a single council on its own. Most voters are unlikely to support a politician who at one moment was attacking the ANC’s delivery record and President Thabo Mbeki’s “obsession with race”, and months later was grovelling for favours from the ruling party.
The NNP is now neither fish nor fowl, and has no market niche — voters who like the ANC are likely to vote for it, and those who dislike it to vote for an opposition party. On the strength of traditional loyalties, it may just survive the 2004 election. But sooner rather than later, in one of world history’s most shattering ironies, the party of Hendrik Verwoerd will vanish into the belly of the party of Nelson Mandela.
Pan Africanist Congress
Grade: E-
Sent scurrying away with its tail between its legs after the Bredell land invasion debacle, the PAC has been almost invisible this year. Apart from its historic failures of leadership and proneness to infighting, it has one insurmountable problem — the ANC under Mbeki has annexed the pan-Africanist ground it once called its own. It is Mbeki that is pushing for a resurgent Africa and continental solidarity through the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development.
Its attempts to raise its profile by publicly acclaiming Zimbabwe’s racial land grabs illustrate the point. Given Mbeki’s thinly veiled sympathies with Zanu-PF, and the open support of ANC members like Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Dumisani Makhaya, this stance is unlikely to win the PAC the electoral support it so desperately needs.
Indeed, its ideological incoherence meant that it was not even united on this issue. Its most visible and capable MP, Patricia de Lille, clashed with secretary general Thami ka Plaatjie after she denounced Zimbabwe’s presidential election as deeply flawed.
Backed by the party’s youth wing, the likes of Ka Plaatjie and Limpopo leader Maxwell Nemadzivhanani will sooner or later supplant the genial but ineffectual president Stanley Mogoba, a hangover from the “era of Studebaker civility”, as erstwhile editor Ken Owen once described it. Ka Plaatjie will not resolve the PAC’s fundamental policy dilemmas. But voters would at least find him more colourful.
That is assuming the PAC manages to get its act together enough to elect anyone new: the electoral farce that concluded its December conference means it still has the same leadership.
United Democratic Movement
Grade: C
It is anyone’s guess where the UDM stands on the ideological spectrum — it even started making “ultra-left” noises when it thought the labour movement and the ANC were about to part ways — but it definitely has nuisance value.
To offset its small size — it is the fifth-largest parliamentary party — it uses the courts, the Human Rights Commission and the Public Protector, sometimes to telling effect.
Its irrepressible leader, Bantu Holomisa, continues his grudge war against the ANC, belabouring its stance on just about everything. Former president Nelson Mandela, who is known to regret Holomisa’s ejection from the ANC fold, stepped in to court the general, only to incur his party’s wrath for acting without a mandate.
Holomisa’s party’s major coup this year was its challenge to the floor-crossing legislation, which, at least temporarily, put the kibosh on the ANC’s power grab in KwaZulu-Natal.
It complained to constitutional watchdog bodies about the appointment of DA spin-doctor Ryan Coetzee as consultant to the Western Cape administration and on Ngconde Balfour’s cricket gaffes.
But the year has also brought its setbacks. The UDM lost its only municipality, Umtata, as a result of floor-crossing — though two by-elections put it back in charge. And the party remains wracked by internal turf wars.