Jeremy Cronin
Crossfire
The newly launched Democratic Alliance (DA), dominated as it is by Tony Leon’s party, represents two not entirely converging impulses found in the Democratic Party.
On the one hand there is the electoral juggernaut that quite shamelessly stirs the racial phobias of minority constituencies.
On the other, there is the DP’s Thatcherite neo-liberalism, a radical programme for the restructuring of South African society, by way of swingeing privatisation, the radical restructuring of a rightless South African working class, and the shaping of a state that is lean (let the rich pay fewer taxes) and mean (let their private property be guaranteed).
This Thatcherism presents itself as meritocratic and “non-racial”. Should it be actively implemented in over-drive (it is, given global realities, already materialising partially), it may well forge a new non-racial elite. But it would also accentuate the time bomb of racialised poverty.
Understanding the DP in this way helps to better understand the reasons for, and the implications of, the effective swallowing-up of the New National Party in the DP-dominated DA. Marthinus van Schalkwyk’s party, suffering the humiliation of its own recent past, has found it difficult to flirt energetically with minority racial phobias. Leon has felt less constrained.
The DP will, of course, reject this allegation, but it should not feign innocence. It plays the race card subliminally perhaps, but all the more manipulatively for that reason. Consider its recent Zim-phobia campaign.
Right on our doorstep there is a country in which a state of emergency has prevailed since 1973. Independent multiparty politics have been stifled for 27 years. Opposition supporters have been jailed, others have been removed from employment.
Trade union activity has been repressed, and students and young people are routinely harassed. Earlier this year, the youth congress in this country had to relocate its national conference into South Africa because of intimidation.
Professionals, not least media workers, constantly run foul of a maze of legislation and they are whimsically fired from their posts if they offend the feudal sensibilities of the ruling elite. In the countryside, peasants, many of them women, suffer under the domination of “traditional” head-men.
The country I am referring to is Swaziland. I might be mistaken, but I do not recall a single DP press release, still less poster campaign protesting against the stifling of democratic rights in Swaziland. Am I being cynical if I suspect that this lack of interest might have to do with the fact that, in Swaziland, it is black professionals, trade unionists, youth and rural people who are denied their basic rights? Are they too dark, too progressive, or too marginal to be worried about?
Come to think about it, I do not recall much DP outrage when Zimbabwean students and trade unionists, protesting against the savagery of an International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programme, were bearing the brunt of oppression a few years ago. But how all of our opposition parties woke up when white-owned farms were invaded in Zimbabwe!
The DP’s poster campaign – “Without a strong opposition, SA = Zimbabwe” – does not utter a single racist word, and yet it knowingly stirs up race phobias. In many conservative white suburbs “Zimbabwe” symbolises the “fact” that all blacks are basically savages and when these savages are in charge, well, you don’t want to make the same mistake as Piet Retief.
My own assigned constituency, Blue Downs, is a predominantly coloured lower-middle and working class township. A majority of the residents voted, last time, for the NNP. For many of them “Zimbabwe” means Khayelitsha, just across the N2. Land invasions in our neighbouring country evoke the fear of being swamped by the “people from the Eastern Cape”.
I am sure in some Indian constituencies Robert Mugabe evokes memories of Idi Amin and all of this implies the “inevitable” consequences of majority rule in Africa.
The DP is smart enough to understand this, and it is quite happy to play electoral politics, nurturing malignant fears, regardless of the long-term dangers to the national fabric we are trying to nurture.
Will anything convince me that the DP is not deliberately playing with racist phobias? I have a suggestion: let them sponsor (with all of their Zim-hysteria, tele-campaign fundraising booty) a poster that reads: “Without a strong, democratic ANC, SA = Swaziland, Zimbabwe, etc.”
In the interests of nation-building, I will even help them put it up.
But what about the other core strand of DP politics? Indeed, they have already spent their Zim booty on a poster that seeks to mobilise against a more redistributive property rates policy. This Thatcherite neo-liberalism will certainly go down well among the more myopic property owners in Constantia and Houghton, but as the NNP in the Western Cape will be telling Leon, it is not going to fly on the Cape Flats.
This is the significance of the new DA in a nutshell. Thatcherism plus the race- card trumps the NNP attempts to explore, under the clumsy title of “Christian democracy”, a more centrist, a more redistributive place in South African politics.
Jeremy Cronin is deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party and an ANC MP