Politics can be a brutal profession. One minute you are in the Cabinet, the next you’re not. You might have come in the top 10 in the African National Congress’s national executive committee election not even two years ago, and been picked in the top 10 for the election candidates’ list, but it means nothing in the final choice of The Chief.
They give you a secretary for a month, to help ease the ‘phase out”, which is nice. But if you haven’t driven your own car for 10 years, a secretary is not much use, because you lose the chauffeur-driven car immediately. Suddenly, like Kader Asmal, you are having to share a car with the missus. Oh, welcome back real life!
One minute you’re plotting your path towards being Speaker of the Pan African Parliament, the next your dream lies in tatters. Frene Ginwala was on the way to the ANC’s first caucus after the election on April 23 when, just five minutes before it was due to start, ANC secretary general Kgalama Motlanthe broke the news that the caucus was going to elect her deputy, Baleka Mbete, as Speaker. Can this be the same ‘we are a family and we look after the family members” ANC that brought Pallo Jordan and Derek Hanekom back in from the cold?
It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. More interest packed into the two weeks post the election than in the two months of the campaign. Jeremy Cronin chides the commentator class for proclaiming the election campaign ‘dull as dish water”. ‘Out there”, he says, it was fascinating. ‘You should have been there”.
But we weren’t ‘out there”; politics, like any profession, is always more interesting for the professionals immersed in their profession.
Partly because it was desperately short of money compared with previous years and partly, for solid strategic reasons, the ANC’s campaign was based on voter contact, on getting the whole leadership ‘out there”, including Thabo Mbeki.
It is remarkable listening to some of them talk. It is as if they have been on a Hippie Yoga Retreat. ‘Hey, man, it was so cool, just being with Our People. My soul is so rejuvenated!”
I re-read Jeremy Paxman’s The Political Animal the other day. It is as entertaining and sharply observed an account of the political profession as you will find. Paxman identifies seven core characteristics for a politician. First, self-confidence (or the appearance thereof). Second, dedication. The third is physical: ‘You need enormous reserves of energy”, and getting ill is not an option. Fourth, incurable optimism, or self-delusion, however you prefer to diagnose it. Fifth, the ability to sift through a mountain of bilge to find the one nugget of political gold. Sixth, unswerving loyalty: your party bosses will delegate the most boring, demeaning, embarrassing and dishonest tasks to you, and you have to grin and bear it. Last, you need, as Paxman puts it, ‘a wife or husband who doesn’t object to long separations, to coming second, to trailing around party meetings like some well-groomed spaniel, to being admired and petted but never listened to”.
Paxman adds another, optional one: gambling; you need a propensity for risk because it is an inherently risky game. Out there right now, there are at least 13 people who, had their party gained just a few more people, would be members of Parliament. Equally, there are some for whom Christmas has come early. They are sitting on the benches of the National Assembly. For Asmal and Ginwala the luck ran out; for Jordan and Hanekom, the dice rolled their way.
Meanwhile, the parties are coming to terms with how the electoral cookie crumbled. The ANC’s power, dominating a widely centre ground of politics, is consolidated. Obviously. The Democratic Alliance’s position as the main — and sole — national party of opposition is consolidated, albeit that its collective head is now sore from banging on the glass ceiling that clearly exists at around the 15% mark.
Beyond the DA, what we have is a series of ’boutique” parties that represent specific parts of the electoral market, but which have no apparent appeal outside of their neatly confined boxes. Thus, the Inkatha Freedom Party’s position as a small, essentially regional party is consolidated. About 964 000 of its 1 080 000 votes came from KwaZulu-Natal. Ditto the United Democratic Movement with the Eastern Cape, where it collected 202 000 of its 355 000 total.
With 50% of its vote coming, unsurprisingly, from the Western Cape, the Independent Democrats look like the new (cross-race) home for liberal dissidents. It is perhaps more than a coincidence that it now has the same number of MPs in the National Assembly (seven) as the DP did after 1994.
With a majority as great as that of the ANC, the doom and gloom merchants are bound to have a field day. It must be irritating, but the larger the majority, the greater the onus to continually remind everyone of your commitment to not abusing it.
In this context, it has been an untidy start to the new Parliament for the ANC. The 10-year celebration on Monday was stuffed up by a fight about the rules. And for what purpose? So FW de Klerk could speak — surely a case of misplaced priorities.
First though, the ANC decided it wanted even more control over the standing committee on public accounts and so discarded the tradition of an opposition MP chairing the crucial oversight committee.
Ever since I described him in these columns as a ‘shark-eyed filibuster supreme”, I have not been top of Vincent Smith’s Christmas card list. Now Smith has been rewarded for having politically closed down the committee during its 2002 year of strife over the arms deal.
The committee has never recovered, at the expense of proper oversight of public expenditure. Perhaps Smith truly believes he can lead it back to where it was before the arms deal. But if so, is it optimism or self-delusion, or merely dedication and loyalty?