The United Democratic Party (UDM) will not be participating in this year’s State of the Nation debate unless it is allocated reasonable time to raise its supporters’ issues, the party’s leader, Bantu Holomisa, said on Monday.
According to the UDM leader, Parliament on Monday informed him that his party has been given only one minute to participate in the debate scheduled to take place on Friday as part of President Thabo Mbeki’s State of the Nation address.
“If this time allocation is not increased to a reasonable period — as was allocated to us in the previous years — I assure you that the UDM will not attend the debate simply to listen to hours of propaganda and one-sided rubbish from one party,” he said in a statement.
If the party’s concerns are not addressed, Holomisa said the UDM will have no option but to “donate” the one minute to another party.
“We will not give false legitimacy to a one-sided backslapping exercise masquerading as genuine democratic debate.
“Outside the chambers of Parliament large sections of our constituencies are wallowing in abject poverty … and none have escaped the terror and violence of rampant criminals,” he said.
“I want to state unambiguously that this is simply not acceptable. How can I express the concerns and aspirations of hundreds of thousands of UDM voters regarding the State of the Nation in a single minute?” he asked.
New age of denial
It was reported on Friday that a week before President Thabo Mbeki’s State of the Nation address, his “age of hope”, trumpeted in last year’s speech, is at risk.
Despite 96 straight months of economic growth, his recent dismissal of concerns about of two of South Africa’s most pernicious social ills — crime and corruption — have undercut public confidence in his presidency.
An “age of denial”, HIV/Aids, unemployment, crime and corruption now threaten his legacy.
In an interview flighted on South African Broadcasting Corporation television three weeks ago, Mbeki said it was just a perception that crime was out of control.
“It’s not as if someone will walk here to the [television] studio in Auckland Park and get shot. That doesn’t happen and it won’t happen. Nobody can prove that the majority of the country’s 40-million to 50-million citizens think that crime is spinning out of control,” he said.
Asked about recent reports implicating a number of South Africans in a British police probe on corruption between British arms companies and foreign government officials, Mbeki said the bidding process for South Africa’s arms deal was “perfectly correct” and not affected by corruption.
Analysts are divided about whether Mbeki’s recent bout of denials can be equated to his HIV/Aids quackery at the turn of the century in which he fatally refuted the scientific link between HIV and Aids. They agree, however, that his rebuff of crime and corruption combined with South Africa’s recent delay in publishing the African Peer Review Mechanism report, have seriously weakened public trust in his leadership.
“He hasn’t been any more of a denialist in this case than any other leader. All leaders defend their record,” said Richard Calland, executive director for the open democracy advice centre at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. “But any leader who lacks empathy with his or her people [demonstrates] bad politics.”
Xolela Mangcu, a visiting scholar at the Public Intellectual Life Project at the University of the Witwatersrand and a non-resident WEB DuBois Fellow at Harvard University, said Mbeki’s recent comments “add to a whole series of different kinds of denial that have characterised his leadership. They have fed into the belief that he is out of touch with South Africans.”