This great black hope is inaudible without white

What does the DA's Lindiwe Mazibuko have to offer the poor - or, for that matter, SA's middle class? Very little, it seems

EVERY morning, as I drive to work, I pass two young boys at two sets of traffic lights. Both boys hold refuse bags, both hoping for change, both having perfected that begging look.

I give money to one but not the other, because he makes me uncomfortable to the point of closing my window as I approach him.

When I shake my head at him, his eyes change and begging transforms into something else. Anger maybe, but something more akin to hatred because he sees a black woman in a big car oblivious to his need.

There are many of these young men on Johannesburg's heartless streets; some of them lost in a trance of cheap drugs, hunger and hopelessness.

My random acts of kindness, born out of a pricked conscience, will not save these boys. My coins are a drop in their ocean of poverty. So who fights for them? Whose children are they, even in the most symbolic of ways?

Did Julius Malema consider them his cause? Were they the ones whom he carried in a heart covered by an overfed belly? Even if they were part of his selfish cause, what happens now that his act has been dropped from the big-top ANC circus?

Can they find, for instance, an alternative in Lindiwe Mazibuko, who has so distinctly been positioned by Helen Zille as the squeaky-clean antithesis of Malema?

Where Malema speaks in the rough tones of a working-class African kid, Mazibuko offers the soft cadence of a private school education.

Where Malema invokes the young lions of the struggle whose frustration gave birth to the armed struggle, Mazibuko's help comes from the post-1994 constitution.

So what does the young woman from KwaZulu-Natal really have to offer that could possibly pull the street kids of Joburg? What does she have to offer to the young people who have looted for Malema, chanted for Malema and marched for Malema?

Or, for what it is worth, what does she have to offer my middle-class daughters, who were conceived long after apartheid died?

Very little, I would imagine.

For Mazibuko, in everything I have heard her say and everything that I have seen her write, does not offer much in the way of individuality.

Her utterances are the equivalent of a young woman who has studied her textbooks and the mantras of the DA and Zille.

If I knew it would not be construed as mean-spirited and unflattering, I would go as far as describing her as Helen lite - like a horrid diet food that does nothing for one's hunger except offer the pretence of chewing.

In the introduction to his biography of Barack Obama, David Remnick writes: "In the eyes of his supporters, he was a promise in a bleak landscape; he possessed an inspirational intelligence and an evident competence when the country had despaired of a reckless and aggressively incurious president ..."

Obama was 35 when he was elected to the Illinois senate in 1996.

Mazibuko, when she vanquished Athol Trollip as the DA's parliamentary leader, was 31 years old.

I cannot see Mazibuko symbolising a promise in the bleak landscape of South Africa, nor inspirational intelligence in the presence of a reckless and incurious President Jacob Zuma.

For Mazibuko, I will say this. I sat in the parliamentary gallery on black Tuesday and listened to her impassioned speech and I was impressed with her eloquence.

A few days later, I read an edited version of a speech she had given. I was far less impressed.

What made the piece unpleasant and cynical was the fact the Mazibuko invoked the names of Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe in her attempt to juxtapose the sacrifices of those who came before her with that of her own generation.

She said: "Ours is a generation of heroes-in-waiting. But there is much to do to create the space for the growth and development of this generation."

Then she moved into the terrain of party politics: "And so 2014 has the potential to be an epoch-defining year. It will separate more clearly those who base their politics on the future, on the achievement of dreams, on hope, and on freedom through opportunity, from those who remain rooted in the past."

It is clearly nothing short of an electioneering tactic.

The irony is that those who will leap to Mazibuko's defence are the same white strategists who have engineered Zille's ascendancy in opposition politics. All that it will do is give credence to the suspicion that Mazibuko needs the backing vocals of an all-white choir to reinforce an immature voice.

And while it pains me to say this, Malema in his blinding arrogance and frightening bullying has never needed anyone to reinforce his message.

Mazibuko, on the other hand - and as much as she wishes to portray herself as the voice of her generation - has yet to discover her own mission.