Howard Barrell
over a barrel
By a stroke of good fortune, a conference on opposition in South Africa that had been planned for many months opened last week just four days after the formation of the Democratic Alliance (DA). It also coincided with Robert Mugabe’s attempts to digest the outcome of Zimbabwe’s general election.
About 50 academics and politicians, plus a handful of journalists and other bottom feeders, spent three days at a private game reserve in the Eastern Cape – this was no hardship posting – to talk about opposition in South Africa and its importance to safeguarding democracy.
As the bontebok grazed, as the butterflies bounced above the aloes, wheezing in the mid-winter heat, and as the the fish eagles cried out on the Kariega river in the valley below, we spoke and listened in air- conditioned luxury. Many of the ideas expressed were learned. But some, in the best traditions of academia, comprised the blindingly mundane dressed up in jargon.
I would not be doing the luminaries who assembled too great an injustice if I summarised majority sentiment thus: One, there is little prospect of a serious opposition force emerging to the left of the African National Congress in the next few years from the ranks of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). And, two, the DA, which has brought together the Democratic and New National parties to the right of the ruling party, is unlikely to make much progress.
I agree with the first of them, though not with the second.
Eddie Webster, labour expert and professor of sociology at the University of the Witwaters-rand, saw Cosatu’s dilemma as fairly typical of that being experienced by trade unions the world over. The rise of neo-liberal economics has placed enormous strains on relations between trade unions and historically allied political parties of the left. As these left-wing parties have themselves adopted the neo-liberal prescriptions of the old class enemy – reducing state involvement in the economy, deregulating labour markets and the like – unions have reassessed relations with them.
The ANC government’s embrace of some neo-liberal options means the Cosatu leadership has, basically, three choices, according to Webster. It can continue to constitute a sort of internal opposition within the tripartite alliance. It can capitulate and be marginalised within the alliance as an influence on government policy. Or Cosatu can leave the alliance and spawn a separate political party of its own.
Webster said he expected Cosatu to continue as an internal opposition.
For Adam Habib, professor of politics at the University of Durban-Westville, the coming into being of a left-wing party of the kind Cosatu might produce could have a big effect on government economic policy. As an opposition electoral threat to the ruling ANC, such a party could be a counterweight to pressures on the government, mainly from abroad, to pursue neo-liberal options.
In private discussions off the conference floor, a number of others felt the Cosatu leadership lacked the intellectual ballast and strategic skills to make a real go of a separate party at this stage – and its leaders themselves seemed convinced of this weakness.
Some predicted that Cosatu, instead of providing opposition within the tripartite alliance, was more likely to be marginalised. Added to this, Cosatu’s allies on the left of the South African Communist Party and within the ANC appeared to lack the political will for a divorce from the ANC.
There is no such lack of will, however, in the case of parties to the right of the ANC. And this may yet produce an ironic outcome in our politics. You will probably have heard as often as I have in recent weeks that, for Tony Leon and the DA ever to make real progress, they need votes from black South Africans. There is no prize for this startling insight.
You will also have heard that, because the leadership of the DA is currently largely white, it follows that it will always be largely white. And, because the DA leadership will always be largely white, the DA is unlikely to win over substantial black support.
Perhaps. But I think not. Racial identity is, and is likely to remain for several generations, a considerable influence on the political and electoral choices South Africans make. But people can, and tens of thousands of black South Africans did in the past general election, vote for parties led by other-race candidates.
Tom Lodge argues in his study of last year’s election* that “it is very difficult analytically to draw a clear distinction between ‘rational’ material considerations and the more emotional preoccupations with social, historical or racial identity which might have informed voter decisions”. But, “on the basis of their material interests, black South Africans had good reasons to support the ANC”. He notes that, in the run-up to the poll, there were “large proportions of the undecided – especially among African voters”. This, he believes, is “an encouraging signal of an increasingly thoughtful and discriminating electorate”.
In recent months one of the DA’s two tributary organisations, Leon’s DP, has targeted the lower middle class in the traditionally black urban townships. It has been sending its MPs there to try to address the people’s frustrations over the state of their streets, poor service delivery, children’s schooling, the shortage of jobs, lack of recreation facilities and, of course, crime.
The DP began this campaign with its own polling showing that 25% of lower-middle- class black people in the urban areas were to some degree “open to” the DP. Last weekend, a Sunday Independent poll of black people in Gauteng townships suggested 17% “could see themselves” voting for the DP at the next election, while a further 17% said they might.
All that this research indicates is the potential for the new DA to garner meaningful black support in coming years. With a lot of hard work by the DA – and a failure by the ANC to deliver services and foster job creation – they may well do so. If they do – as they do – the complexion of their representation and leadership is likely to change, so making a centre-right alternative to the ANC increasingly credible.
If I am right about this, it could create a paradoxical situation for the South African left. Its unwillingness to stand up and to stand alone may mean it hands over to the political right those it claims are its own. If so, the left will have no one to blame but itself – not even purveyors of the Washington consensus.
* Tom Lodge, Consolidating Democracy: South Africa’s Second Popular Election (Johannesburg: Electoral Institute of South Africa and Witwatersrand University Press)