After its traumatic birth the new political party needs care desperately
People ask me all the time what I think about the Congress of the People (Cope), usually about five seconds after they ask whether Jacob Zuma really really really has to be our next president. Questions such as this are an occupational hazard for journalists, who are presumed by their proximity to the political maelstrom to better understand its fluid dynamics.
In the interests of upholding that reputation, I’ve been working on my Cope spiel for months.
It goes like this: Cope is a breech baby, it emerged arse backwards into the world, ripping its mother in two and just about suffocating on its own umbilicus, while a scrum of midwives burned impepho and chanted incantations instead of calling for the scalpel and the epidural. Now a malformed and fragile thing lies squalling in the bloodstained sheets and desperately in need of care, feeding and a bit of disciplined attention.
It is a grotesque analogy, but not that far-fetched. It was a colossal tactical blunder by the ANC to fire Thabo Mbeki nine months before his time was up, just enough time for an infant opposition to gestate. The headlong rush towards revenge in the national executive committee forced Terror Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa out into the cold much earlier than the gathering momentum of the party’s diverging tendencies would otherwise have done and created a nucleus around which others could gather.
So it is not surprising that the first wave of top-level defectors cited their anger at the axing of Mbeki as their basis for joining Cope. It was hardly a positive political programme, but it was a convenient shorthand for all the wounds incurred in the Polokwane blitzkreig, and the grinding war of attrition that followed.
The challenge for the party now is to change the narrative when it is top heavy with leaders too easily dismissed as by their association with Mbeki, and the worst failings of his leadership. It is a difficulty that has only worsened since Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka formalised her membership. No one is more of a poster child for the wasted promise of the Mbeki years — bright, personable, and deeply implicated in the muck of Oilgate, not to mention the brutal struggle over the prosecution of Zuma.
Away from the personalities, and closer to policies, an electoral manifesto that follows promising affirmations about the Constitution with large swathes uncritically affirming about the importance of BEE, and of failed state programmes such as Umsobomvu youth fund seemed only to confirm that image.
Many in the party are sharply aware of this problem and are trying hard to correct it. They want to limit the role of people like the deeply compromised former minister for safety and security in the Western Cape, Leonard Ramatlakane, to vet sources of funding carefully, and to ensure that the electoral slate has appeal to new voters and an urban middle class who are fed up with the ANC and broadly receptive to a message of modernisation and economic openness.
The question is whether they can make themselves heard.
The evidence is contradictory.
On the one hand there is that manifesto, which was hotly debated internally, with party advisers such as Moeletsi Mbeki pushing for a much harder-hitting document, and others, including Shilowa, wanting a more conciliatory, “positive” approach.
There is, too, the debate over who should be the face of the party’s election campaign — apparently resolved in favour of the relatively unknown clean-skin Mvume Dandala, over the popular but potentially compromised Terror Lekota.
Damaging battles, like the one under way already between the dynamic Mbulelo Ncedane and much of the Western Cape leadership is a sign that other ANC habits have not faded with the announcement of an election date.
But there are serious efforts to move the conversation on. One is a bold and potentially risky process for drawing up party lists. Branches made nominations to a committee of party elders headed by Barney Pityana. That committee conducted an initial scrutiny and also made an effort to draw in people from outside the current Cope leadership. Finally, it published the lists, and invited the public to perform scrutiny of its own. “They won’t be able to object as such,” says national spokesperson Phillip Dexter, “they can do that at the ballot box, but they can tell if there is something we should know about a candidate — are they clean, do they have a record of community involvement, etcetera”.
If Pityana and company are to have a real impact, though, they need to be able to ignore the Mbeki-ite heavies and concentrate on the second- and third-tier leadership of Cope; young, educated, highly capable people who identified with the Mbeki project in the ANC primarily because they believed it was time to move beyond the ossified language of the Moscow party school, as well as the greed and cant that they felt had come to dominate the tripartite alliance. Just a few of those people, given the platform that Parliament offers, could very quickly become the kind of new stars that the party needs.
Like Helen Zille, Cope’s leaders also need to be creative about bringing in total outsiders as they seek to change the story.
The choice of Dandala was an effort to do just that, but it was complicated by the disappointing wrangling that followed.
For all those disappointments, for all the dubious business people clustered in the wings and the Polokwane losers on the podium, it matters that Cope finds its way to a sustainable future for one simple reason: it has opened the political imagination of South Africans in an unprecedented way. Suddenly it is possible to conceive of opposition without the stigma of racism, of a political contest defined by all kinds of other factors from personality to policy, but not finally determined by monolithic racial identification. And that, frankly, is a hell of a start.
Mbeki himself might have turned to William Blake to sum it up: “My mother groan’d! my father wept;/ Into the dangerous world I leapt; Helpless, naked, piping loud,/ like a fiend, hid in a cloud. /Struggling in my father’s hands, /Striving against my swaddling bands, /Bound and weary I thought best/ to sulk upon my mother’s breast.”
Hopefully Shilowa, Lekota and their swelling coterie of advisers and supporters know how important it is that they keep the kid alive, instead of suffocating it under their own ambitions.