Thank God it’s over. The daily e-mailed “scoresheet” from Douglas Gibson’s office, recording the latest tally of New National Party “rats”, is a thing of the past; the daily gloat from either NNP leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk or his African National Congress counterparts, as their lust for control of the Cape Town unicity was inexorably requited, a footnote of history.
What all this will do for their relationship with the voters is anyone’s guess. Sadly, the expense of opinion-polling in this country, combined with the narrow-visioned austerity of the big media group
owners in failing to support such polling, means that there is no empirical basis for what I am about to say. But my gut tells me it is accurate: the voters feel let down, betrayed in many cases.
If so, that will denigrate the notion of democracy in the minds of many South Africans, a category of citizen that previous polling has told us have a very high expectation of democracy. South Africans, unlike, say, Namibians, generally see democracy as an outcome-orientated process, and not an event limited to a free and fair election (see www.afrobarometer.org).
In essence, the implication is both profound and entirely reasonable: what is the point of democracy if it does not deliver a better life?
My turn of phrase — a “better life” — is deliberate, derived as it is, of course, from the ANC’s core slogan of the past eight years: “A Better Life for All.” At the time of its design, it was perfect: simple, clear, inclusive (a better life for everyone, not just working-class black people) and aspirational: we are going to improve your lives (though some of the figures that accompanied the slogan, at least in the 1994 election, were flights of fantasy that the ANC later came to regret, such as the promise on house-building).
As South Africa approaches the run-up to the next election, the slogan will become the yardstick. Has the ANC delivered a “better life” will be its electoral test — and an exacting one at that, set as it is against the backdrop of a president who came to power with the epiphet “Mr Delivery” set against his candidacy.
So the information war will heat up. The paradox is this: at the moment when the biggest parties have offered the most promiscuous public image possible, with their enthusiasm for “floor crossing”, so have they also improved their communication capacity to First World standards. The ANC website is superb, for example, though the current home page contains a rather curious choice of photography: next to the headline “Policy Conference Sets tone for 21st National Conference” is a rather unflattering pic of National Assembly Speaker Frene Ginwala apparently fast asleep. Is this deliberate? Was the policy conference really such a bore? I can’t possibly imagine that. I’d walk over hot coals to attend an ANC policy conference.
Anyway, I digress. Back to the opposition. I used the word “rats” in the opening paragraph. That, I want to make clear, is my word, not Mr Gibson’s, though there is no doubt that the ANC does regard the departing NNP councillors as vermin — and, indeed, always did regard them as such, hence the fundamental folly of this feckless piece of political fellatio. Lie back and think of Table Mountain, said Tony Leon to Van Schalkwyk two years ago, while I screw you.
I may well be getting my sexual metaphors a little confused, but the basic point is good: the Democratic Party, as it then was, wanted to consume the National Party and thus remove the competition for opposition voters. Now, they say, the ANC has done it for them.
Certainly, the battleground for non-ANC votes at the next election is shaping up nicely. “A Voice in Government” will be the NNP’s core message. “A Voice in Opposition” will be the Democratic Alliance’s. Like the end of a turbulent marriage, this divorce offers each a clean break. Except for the rancour, there will be very little long-term hangover. In the end, the NNP will expire, as I have always said. It has chosen, with perfectly good sense, to go down in style — in Leeuwenhof (the Western Cape premier’s official home), rather than in flames; with delicious irony, suffocated in the arms of its former enemy the ANC, rather than the two-faced Engelsmanne of the DP.
It suits Van Schalkwyk well, and to be fair to him, he is doing a good job at melding the ANC-NNP alliance in the Western Cape provincial government, with a clear government programme of action. He is a technically gifted politician. By that I mean he is good at managing things (and would probably make a very capable CEO of a middle-to-largish corporation).
How they turn “a voice in government” into a winning election formula in the deep reaches of the working-class coloured community on the Cape Flats will offer a very tricky electioneering challenge. The National Party brand was and still is based on swaart gevaar, on making political capital out of division. Anyone who has driven down Prince George’s Drive, which bisects part of the Cape Flats, will know that the idea that one community — the coloured — is definitively better off than the other, the black African community, is a fiction. Both communities live in appalling squalor; human security and dignity are conspicuous by their absence in both communities.
Now, for the first time, the ANC-NNP alliance offers the prospect of government that will serve both, across all three spheres of government. Nay, it must serve both. If it fails in this respect, then it will signal the failure of the coalition, which will fall apart as a viable working partnership for government.
The question of ideology remains, therefore, of little importance for the Nat ultra-pragmatists (not to be confused with the ultra-left). Does it matter for the DA? It denies that its lurch to the right has been halted for the simple reason that it denies there was any lurch to the right in the first place. Yet only a blind person could see the “Fight Back” campaign of 2000 as anything but a conservative agenda, far removed from the liberal heritage of the DP.
When called the other day by one of Leon’s colleagues and invited to offer a view on the floor-crossing interlude and what it would mean for the DA, I offered the view that it represented an opportunity to start afresh, to return to its liberal roots and to abandon the Napoleonesque designs on the broad reach of opposition politics.
Liberalism has always been a “small business” in political terms. And correctly so: a creed that emphasises individual rights ahead of collective rights should proportion its ambitions on a Pekinese scale — that’s the type of dog, rather than Beijing — rather than monster Doberman.
Whereas Bantu Holomisa’s United Democratic Movement has, for example, taken the trouble to redefine itself in clearer, social democratic terms, ideas and strategy, the DA seems unsure of whether it wants to dig itself out of the ideological hole into which it put itself.
A key adviser answered me by saying: “It is not what but who we stand for.” Thus, its new-found liking for “big government” in the form of its support for the Basic Income Grant is a tactical shift, rather than a conceptual one, born of a self-deluding belief that it is the natural receptacle for disillusioned black voters “left behind by the new elite”, as its spin doctors would put it.
There is nothing like an election to whet the appetite and release the creative juices. So, as the three main parties prepare for major national conferences, the thunder of election time can be heard gently rolling in the background. After the nonsense of the past two weeks, I look forward to the next general election and the parties’ date with destiny: the ballot box. Campaign 2004 starts now.
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland