Tony Leon has transformed the official opposition into a force to be reckoned with. He spoke to Howard Barrell and Sipho Seepe about transformation, President Thabo Mbeki and giving the government a run for its money
Seepe: The challenge that faces South Africa is social transformation. The Constitution mentions three aspects. One is economic inequalities. The second is the entrenchment of democracy. The third is the establishment of a non-racial society. What is your party’s take on these challenges?
I’m very committed to the three concepts. If they remain unaddressed, I don’t think South Africa will survive as a democracy or as a country. But, we are very far away from realising those goals for a number of reasons.
To transform society, there is an obvious role for the state. The argument that we should have a minimal state is, frankly, not part of the discourse in South Africa. But it’s ironic that at the very moment that our Constitution and our politics demand the most of the state, this government has actually incapacitated the machinery of state to an extent that it is almost impossible for core functions to be performed because of a range of different policies pursued to meet different agendas. The Coleman Andrews/ South African Airways saga is a case in point. It has enriched one or two individuals and we have countless examples of that kind of thing. It doesn’t transform anyone or anything.
I’m in favour of transformation that gets South Africa from a place where it was to a place it has not yet been.
I’m opposed to what masquerades as transformation and which is simply the redeployment of resources to the ANC [African National Congress] and its friends and relations.
On the question of non-racialism I’ve told Mandela the one thing I regret about his presidency was that I didn’t appreciate it enough at the time. There was a happy non-racial period between 1994 and 1999. In the 1990s South Africa was aspiring towards a non-racial future, even though there was a lot of violence. But what you have at the moment, from the state, is almost a denial of that transition. I think we need to get back to it.
Seepe: How do you reconcile your support for government macroeconomic policy with a desire to see inequalities addressed?
Well, let me say that I support the policy. The government, however, does not implement its own policy properly. That’s the problem. They’ve been quite good on one or two fundamentals like deficit reduction. And it is now not really them, but Tito Mboweni who is trying to keep inflation under control. But they have done practically nothing in respect of, for example, privatisation. It is not an ideological point. But, if you want to put money into the hands of the poorest, one of the few weapons the state has are its assets, many of which should not be in state hands.
The Economist reckons that there is R170-billion worth of privatisable assets in South Africa. We have privatised, you know, perhaps R20-billion of them. So we are far away from where we should be. And the question is: what are we doing with the proceeds of privatisation? Are we just going to make the Coleman Andrews and Saki Macozomas of this world incredibly rich? Or are we going to implement one of our ideas which is far more radical than anything the ANC has proposed create a public unit trust where you would actually take the proceeds of privatisation and give shares out to the people?
The most radical economic thinking we don’t say enough about it comes from my circle, and not from Mbeki’s. We would do far more than just popularise capitalism so people felt they had a stake in the economy. We would actually make people direct beneficiaries of government economic reform. At the moment the only beneficiaries of government economic reform are the elites. Where the ANC has succeeded they’ve succeeded very well: they have taken the elite and they have turned it from a white elite into a very, very quickly blackening and multiracial elite. That’s a necessary process. But they’ve stopped there. They have not transformed the lives of ordinary South Africans.
Barrell: Turning to your party: you individually have had great success in consolidating the opposition. To what do you attribute this success?
I’m not sure that the National Party opposition of 1994 was an opposition in any meaningful sense. They were really junior partners of the ANC in the government of national unity. I think I then had a very clear idea of what had to be done. I took over the Democratic Party when it was really politically bankrupt. Our base had shrunk to the English-speaking suburbs of Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. We represented literally the elite of English-speaking South Africa and politically we were all over the place.
The first thing I did was to give the party a clear thrust and sharper focus. This caused quite a lot of angst and pain in 1994/5. Ken Owen [now-retired former editor of The Sunday Times] probably hates me more than anyone else in South Africa. But he had an important insight. He said the DP [Democratic Party] was fighting the wrong war with the wrong set of weapons on the wrong battlefield, and that we were still opposing apartheid and they needed to get into the new politics. I very much took that criticism to heart. I pointed out that no one was going to thank us for opposing apartheid.
The party made some massive changes as a result. But, to be perfectly frank, there was a huge factor that helped us. It was that the opposition field had been left vacant. The Nats were the junior partners in government. All the other opposition parties were preoccupied: the PAC [Pan Africanist Congress] was busy back-stabbing Clarence Makwethu; the Freedom Front thought the way forward was to get close to Mandela. So we had an open field in front of us with an open goal. But we took our chances to score.
Barrell: If one looks at the DA [Democratic Alliance] from the outside, it’s quite apparent that there’s some difficulty in integrating two political cultures, the old NNP [New National Party] and the DP side. How serious are these difficulties and what success, if any, have you had in integrating these two cultures?
When I was in charge of a much smaller party, if someone stepped out of line, they’d get a phone call from me and I would go ballistic. But in a much, much bigger party you can’t control everyone, everything, nor should you try to. There are always going to be some dissidents. That’s quite healthy.
