Tony Leon’s arrogant treatment of the NNP drove it into the ANC’s arms, argues Drew Forrest
In the highly fluid aftermath of the New National Party’s withdrawal from the Democratic Alliance, it is impossible to say how much damage has been inflicted on the multiparty cause in South Africa. But if there is significant damage, the strategic miscalculations and high-handed style of DA leader Tony Leon will be largely to blame.
Of course, Marthinus van Schalkwyk is a rank opportunist who wants to save his skin by handing his only political property the Western Cape to the African National Congress. If the ANC plays ball, it will cynically change the law for party advantage.
But the question is whether, by overreaching himself and under-estimating his NNP partner, Leon drove it into the ANC’s arms.
“None of this would have happened if Leon and his circle operated differently,” said one NNP provincial leader.
It is striking how easily Van Schalkwyk sold withdrawal to the NNP federal council last Friday. Only two dissenting voices are said to have been raised, and insiders say speaker after speaker described their cathartic relief at the party’s disengagement. This hardly supports Leon’s claims that “a small group of people” resisted his leadership and the decommissioning of the NNP.
The two themes of that meeting were Leon’s arrogant and contemptuous treatment of his ally, and his desire for Democratic Party hegemony. “Paul Kruger told the British: you don’t want the vote, you want my country. Likewise, Tony wanted domination, not co-operation,” said one council member.
For Institute for Democracy in South Africa analyst Richard Calland, Leon’s strategy from the outset has been to asset-strip, by taking over the NNP’s structures and electoral base and “merging it into oblivion”.
Given the weakness and intellectual incoherence of the NNP, and Leon’s plan to present the DA as a government in waiting, this approach may have made long-term sense.
But it was far from the united opposition he offered last year. By moving so impetuously, months after the formation of the alliance, he belittled NNP leaders and left them insecure about their survival prospects.
Over ambition and over-confidence are Leon’s besetting vices. As shown by the DP’s 1999 election campaign, he is oblivious to the emotional and symbolic resonance of his actions.
These faults have been reinforced by his strategic adviser, Ryan Coetzee, whose survey-based approach ignores the messiness of politics and who has encouraged Leon in utopian expectations, for example that the DA can cut the ANC’s majority to below 50% in 2004.
Openly dismissive of the NNP, and perceived as Leon’s spy in the unicity and the Western Cape government, Coetzee is hated by that party.
Leon’s determined move against Peter Marais and latterly Van Schalkwyk were seen by NNP leaders as further evidence of a preconceived take-over plan to which the Cape Town street-naming affair was harnessed.
They point to Coetzee’s alleged advice to Leon in April this year, in a document found after his computer was stolen, on how to purge his deputy. They suggest Leon’s repeated demands that Van Schalkwyk state his loyalty to the leader, when he had publicly done so, were a scene-setting tactic.
Calland dismisses as “impossible” the claim that Van Schalkwyk, very much the junior DA partner outside the Western Cape, was mounting a “reverse takeover” of the alliance.
An ineffectual and controversy-dogged mayor, Marais was a clear obstacle to Leon’s plan to present the unicity as a governance showpiece to the wider electorate.
But the move against him was premature, and Leon picked the wrong battleground.
If the mayor had been caught with his fingers in the till, or in some flagrant act of nepotism, Leon might have taken the NNP with him. But the charge was perceived as flimsy, and the punishment as outweighing the crime.
The Heath inquiry did not conclusively nail Marais of vote-rigging, and the fact that Leon pushed on regardless while shifting his ground to the mayor’s overall performance was seen as evidence of malice aforethought. The impression was that he was cynically used to win the metro election and then discarded.
The handling of the case reinforced perceptions of DP arrogance and hegemonic ambitions.
“The DP claims to be federalist, but the whole Marais business was engineered from the centre,” an NNP leader complained. “It wasn’t even taken to the DA’s Western Cape management committee.”
Apparently intended to prepare the ground for Van Schalkwyk’s expulsion from the alliance, the leaking of the NNP’s debt to Absa may also have played a part in precipitating the split.
NNP leaders reacted furiously to what they saw as dirty tactics. They claim both parties agreed to take their separate liabilities into the alliance and that Absa last year accepted a R1-million settlement of the NNP debt while writing off the balance.
They complain, also, that Leon demanded an end to separate party fund-raising.
DP triumphalism must have been a factor in Van Schalkwyk’s desperate search for a way of going solo without shedding council seats. His overture to the ANC chairperson Mosuioa Lekota who is charged with weakening the DA was no doubt partly driven by a desire to settle scores.
The fallout from the split is still unforeseeable, but there is a grave risk opposition politics will suffer. If floor-crossing legislation is passed, or municipal elections called, the unicity and several marginal DA councils in the Western and Northern Cape are likely to fall to an ANC-NNP alliance.
At provincial level, where members were elected on separate party tickets, no legislation is required. If the ANC and NNP team up, or the ANC claims its right to form a government as the majority party, Leon will lose the Western Cape as a model of alternative rule.
The ANC may now “asset-strip” the NNP. Alternatively, the NNP could rebrand itself as a regional coloured party, along Inkatha lines. This would pose a serious threat to the DA’s multi-ethnic ambitions.
Given that the alliance’s DP leadership is already seen as an Anglo-Jewish club, Leon’s actions could have other long-range effects. Far from reading it as a blow for clean government, some senior black DA members say they are unhappy with his treatment of Marais, and predict electoral repercussions. If radio phone-in programmes are a pointer, black people sympathise with Marais.
His imperious handling of the NNP may also have hurt him among white Afrikaners. Praag, an Afrikaner lobby group, commented this week that “it appears he sees the country through Houghton eyes, and that the DA is still ruled by a PFP clique whose trademark quality has always been that they look down on everyone in the country except well-heeled urban English-speakers”.
Leon has charisma and is an effective parliamentarian. But he miscalculated in the 1999 election campaign by rejecting a coalition with the ANC in the Western Cape, and seems to have miscalculated in the current imbroglio.
The question now must be whether he and his inner circle have the realism, patience and judgement in short, a sufficiently reliable sense of their country to take the DA and opposition politics forward.