Jaspreet Kindra The African National Congress has launched a concerted effort to woo the Afrikaner community ahead of the local government elections.
A sense of urgency has been added to the recruiting drive with the launch of the newly formed Democratic Alliance (DA) of the Democratic Party and the New National Party.
The ANC is concentrating on natural DA turf in areas such as the Free State and Gauteng. In the Western Cape, the ruling party will be gunning for the key Afrikaans-speaking coloured working-class vote.
The ANC’s constituency offices in Randfontein and Carletonville are staffed by white Afrikaners, while the party’s regional secretary in Randfontein, Stephen Motingoa, says white Afrikaners “often walk into [our branches] looking for information on the party”. Nationalism and recognition of ethnic rights are two of the issues on which the ANC is trying to reach out to the Afrikaner community, in which it sees a natural ally in its long-term strategy to building a multiracial constituency, ANC sources say. The ANC is using NNP defectors to capture the Afrikaner vote. The party is hoping for more NNP defections before the elections, which it hopes will give further impetus to its “recruit Afrikaner” drive. A prime target would be Manie Schoeman, the former NNP Eastern Cape head, who was suspended for failing to endorse the formation of the DA.
The ANC’s attempts to reach out to the minority vote featured at the national general council gathering in Port Elizabeth last week. Secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe said: “New branches are being launched where we never had a presence before … branches in predominantly white areas like Randfontein in Gauteng and De Aar East in the Northern Cape, which used to be strongholds of the NNP and others.” The ANC’s Youth League has already established links with Die Afrikanerbond Jeugliga on building “new patriots”. The organisations jointly hosted a youth conference opened by President Thabo Mbeki in Gauteng last month. Die Afrikanerbond Jeugliga president Jan du Plooy declined to comment on the ANC’s political ambitions but said: “We feel the Afrikaans-speaking community must broaden their choice regarding any political movement in South Africa to add new impetus to the democratisation process in the country.” South African Communist Party deputy secretary general Jeremy Cronin said the coloured Afrikaans speakers will find “more resonance around their cultural and welfare-type concerns” in the ANC’s policies than in the DP. “English mining houses that have been the historical masters of the DP have scant respect for the national sovereignty of our country,” he says, adding that however distorted the National Party’s concerns might have been, the theme of national sovereignty always prevailed in its dictum. Motingoa, who is also the mayor of Afrikaner-dominated Krugersdorp where an ANC branch will be launched soon, describes the community as “very hard-working and very honest”, which is why the two have had a very good relationship. “We are deliberately recruiting Afrikaners,” says Motingoa. The party intends to field candidates against the DA in all the white wards. The recruitment drive has received impetus from the defection of at least four NNP councillors to the ANC in the West Rand region, and the task of the formation of the Krugersdorp branch has fallen on the shoulders of former NNP councillor Gert Visser.