The African National Congress will have to do better in the Eastern Cape if it wants to retain the support of one of South Africa’s poorest provinces, writes Lizeka Mda
The African National Congress is fortunate the elections are still a year away because were they to be held tomorrow, it seems the United Democratic Movement would do tremendous damage to the ANC’s majority in the Eastern Cape.
The ANC is aware of this and has been sending a succession of Cabinet ministers and party officials to the province. These overtures could be too little too late, as the party is an object of scorn, particularly in the former Transkei, for this sudden attention from a ruling party that has kept the province on the back burner for the past four years.
At gatherings one hears that the choice of Minister of Health Nkosazana Zuma and Minister of Provincial Affairs and Constitutional Development Mohammed Valli Moosa to meet traditional leaders at a recent indaba was uninspired: they have no profile in the province.
People recount how the majority of President Nelson Mandela’s audience when he visited Nyandeni Great Place in Pondoland in March were children, whereas the adults came out when UDM co-leader Bantu Holomisa arrived a week later. They laugh as they tell of how the buses the ANC had laid on as free transport to take people to the June 16 rally, addressed by ANC chair “Terror” Lekota at the Independent stadium in Umtata, had few takers.
On the other hand, the UDM’s message seems to be falling on fertile ground. “Life for the ordinary majority of blacks has retrogressed under the ANC government,” says Holomisa in a discussion document he has prepared for the UDM’s conference of June 27.
“Health and education services are rapidly collapsing under the insensitive ANC government. In fact, both the political and economic outlook becomes bleaker and bleaker every day as the ANC government dithers while the country is burning.
“Affirmative action is a euphemism for the appointment and placement of ANC loyalists in highly rewarding government positions while experienced and seasoned black and white civil servants are being retrenched, bribed to quit the civil service so as to pave the way for the further appointment of inefficient and inexperienced ANC members.”
These statements find resonance in one of the poorest regions of the country, historically under-resourced and reaping very little from putting the ANC into power. Many of the miners who are being retrenched are swelling the numbers of the unemployed who have no prospects in this underdeveloped province.
“Just because there were a few corrupt officials in the homeland government,” says a former Transkei civil servant who is now a card-carrying member of UDM, “we have all been dismissed as corrupt and left to wither away and die.
“The people who are in the Bisho government are just as corrupt, if not more. The only difference is that they are from Port Elizabeth. What the ANC has done is to strengthen the divisions that have always been there between people from either side of the Kei River.”
The ANC’s response has been to discredit the UDM at every opportunity, at its kindest labelling it counter-revolutionary.
Eastern Cape Premier Makhenkesi Stofile has dismissed the UDM as the “old bricks which once made up the National Party house. That house was decimated in 1994, but now it is coming together again in a different guise.”
Joel Netshitenzhe, when he was head of communications in the president’s office, described the founders of the UDM, Holomisa and Roelf Meyer, as “a former co-ordinator of the apartheid State Security Council and an erstwhile military leader of a bantustan”.
It was the same Holomisa, now ridiculed by the ANC as a bantustan leader, who got the most votes at the ANC’s 1994 congress in Bloemfontein. And Meyer, now dismissed as an old apartheid thinker, was very close to the bosom of the ANC when he was half of the “Cyril [Ramaphosa] and Roelf magic”, as it was called. His fault could be in not defecting to the ANC.
Holomisa was expelled from the ANC for daring to tell the truth as he knew it about the role of Minister of Public Enterprises Stella Sigcau in the events leading up to the death of Transkei soldiers when Holomisa was at the helm of the homeland.
Netshitenzhe and others may criticise the UDM support on the grounds that the organisation has no policies as yet, and therefore exists only in opposition to the ANC.
That is true. It is true also that when the majority of South Africans voted for the ANC in large numbers in the Eastern Cape in 1994, it was not because they were impressed with ANC policies. Most of the people in the province are not literate and do not know one party from the next. In truth, many could not tell the difference between Mandela and Kaizer Matanzima.
Many educated Transkei inhabitants are opportunists who were extremely happy to enjoy the benefits of being in Matanzima’s inner circle. Now that the ANC is in power, this elite is suddenly very active in ANC structures like the women’s league. Yet the ANC has never questioned this support.
When Holomisa says “we shall endeavour to eliminate the vast gap between the haves and have-nots, stimulate job creation and sustainable economic growth, thereby eradicating the grinding poverty wherein millions of South Africans are presently mired”, it is a wish list, just like some of the strategy and tactics the ANC adopted at the Morogoro conference of 1969.
The UDM gives hope to people who have nothing left to lose. After all, they live in the shadow of the growth, employment and redistribution strategy, whereas they thought they were voting for the Freedom Charter, which has yet to deliver on promises like: “There shall be peace and friendship.”