Yes, the DP and Nats come from two very different political cultures. As we integrate the two cultures, we are building a new culture. Yesterday, I went into my caucus meeting with 80 pieces of blank paper and I said: I want you to write out what is the core governing principle of your political life what gets you to wake up in the morning, and you can’t say it’s to oppose the ANC, and you can’t say it’s to go and draw a salary? So you can write anything you like within 100 words and tell me. The responses were very interesting. There was a huge amount of congruence among people who come from radically different backgrounds. Our philosophy is starting to meld.
Barrell: So what does motivate Tony Leon when he gets up in the morning?
Well, what motivates me, apart from giving the government a very good run for its money, which I think is part of trying to build a democracy in this country, is a concept of responsible individualism. Liberalism is too often associated with the atomised individual. I don’t think that the individual exists in a society-free zone. I think the individual has responsibilities to family, to community and to nation. But, equally, what motivates me is getting away from group-based thinking, from race consciousness. I say that what you put into your life will more or less determine what you get out of it. Where someone is unable to put something in, then he or she must be helped to put something in. I believe that South Africa’s got to be a society where we create bigger individuals and a smaller state. That really would be my core philosophy.
We’ve got to do this anchored in principles like respect for the rule of law, social justice and the rights of individuals. I think those really are the three pillars of society. And I would say that there was a huge amount of that coming out of the pieces of paper from my caucus colleagues. They would like to see that people don’t get brushed aside. They want a state that is more responsive to its citizens. They want the rule of law reimposed in South Africa.
I also think our party has become much more sensitive to issues that it was previously never exposed to. We have people like Joe Seremane, who was on Robben Island at one stage, and we have other people who came into politics because of PW Botha. Now, what is their common meeting point? It’s understanding each other. It’s very interesting just having spent a year in this larger group. There are not many people who would normally sit down and break bread together and doing so has made them much more sensitive to the needs of the other.
Barrell: It strikes me that the requirements of electoral progress by the DA are a lessening in the importance of the politics of identity, usually measured around the issue of race, an increase in the politics of issue, and more people identifying the DA as the party best able to take forward issues of concern to people. What progress has been made in that direction?
Yes, I think that depiction is correct. We have done away with the previously anarchic character of the opposition. At one stage, there was a huge ANC government and 13 different bits and pieces of the opposition. Now we can say to voters: if you like the government, go and vote for the ANC; if you don’t, there is only one significant other choice, and it’s us, the DA.
I think the ANC is on a collision course with its supporters because it’s not delivering. Frankly, it can’t deliver because it’s incapacitated the ability of the state to deliver at the most basic level. The question is: can we get the disillusionment with the ANC that was manifest in last December’s elections and turn it into a positive vote for us? We can with some. We’ve identified a section of the electorate, about 25% to 35% of the current electorate, who happen to be black Africans who would consider voting for an opposition party. We’ve just got to go after them and that’s what we’re spending a lot of time doing.
At the same time, we’ve got to keep our existing base. I think you can keep what you have and add to it if you’re very focused. I spend every single public holiday in a black area having a political event. I can honestly say that I’ve met more ordinary black people than Thabo Mbeki has. My party is embarking on a programme where it is spending more and more time, and more and more resources, in that voting market, because the biggest criticism made of us has generally been that people don’t see enough of us.
Seepe: Going back to the issue of holding government to account. Your party also initially supported the arms deal. (Leon: Yes.) How did this make sense given that there was no threat of a military invasion and that we have a social deficit in terms of health, housing, jobs and education?
A good question. Let me say and I’m not weaselling out of things that [Douglas] Gibson, who was our defence spokesman at the time, was very qualified in our support. He said it had to be fiscally tight, it had to be sustainable and the deal had to be transparently done. We are pretty sure now that all those conditions have been breached. We have suggested a massive rethink of the arms procurement and that certain of the options currently in the contract should not be taken up so that we can reduce the cost.
I have very little faith in the investigation currently under way, but maybe I’ll be proven wrong.
We thought there should be an arms procurement package because we were told by the chiefs of the South African Navy and the Air Force that, if we were going to have a navy, it had to have ships, and there are no ships of any significant size in the South African navy that can safely be put out to sea. Similarly, if you want an air force, you’ve got to have planes to fly and the Mirages are 40 years old in most cases, so you can’t keep them going. I thought that was a very good argument. I think South Africa does need a defence capability. I accept that we are not under attack, but I think for a country that calls itself a regional or a continental power, and a country that’s got a huge coastline, we’ve got to have some military capacity.
So I’ve got no problems that we should procure ships and planes. How we procured them was something that we were not consulted about. It is quite clear to me that enrichment became a huge factor in this process.
The biggest scandal of this arms deal was exposed in a question my colleague Raenette Taljaard asked Finance Minister Trevor Manuel two weeks ago. The government never covered forward against the falling value of the rand. So the costs of the arms deal are stratospheric.
