Analysis
Jaspreet Kindra
Faced with a high unemployment rate and a president in denial over the causes and effects of HIV/Aids, what would an effective opposition party do in a democratic state?
In India, where parties have grown up under the shadow of Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign against the British Raj, opposition leaders would have staged a hunger strike outside Parliament to force an admission of remorse from Thabo Mbeki. Oppositionists would, in all likelihood, have burned effigies of the president, held marches and rallies in harness with the civic bodies, and even called for a nationwide work stoppage.
What happens in South Africa? Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon provides clever sound bites decrying the ruling African National Congress.
It is the ANC’s ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), that has moved beyond words to action by mobilising the churches against the government and the ANC’s Aids stance. Cosatu has even tried to address unemployment by setting up a job-creation trust.
The leaders of the DA make a suggestive contrast with Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of India’s largest opposition party, the Congress.
Gandhi was pushed to the political centre stage in the world’s largest democracy three years ago, when her party, once led by her late husband, Rajiv Gandhi, faced a leadership crisis.
She brushed up her rudimentary Hindi which she speaks with a strong Italian accent donned a sari, and covered her head as a sign of respect for conservative rural communities. By identifying with the masses in this way, she has become a popular leader despite the handicap of her ethnic origins.
Almost seven years after the end of apartheid, Leon has not mustered a working grasp of a single language spoken by the black majority in South Africa.
The problem for the DA is, in a sense, the reverse of the ANC’s. The latter is trying to manage a transition from being a mass movement to a political party. The DA needs to connect with the masses.
If Leon is serious about projecting the DA as an alternative government, he has to do a lot more than pose for pictures in a doctor’s coat. His “day in the life” campaign, in which he spent a day with ordinary working people in an attempt to identify with them, looked half-hearted and patronising.
Can Leon shed the dark suits and go to a few football games, just as former president Nelson Mandela watched rugby at Ellis Park? Can the DA transfer its headquarters to Soweto like former United States president Bill Clinton, who set up his office in Harlem on his retirement?
Mail & Guardian journalist Thebe Mabanga recalls the time when Leon, accompanied by the DA chairperson, Joe Seremane, was campaigning in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township before last year’s municipal elections. Seremane was not used as the principal speaker to establish a connection with the crowd. Instead, he was used as a translator for Leon’s campaign rhetoric.
The trouble with the Democratic Party component of the DA is that it is too clever. DP leaders are exceptional political adversaries, more adept at scoring points in Parliament than finding common ground with a farm worker trying to stretch his last few rands to the end of the month.
There are exceptions. One is MP Vincent Gore, whose constituency is Alexandra. Despite being confined to a wheelchair, and living in Sandton, he knows every street of the township. Unlike the rest of the DP’s chardonnay-sippers, he has entrenched himself in the hearts of township residents simply by being there.
The DP has not come to terms with the fact that it operates in a Third World country where the majority of people are poor and illiterate. This has implications for its approach to a man like Cape Town mayor Peter Marais. He may be uncouth and bombastic, but he speaks the language of the Cape Flats. The DA need not feel shy of accepting such a man into its folds.
In India there are many examples of actors turned politicians who at election time dress up as the gods and goddesses they have portrayed. It is a country where parties are more tactically flexible, and to catch votes, tolerate political buffoons.
Strictly speaking it is not a problem restricted to developing countries. After all, the US elected George W Bush.