A SECOND LOOK
Jaspreet Kindra
The Democratic Alliance is not a party of true liberals, claims African National Congress spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama. This is the ANC’s major problem with the official opposition for “if the Democratic Party and the DA believed in liberalism it would not demonise a democratically elected government”.
Exposing that “problem” are four senior ANC leaders, including Ngonyama, whose satire on the events leading up to the formation of the DA was launched this week.
A Marriage Made in Heaven refers to the DP and the DA as “liberal”. Colin Gardner, a former member of the old Liberal Party and now a member of the ANC, describes the use of inverted commas as significant. “They are stating that they do respect liberalism as an ideology. And they would probably be sympathetic to liberals like Alan Paton.”
An agitated Tony Leon says it is “completely preposterous” that someone like Ngonyama “who on his good days is an apology for a socialist could decide what a good liberal or a bad liberal was”.
Leon says the DP has been a “responsible, decent and democratic opposition” and he would have engaged in a debate on liberalism if the criticism had come from liberals of the ilk of Helen Suzman.
Gardner, a liberal within the ANC, attempts to explain liberalism in South Africa. “Liberalism means different things in different contexts. A liberal in the wider context across the world could be someone who disagrees with the policies of the day so a liberal in England would be different from a liberal in Spain.”
However in the South African context, liberalism has had specific political connotations.The aim of the Liberal Party “was to introduce democratic thinking into South Africa”. In the South African Communist Party, “liberals” were often the “moderates making people less revolutionary”, and that’s the stigma that remains attached to the word. Well, besides the association of liberalism with a “white party, which intends to fight a democratically elected government”. And its reputation as the voice of free-marketeers.
Gardener says liberals such as Helen Suzman are respected by the ANC because while criticising the government “she always makes the point that thank God we do not have the previous regime and that this is a democratically elected government”.
A major ANC gripe explicitly portrayed in the book is that liberals traditionally “left of right”, as opposed to left of centre, have joined hands with rightwingers, such as the New National Party.
Leon tears at the criticism, pointing out that when the NNP and DP were in the opposition as separate entities, the ANC was constantly “talking up the NNP as the good opposition while they always talked down the DP. I promise you if something happens tomorrow and the alliance goes asunder, the ANC will be at the NNP’s door.”