Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
And how, I was musing aloud on the road back from the election counting centre in Pretoria, do opposition parties begin to contend for power?
“By getting bigger,” responded my colleague, Mungo Soggot.
And how do they get bigger?
“By winning more votes, of course.”
And how do they do that in the South African case?
“Let me think about that,” said Mungo.
We did. We still are. So, too, are opposition leaders after their showing in Wednesday’s national and provincial elections.
They need, in their own interests, to find the answer. And, as some people have been arguing with increasing anxiety recently, it is in the interests of the survival of our democracy that they do so.
The African National Congress may well be as splendid a bunch of people as we are told, but that is no reason to believe that they can resist the temptations of near unfettered power for any substantial length of time. Moreover, the survival of democratic pluralism in our country is, frankly, more important than keeping the venerable old ANC chomping at the trough of power.
So then, how might our democracy be best served by the opposition parties now?
A first step may be to recognise that there are two opposition blocs. One is to the right of the ANC and is centred on the Democratic Party, (most members of the) New National Party and the United Democratic Movement. The other is, rhetorically at least, of the left and comprises the small Pan Africanist Congress, Azanian People’s Organisation and the Socialist Party of Azania, among others. These two opposition groupings should not bother trying to find common ground.
A second step may be to recognise that each of these blocs has views which resonate favourably within the ANC. It would, for example, be difficult to slip a feeler gauge between the views on the economy of a number of senior ANC and DP members I know. And the frustrations of some grassroots leftwingers in the ANC and South African Communist Party find better expression in the extravagant rhetoric of some small left-wing parties than in the weasel words of their own leaders dependent for a livelihood in Parliament on their obeisance to the ANC leadership.
That being so, a third step may be to seek by guile and guts to induce or force the break-up of the alliance of the ANC, SACP and Congress of South African Trade Unions. For it will be that much more difficult for the opposition parties to win converts to their causes for as long as the alliance holds together. And that may be for a long time yet, to judge by the failure of courage among those who privately brief journalists against their leader, Thabo Mbeki, and various policy directions but publicly echo the approved wisdom and lash anyone who voices reservations less far- reaching than their own.
A fourth step may be to court subtly any in the ruling alliance who fall out with Mbeki. One of Mbeki’s more evident weaknesses is a tendency to draw far too clearly defined a border between his circle of political intimates and the rest. One effect of this is to exclude often significant and highly talented individuals in a way that invites them to become anti- Mbeki activists or to see their political future elsewhere.
But these four steps are likely to carry the opposition parties significantly forward only to the extent that they address successfully the two main challenges before them. The first is to find common cause among each other where it exists and to unite in appropriate forms, be it by merger or alliance.
This first challenge may involve the opposition parties in looking inwards for a while longer. Tony Leon, the DP leader, has suggested a “Codesa of the opposition” – a sort of protracted effort, if lengthy it must be, to find meeting points. Leon’s suggestion has got some tart responses from other opposition parties in recent days. No doubt this is partly because they knew Leon’s party would do better than most of theirs and because he chose to issue his call just as they were embarking on their closing efforts to stave off electoral oblivion. But we can expect attitudes to soften in coming weeks.
The second, and the most important, challenge before the opposition parties is to start facing outwards soon. They need to appeal to the vast majority of voters – and that means to appeal to black people who currently vote for the ANC. The opposition parties’ focus over the past three months – on pilfering voters from each other – will need to become something of the past.
Personally, I do not believe that the DP, by seeking to smash the NNP and dominate the right opposition, has talked itself into an ideological corner from which it cannot in future years reach a sizeable number of black supporters of the ANC. Parties are perpetually repositioning themselves, and there is no reason to suggest the DP is less adept at doing so than others.
In doing so, however, the DP and others will need to pay close attention to the different factors that cause voters to change allegiance. There is a growing body of work on what these are. The merit of a party’s policy is only one. Many, less tangible factors are at least as important.
Voters need to feel a party is not only sensitive to their problems and aspirations but that it is also part of their social idiom, so to say. Voters need to feel comfortable with the accents, skin colour and mannerisms of a party’s representatives and organisers. Achieving this can, of course, be particularly difficult in South Africa, where the primary political paradigms of race and past privilege show no signs of abating.
But, in what is likely to be a very long game, the opposition will have to play the chameleon far better than hitherto. It will need to fashion its strategies differently. It will need to convince many blacks who now support the ANC that, when the opposition opposes, it is opposing on their behalf – that it is not fighting back on behalf of white privilege but for the opportunities or services most wanted by those who most need them.