Howard Barrell:OVER A BARREL
At a lunch for a visiting Western diplomat I attended with a few MPs a couple of months ago, that hot political potato, the government’s growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear), came under discussion.
A minute or so into the conversation, it became clear that our guest was lost. He was struggling. His anxious expression betrayed the fact that he was having difficulty in finding a meaning for the word “gear” that might explain the way we were using it.
“Sorry,” said the Democratic Party MP at the table when he realised our guest’s difficulty. “I should explain. Gear is the government’s liberal economic policy. It’s a policy for growth, employment and redistribution. The irony is that we in the opposition agree with it while our two colleagues here from the ruling African National Congress and Communist Party oppose it.”
The DP man had highlighted another example of the paradoxical position liberalism occupies in South Africa today. Within the African National Congress-led alliance those who claim to be socialists or militant nationalists dissent from their party’s predominant liberalism, yet they consent to liberalism’s ascendancy – perhaps because they feel they lack an alternative that others might take seriously.
Likewise, liberalism informs almost every clause of our widely admired Constitution. Liberal principles were adopted as the terms of co-operation between the political parties which could not be sure between 1989 and 1994 that they shared the same understanding of the common good. And liberal principles have provided the basis for the mutual trust that has made political accommodation possible. Yet liberal principles are the very antithesis of the precepts that guided the two extremes in the struggle over apartheid.
Look at the policies enacted by the ANC and professed by just about every other party and it seems we are almost all liberals in South Africa nowadays. Yet liberalism is the body of thought still excoriated more often than any other. And the liberal tradition’s flag- bearer in South Africa, the DP, occupies a still marginal position in our politics. Somehow South Africa’s main liberal party has failed thus far to capitalise on liberalism’s triumph in the country.
The marginalisation of the DP may ease somewhat at the coming election. The signs are strong that it will as, under Tony Leon, it transforms itself from party of conscience to contender for power. But its road towards a central role in South African politics looks longer, more difficult and less certain after the defection from its ranks to the ANC last week of Dr Bukelwa Mbulawa, its young black MP from the Eastern Cape. Her departure follows the crossover from the DP to the New National Party a couple of months ago of another black MP, the considerably less impressive William Mnisi. Clearly the DP is having difficulty in holding on to senior black representatives.
There may be any number of reasons for this over which the DP has no control. A ruling party as dominant as the ANC may be able to offer strong inducements to a bright young black medical doctor from the Eastern Cape.
If someone is a passenger – as some suggest Mnisi was – he may well decide to jump before he is dropped if he hears rumbles of discontent among his bearers about carrying his dead weight any longer.
It may also be particularly difficult emotionally for a black person to settle for a place in the opposition rather than the government in South Africa after his or her race has been excluded from political power for 300-odd years. Moreover, opposition in any context seems to require a certain steel in an individual; Joe Seremane, the DP’s newest recruit to Parliament, appears to have it in abundance; but possession of it is not that common.
Yet the DP has still to cope with the consequences among voters of its failure to hold on to Mbulawa and Mnisi. In that sense, it has to take responsibility for that failure.
Whatever other reasons the DP has offered for their departure, these two individuals have listed serious political differences. Mnisi alleged, among other things, that the DP was disregarding black voters in its election campaign, while Mbulawa said the DP opposed social and economic transformation.
Those are powerful messages which – if they take hold in the black community, as the ANC surely hopes they will – may seriously harm the DP’s attempts to become a big player in our politics in the coming decades.
There is no prize for recognising that, to became a main player in South Africa, a party must win over mainly black voters and members. Like Henry Ford’s Model T car, a party can have any colour, as long as it’s black.
It has taken the DP and its predecessors – the Progressive Party, Progressive Reform Party and Progressive Federal Party – nearly 40 years to make serious inroads into white opinion, as it is doing now. It is not therefore difficult to understand why, tactically, the bulk of the DP’s attention may now be falling on white voters. On June 2, it may well emerge as the biggest party among whites.
But the strategic challenge for the DP lies among blacks. It has, indeed, made some progress in garnering support in this quarter. Dusky folk of one shade or another are now in the majority at DP congresses and many meetings – because they want to be there rather than through window-dressing.
Yet a massive job remains to be done if the DP wants to convince a sizeable portion of black people that they should reward it with their vote as perhaps the authentic representative of the liberal ideas that have evidently won out in South Africa.