Tony Leon CROSSFIRE
Retiring United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once memorably observed: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” So, too, with Crossfire (“Democracy requires wisdom too”, September 22 to 28). In order to concertina my words into his argument, Firoz Cachalia is guilty, at best, of elliptical reasoning or, at worst, of decontextualised distortion.
In any event, Cachalia’s reasoned tone in his contribution to the race debate is somewhat undermined by his exceptionally selective use of a speech I delivered at the University of the Free State on September 9 1998. Cachalia claims I made the “astonishing” claim that liberal democracy is “the ideology” of a racial group, namely the whites. In fact the point I made is that the white group had made an extraordinary change from its almost total dismissal of the Progressive Party (PP) as “outlandish, impractical and even revolutionary” to a majority of the same group accepting almost the exact same sort of policies by 1998. Of this conversion, I said: “In so doing [the white group] has cast off the political shackles which once tied it to the apartheid millstone.” Incidentally, it was John Vorster who described the same philosophy as variously “dangerous”, “fatal” and “revolutionary”. The remarkable feature which I believe both history and the African National Congress (and their media satraps) have paid insufficient attention to is, precisely and emphatically, such a paradigm and political shift in such a group’s opinion and voting patterns. As someone who was a foot soldier in successive PP defeats at the hands of the same electorate in the 1970s, and who now leads the same movement, I am entitled, indeed compelled, to make this important observation and to commend this historic change.
The second observation which Cachalia attacks as “hypocritical” is my observation that opposition needs a defined and important constituency which the government cannot ignore, whether it is “a political or a racial minority”. However, Cachalia concentrates only on the racial, not the political. Let me confide that my fondest dream would be an engagement with the ANC on the merits, or on principle, or even on the practicalities of governance. But President Thabo Mbeki, not I, has decided that we will debate racially, not rationally. He should be in the sights of Cachalia. But of course Cachalia chooses deflection as the best form of defence. In fact, my formulation of the opposition’s interim strategy was borrowed – with acknowledgement – from a much longer and thoughtful piece on the opposition debate made by Steven Friedman, no friend of my party or its electoral tactics. While I believe speaking for a minority constituency is absolutely legitimate, Cachalia conveniently omitted the crucial rider from the same speech which he so carefully cherry-picked. I added:
“It [minority representation] is not a long-term goal to be sure, because in properly serving such minority constituencies we must reach out to others not repel them with our rhetoric, and so help bridge the fundamental divide of our society.”
Cachalia concludes his article by stating that a “continuous national consensus- seeking conversation” is essential to move South Africa forward to a non-racial future. Although these are admirable sentiments they are belied by the conduct of the ANC, which routinely dismisses opponents as “racist” or “defenders of white privilege”. The fact is that the ANC has abandoned non- racialism for racial nationalism. Such a policy may or may not be justifiable, but it cannot be reconciled with either the Charterist tradition of the ANC nor the constitutional injunction to work towards the creation of a “non-racial” South Africa.
Thus, although the declared aims of the ANC remain the creation of a non-racial South Africa, its real aims are quite different. The result is the fog of obfuscation which obscures and distorts political debate in South Africa today. In 1998, in that speech, I set my party, then just seven MPs, the task of becoming the “second party of South Africa”. Few thought it possible; we did it eight months later. The formation today of the Democratic Alliance (DA) – now consisting of 85 MPs – is an opportunity to advance on to the major, and majority, front in South African politics. The choice facing South Africa is a simple one: between the non-racial liberalism of the DA and the racial nationalism of the ruling party.