analysis
Drew Forrest
Last Friday I experienced a creeping sensation every hack knows and dreads publication remorse.
The Mail & Guardian was spot on when it reported that there is no immediate prospect of cabinet posts for the New National Party in African National Congress-dominated provinces, as provided for in its pact with the ANC.
Because of constitutional restrictions on the size of provincial cabinets, this would mean “redeploying” ANC MECs. Politicians are usually flexible on principles but not on their jobs.
What started to feel less secure was our prediction that NNP boss Marthinus van Schalkwyk’s hopes of national Cabinet glory were fading.
Rumours of an imminent Cabinet reshuffle had started doing the rounds and senior Nats were a little too smug about our report.
Van Schalkwyk’s fate lies in President Thabo Mbeki’s hands, and Mbeki clearly believes the NNP-ANC pact could play a pivotal role in national reconciliation. The president would surely want to treat the Nat leader and perhaps, by symbolic implication, Afrikaners more considerately than did the Democratic Alliance’s Tony Leon.
Mbeki has also shown a propensity for sealing party alliances with government posts. Significantly, his State of the Nation address was free of the “two-nation” refrain.
Then a second thought supervened: What does it matter? Van Schalkwyk would strut about the national stage in a minor portfolio for two years, savouring his petty triumph over Leon and all those who deride him for his short trousers. In the background, like distant thunder at a picnic, would loom the 2004 election.
In fairness, Van Schalkwyk is no “kortbroek”, if this means a political ingnue. He has shown himself a wily street fighter with a stubborn will to survive.
His lack of both charisma and strong beliefs make it easy for him to trade political colours.
Within the ANC there is hard-nosed acceptance of, but no enthusiasm for, the association.
Van Schalkwyk’s masterstroke has been to sell himself to the ANC leadership as an actual or potential representative of racial minorities. Mbeki and his chief negotiator, ANC chairperson Mosiuoa Lekota, are looking beyond the immediate gains of the DA split and a commanding presence in the Western Cape executive. They genuinely view the NNP as the key to deracialising South African politics or of uniting the races in an ANC-led front.
This sheds an interesting light on Mbeki, who is not the hard-line Africanist portrayed by some. He has no time for glib-tongued Europhiles of the Leon variety, but, like his predecessor Nelson Mandela, he is greatly interested in courting “the white tribe of Africa”. If Van Schalkwyk is to be his vehicle, this is a backward-looking fantasy.
Mbeki is a leader driven by ideas, which he is often curiously slow to adapt in changed circumstances. The NNP has long ceased to be a volksparty, just as Zanu-PF was no longer the unquestioned voice of Zimbabweans a good while before Mbeki came to accept the fact.
The idea that white Afrikaners are less racist and ANC-shy than English-speakers is a romance widespread among black intellectuals. One suspects that among black farmworkers it enjoys less currency.
It is a sad fact that Leon’s “fight-back” campaign in the 1999 election resonated among hundreds of thousands of white Afrikaners. NNP support collapsed in the northerly provinces where it is concentrated and in KwaZulu-Natal its base shrank by 80%, suggesting it had lost both white Afrikaner and Indian support.
How, in the two years before the next election, can it possibly recover lost ground? More to the point, how can it avoid shedding more of this constituency while in a co-operative relationship with the ANC?
The other blunt fact of the 1999 election is that the Western Cape share of total NNP vote rose from 30% to 46%. Three years ago, it was already on the way to becoming a coloured-based regional party.
Could the Western Cape not at least guarantee its survival, as KwaZulu-Natal continues to undergird an Inkatha Freedom Party whose national presence has also evaporated? Electoral trends suggest the NNP’s coloured base is a wasting asset. Although the Western Cape remained by far its strongest region, its share of the provincial vote fell by nearly half in 1999, while the ANC polled the largest number of votes for the first time. In the Northern Cape, where the Democratic Party is not a factor, the Nats’ voting support plummeted from 170 000 to 74 000. In both provinces the NNP’s nemesis has been its new-found partner, the ANC.
Why should coloured voters drawn to the ruling party because of national delivery programmes reverse their allegiance?
The NNP suffers from more than its policy destitution, a lack of a clear constituency and lacklustre leadership. Much has been written about the undoubted damage inflicted on Leon by last year’s DA rupture but Van Schalkwyk can hardly be unscathed. His bed-hopping in search of a new breadwinner signals a lack of moral centre and sense of direction to voters.
In its new guise, supposedly independent but in partnership with the ANC, the NNP is neither fish nor fowl, and is likely to attract neither the protest nor the gratitude vote. It will have no trouble bashing the DA in 2004, but how will it distinguish itself from its far more threatening partner, the ANC, in the mind of the coloured electorate?
As Van Schalkwyk’s political property dwindles, the wholesale digestion of the NNP by its historic foe will move up the agenda.
He is unlikely to bring much that the ANC could not get by its own devices. In effect, Mbeki and Lekota may have shackled their party to a corpse.