Seepe: You made a comment recently that people confuse being anti-ANC with being anti-South African. Would you elaborate?
I think this is a key to the future of our democracy. Let me put it in a slightly more positive way: I think you can be pro-South Africa and anti-ANC. In fact, that is the best thing to be in this country.
South Africa is suffering because of the arrogance of power displayed by our government. I was asked last night on Khaya FM: what is the most positive feature of the ANC? I said it was that part of their tradition which speaks to the power of morality. But, unfortunately, the power of morality in the ANC has largely been replaced by the morality of power. The ANC uses the people as door-mats as it waltzes down the corridors of power. And I think you’ve got to stand up to that.
Barrell: To go back to the refocusing of your party towards mainly black areas. I have no doubt that Tony Leon is serious about it but I do wonder how many members of your party are. Aren’t they in for a shock when they find out that you are serious?
Yes, well, no doubt. Everyone has a role to play. I read a book recently it’s one of those rather trite self-improvement manuals, called Who Moved My Cheese? It makes an obvious point: people prefer to inhabit their comfort zones. So, if you come from Durbanville or Houghton, your natural area of comfort is Durbanville or Houghton, and your preference is to operate there and to run a political table at the Tygerberg Valley Shopping Centre or the Killarney Shopping Centre. In that way you’ll see your friends on a Saturday morning and you can do the shopping.
Now that’s fine, and it has its place. It’s your core, your base. But we in the DA have got to move the cheese if we’re serious. We’ve got to move out of those comfort zones. We are going to require every single one of our public representatives local government, provincial parliaments and the National Assembly over a six-week period to do a whole range of public things to connect with people. It will be a massive exercise, and we’re going to make that happen.
Barrell: If you go into a township, in any audience you are going to find, say, one or two construction workers, some office workers, some people who were office workers and who no longer have jobs, people who had jobs but no longer do, the unemployed, the wives, the children, newly employed youths, youths who have no prospect of a job in their lifetimes. You go before them as a newly cast liberal. What kind of programmes can you put before them that make sense to them?
One thing we do is say: look where we govern the Western Cape. We say, we are the only province in the whole country that actually has an Aids treatment policy that’s worthy of the name that if you’re raped or you’re a pregnant woman, you actually have, as of right, access to anti-retroviral treatment. No other province has that. We say: look at the matriculation pass rate; look at what we’ve done with poor black schools we are spending six times more on them than we are on middle-class that is usually coloured or white schools. We don’t use race, we use poverty as a determinant. So we have some concrete delivery items that we are prosecuting with great vigour in the one corner of South Africa we control. We contrast our performance against the ANC’s elsewhere.
Secondly we say: before we can spend money, we have to create money. And there is no short cut to economic growth. Now, I don’t want to sound like Milton Friedman because he has about as much relevance to people’s lives as a B52 bomber. But the idea is that to create jobs we’ve got to build the economy; that we’ve got to create a job-friendly environment. These are things that people relate to. People also respond very much to an appeal for law and order and to the point that it’s the state’s fundamental duty to maintain it. And people respond to the fact that, when the president spends R400-million on a jet or a billion rand is spent paying out teachers not to teach, that there’s something fundamentally wrong.
And then, nobody in government seems to take responsibility for anything anymore. They seem to operate in an ethics-free zone people like Tony Yengeni and the Cabinet ministers and business people who should be taking responsibility for the SAA fiasco. People respond to that.
Seepe: We buy a new jet aircraft so as not to inconvenience the president, but we are willing to inconvenience little babies whose lives might be saved if funds were available. Does that count as moral corruption to you?
Absolutely. First of all, let me just go back to my letters with the president over Aids. It’s indicative of the poverty of South African journalism that they were never cross-examined, except in one or two organs. They revealed a frightening attitude by the head of State that I found bizarre and extreme. In the way he presents a point, Thabo Mbeki is intellectually dishonest. What he does is, he quotes from some journal, or some research, and then he lops off the inconvenient parts of the quote that contradicts his argument. He would fail an ethics test if he were an advocate or attorney. And that’s his style of argument. I think it’s to his great detriment, and it’s to the detriment of the country. I wish he were more straightforward and frank when he has to deal with an issue.
Barrell: Give us the fantasy. Describe the kind of society that the DA would like in South Africa.
A society where people take responsibility for their actions; where people have an opportunity to get ahead; a country where we’re building ladders out of poverty, not just creating more poverty; where children are growing up well, not dying of Aids; and a country in which we have peaceful commerce as the operating principle, not destructive scrabbling over an ever-diminishing economy.
More people are dying of Aids than died in all the wars that have been fought in this country for the last 350 years and yet the fight against Aids is being treated as a sort of optional extra.
I would like to see a country that is a sort of get-ahead, stand-up-and-go-for-it, not a sit-around-and-wait-for-it, country; where lament and excuse have been left to one side and we are free-standing individuals; where we’re not saying I’m white and you’re black, you’re rich and I’m poor, you owe me. But rather: I’m a South African and I want to get ahead.