Chain reaction: Helen Zille, chairperson of the Democratic Alliance’s Federal Council, has been nominated as the party’s candidate for mayor of Johannesburg. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy
In the mid-90s, R&B singer Toni Braxton sang, “How could an angel break my heart? Why didn’t he catch my falling star? I wish, I didn’t wish so hard. Maybe I wished our love apart. How could an angel break my heart?”
Although the music video suggested that the song was about losing a lover to a car accident, for me it was definitely about your heart being broken by someone you thought would always love you.
It is not that teenage love, the infatuation type, but the mature one. The love you chose, now that you think you know what you want and you have convinced yourself this person is the one. Can you imagine what that hurt feels like?
The ANC has broken the collective hearts of South Africans. They sold us a dream of an equal, non-racial, non-sexist and free South Africa. We bought the dream.
Indeed, many of us still believe in that dream because we wanted our relationship with them to work. Yet, year in and year out, they have treated our love and trust with such disdain. They have taken our affection and care for granted.
Generally speaking, South Africans are not stupid. They know when you are lying to them, indeed they know when you pretend to like them. They are a lot more perceptive and awake to the political game than they are given credit for. The average South African is a lot more nuanced.
South Africans want transformation, indeed a radical economic transformation programme that is not apologetic about wealth redistribution and properly redressing the wrongs of the past.
However, they do not trust that the leaders and deployees of the ANC to execute that radical transformation programme. They believe that programme will be used to line pockets and create millionaires out of ANC leaders and their friends and family.
All South Africans have witnessed that, more times than not, when an ANC leader is placed in a position of responsibility with access to political power and resources, their priorities are the needs of their party and their own selfish interests.
For instance, you do not need to convince the majority of South Africans that the Democratic Alliance (DA) believes in the superiority of white people. I can assure you they know. It is not news to them. But they will point out to you that that they have greater confidence that those racists in the DA will not steal and ransack the public purse, like the other political parties who claim to place black people at their centre.
They know the DA will siphon public resources to business, especially white business. But at least the road or bridge will be built and not collapse in six months. Or if a DA leader is caught stealing, more times than not, they will get rid of the person and not try to shield them. As we know, the DA recently announced its former leader and current chair of the Federal Council, Helen Zille will be their candidate to be the mayor of Johannesburg.
Anele Mdoda, host of the breakfast show of the popular 947 radio station, interviewed Zille a few days after the announcement.
Mdoda’s breakfast show is one of the most popular in Johannesburg and its audience are mainly the working middle class, and probably composed of many DA supporters and voters, but also having a number of black listeners who are not necessarily guaranteed DA voters and supporters.
Mdoda did her level best to bring it to Zille’s attention that black people take offense at her anti-transformation utterances and that she comes across as not being empathetic of the oppression that black people endured during apartheid as well as in the democratic South Africa. The exchange was feisty and Zille’s defence was that Mdoda could not speak on behalf of black people.
Zille came across as tone deaf to what Mdoda was alerting her about.
She might not be as fascistic as Trump, but she has cherry-picked a lot of his modus operandi and talking points to surreptitiously take the liberal values of the party of Helen Suzman and Alan Paton and transform it into a conservative and reactionary outfit.
Zille uses strength so that she can be cruel, common sense to hide her lack of intellectual gravity, merit so that her and other beneficiaries of apartheid do not need to admit that their wealth is based on theft and a pro-West stance to hide that the DA is more patriotic to the US-led West than the needs of South Africans.
In that exchange with Mdoda, Zille exhibited self-same tone deafness as by the ANC and all the other political parties and leaders in our country.
Political parties and leaders do not listen to South Africans. They operate like a cult, where their slavish followers shout down, insult and dismiss anyone who dares criticise them. Everywhere you look there is a rent-a-crowd available for hire to drown out dissenting voices.
Mdoda was anointed as the Mampara of the Week by the Sunday Times, because she dared cross swords with Zille. I wonder how long she will be the host of the 947 morning show. It is just a matter of time.
The challenge, though, is greater than Mdoda. Every political party, big or small is licking their lips, hoping to provide a home for disaffected ANC supporters. But they have nothing to offer South Africans, other than that they are not the ANC.
For instance the Patriotic Alliance, led by Gayton McKenzie has threatened to leave the Government of National Unity, if his bosom buddy, Kenny Kunene is not returned as the political head of transport in Johannesburg.
Once again the needs of the party are of greater importance than the needs of the people.
In all of this is the ANC. Its vision has not changed. For many, most probably the majority, it is not the vision of the ANC that is the problem, it is that no one can trust the ANC. When the president of the ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa, appeared at the Zondo Commission, established to investigate the claims of state capture, he said the ANC was accused number one when it came to corruption.
The then-national executive committee of the ANC, as pushed by former ANC president, Jacob Zuma, forced Ramaphosa to withdraw that opinion. He should not have. Just like Zille must accept and admit that the DA places the needs of whites above others, so must the ANC and its leaders accept that it has created an environment and culture of corrupting practices and objectives.
The other day, Ramaphosa came under fire for suggesting that ANC-controlled municipalities can learn from the DA when it comes to financial management. Although he refused to back down from his perspective, he did not go far enough.
He should have also asked his fellow comrades in the ANC national executive committee to reveal how many of them, including their family and friends, are benefiting from tenders in local government and adding to the financial mismanagement!
The ANC has shown no significant commitment to renew itself and become the parliament of the people which it once was. Leaders are more concerned with the politics of elections, within the party and general ones. It remains faction-riven, unable to break out from its selfish needs and wants, and the needs of the people are only found in the rhetoric.
Even if the ANC decided to put up its president as the mayoral candidate in Johannesburg, I doubt that would even be able to turn the tide.
The problem we have is that we want the vision of the ANC without the ANC, because there seem to be none in the ANC who have a genuine commitment to the vision and the values that accompany it. Equally, though, the truth is also that there seem to be none around in any of the political parties who are able to do so either!
Donovan E Williams is a social commentator. @TheSherpaZA on X.