It is easy to be casually cynical about Mosiuoa Lekota’s announcement on Wednesday of a process that will almost certainly lead to the creation of a new political party, and to dismiss it as a new coalition of the wounded, exiles from the ANC warming their hands over a bonfire of resentments.
No matter how magisterial Lekota manages to seem — and he did a good job of it in his address this week — this is going to be a tough charge to rebut.
Our view is not so dismissive, or at least not yet.
Like Lekota, thousands of ANC members and millions of potential voters feel they have grounds for divorce from the party, but for different reasons, and it is in those differences that the challenge, and the opportunity for a new party lie.
To capture their imagination, and ours, it must do at least two things. It must attract credible young leadership from outside Thabo Mbeki’s circle of intimates, perhaps even from outside the ANC, and it must set out a distinct policy vision.
And we urgently need alternatives to a ruling party that has exhausted itself in an ideologically incoherent battle for the spoils of power.
Certainly voters are ready for change — the most exciting prospect from the latest voting intention polls shows we have a growing pool of independent voters of all stripes who are open to persuasion.
So it is to be welcomed that a national convention will take place to develop ideas around the new party.
The convention is a canny move, drawing as it does on the spirit of the Kliptown People’s Congress, which drew up the Freedom Charter. It will help Lekota in his efforts to make the case that in the battle for the soul of the ANC, it is those now outside the party who have won, and that what remains in Luthuli House is an empty husk.
A new party along these lines, even if it attracts only a small proportion of the vote at first, would be able to make heard the message that the Democratic Alliance could not. Opposition is per se a good thing. Not just because it enhances accountability, but because it forces true policy competition.
The ANC, long uncomfortable with opposition, can show that it still holds on to its core democratic values by cooling its rhetoric, and keeping in check the threats of violence bubbling under in the Youth League and Umkhonto weSizwe Veterans Association.
There is another argument to be made against the charge of ”sour grapes”, which requires an acknowledgement of the very real risk entailed in leaving the ANC, not just in calculations of patronage politics, but at the level of the rebels’ basic identity. ”The struggle is my life” is not just an empty phrase.
That risk has become necessary in the wake of the most significant of the many inversions our politics have undergone in the turbulent wake of Polokwane: the achievement by Jacob Zuma and his supporters of one of Mbeki’s cherished goals, a decisive cleavage between the ANC’s modernisers and its populists.
Of course Mbeki hoped to split the South African Communist Party and Cosatu away from the ANC, while remaining in control of the ruling party’s extraordinary political, organisational and material resources, not to mention its grip on government.
But more substantive demonstrations will be needed to persuade voters to take the psychologically wrenching step of choosing another party. Those ANC voters who may be disinclined to elect the party again have lost faith not just because they supported ousted leadership, but often because they feel alienated and disappointed by the performance of the very government of that leadership.
They also know that the democratic credentials of Mbeki’s Cabinet are compromised, in some respects as much as those of Zuma’s inner circle, by the arms deal, the tragedy of HIV/Aids policy, the neutering of Parliament and by the intervention to save police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi.
Any convention must address the damage of that legacy head-on.
We have deep reservations about the sudden claim of people so closely associated with the failures of the Mbeki years to represent true democratic values, but we also know that few people in our politics are entirely untainted, and that the structural need for an alternative to the ANC is bigger than those worries. So we welcome the return of Terror to the opposition role he relished in the 1980s, but it is a new century and we’re expecting even more from him now.