DA’s G7 call: a yearning for a bygone colonial era and a nefarious tactical gimmick

The resounding success of the ANC's election manifesto launch at the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban on February 24 has rattled opposition parties.

They had begun to believe their own propaganda, in particular the wishful thinking that the ANC has lost the support of the people, and will score dismal support in the low 40 percent in the May 29 national general elections.

Rather that loss of support, the overflowing stadium and the sustained positive reception of the ANC leadership in communities since the commencement of the campaign trail suggest the opposite.

Naturally, opposition parties and their associate doomsayers and propagandists are biting their nails, anxious about the approaching moment of truth when they will once more be exposed as nothing but the paper tigers that they are.

They are nevertheless continuing with the propaganda offensive in the vain hope that they will convince the electorate and defeat the ANC at the polls. In the process, some, like the right-wing DA and its so-called Moonshot Pact coterie, are taking matters to another level.

Last week, the Moonshot Pact parties dispatched shrill letters to the G7 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US, as well as the EU — appealing for “assistance in ensuring the integrity” of the elections. The DA “sharpen[ed] the appeal” with its own specific follow-up letter addressed to US secretary of state Antony Blinken.

This unprecedented appeal is a no-confidence vote in and an attack on the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), a Chapter 9 institution which has successfully organised credible elections that have never been questioned by any political party, or local or international observer mission since 1994. Neither the DA nor its kowtowing subordinates have so far presented any evidence to justify their affront on the integrity of the institution of the IEC, its staff and commissioners.

The appeal is based on a “contention” the DA holds that “the ruling elite” (read ANC) is “desperate to retain electoral support” and “may” therefore “be willing to put their narrow political interests ahead of our country’s broader interests and sacred constitutional values”. As with the aspersion they cast on the IEC, they do not demonstrate any historical precedence of an ANC that is prone to gerrymandering elections nor do they show any pattern or trend to warrant concern. They merely ventilate a prejudice rooted in the Afro-pessimist stereotype to the effect that Africans are predisposed to act undemocratically.

Remarkably, the US embassy in Pretoria has reminded the DA and its accomplices of what all South Africans and the world know. Spokesperson David Feldmann stated: “South Africa is a sovereign democracy that runs its own electoral processes. The [IEC] has a long-standing and excellent reputation for conducting free and fair elections.”

He could have added the incontrovertible historical fact that the ANC waged a sustained struggle for our constitutional democracy for well over a century while its opponents — the DA included — stood opposed to a democratic nonracial dispensation.

We need no reminder that as recently as 1978, members of the Progressive Federal Party, the DA’s ancestor, were still talking about a “qualified franchise” in which only a few blacks could be eligible to vote. Their policy offering on every important issue of our national life has been about the implementation of a deodorised apartheid.

By casting aspersions on the IEC, the DA has jumped into bed with the MK Party it says “poses a substantive risk to the continued peaceful nature of our political discourse as a nation”.

Unapologetically populist, the MK Party has been, since its inception, on a sustained assault against the IEC, making all manner of baseless claims. The DA is now walking the same path, proselytising against the commission in foreign capitals and, in so doing, maligning the image of the country. Talk of birds of a feather!

One must note the attempt to narrow the concept: “ruling elite” to the exercise of political power away from the economic power which the DA’s social base continues to wield and which the party steadfastly refuses to democratise for the benefit of all South Africans, black and white. However, that is a discussion for another day.

But the DA’s call for Western (G7 countries) intervention speaks to something more sinister and offensive than merely casting aspersions on the IEC and or the ANC. Stripped of all its pretences, they are saying that as in the last century before the wind of change blew through the continent, Africa and Africans need the colonial mother to keep us in check. This is the logic of Africa as a “dark continent” and its inhabitants a child race.

First, the DA in effect wishes South Africa to voluntarily cede its sovereignty to the G7 countries, with the party and its junior Moonshot Pact partners as proxies and lieutenants as obtained in colonial times. This is delusional thinking, and testimony to the contempt they hold for the people of South Africa who will resist any suggestion that their destiny could be determined elsewhere and by parties other than themselves.

Second, the DA is implicitly defining South Africa in terms of the (new) Cold War divide. “We are witnessing an increasing willingness by the ANC to forge alliances with malign international actors, whose regimes are characterised by tyranny, terror and oppression,” reads the DA’s letter to Blinken.

The Moonshot Pact letter to which the DA is also a signatory screams, without so much as appreciating irony: “We also note with concern the potential for foreign interference in our elections, and we believe that the international community can help to safeguard against any attempts to disrupt the democratic process or influence the South African electorate.”

The same Moonshot Pact parties that cry out against a potential for foreign interference are themselves actively inviting interference from without. It must be that they see themselves as local extensions of the specific foreigners they are inviting to interfere in our elections, which may partly explain why social compacting has been a challenging endeavour since 1994. They want to compact externally to the detriment of a local people-centred compact.

But the Moonshot Pact does not cite evidence of the foreign interference they allege. They are merely intent on making South Africa a theatre of geopolitical contestations in which we would have no possibility to interpret the world and act independently from the contending major powers but align on narrow ideological grounds. Nothing would be more dangerous.

Third, the DA is evidently intent on creating pockets of alternative state power in ways that could possibly be in contravention of some of the country’s laws, the electoral and intelligence laws included. They are asking the US government to avail funds “to bolster the deployment of additional, independent, domestic observers” as well as “technological resources” to “safeguard against sinister attempts to manipulate election outcomes”. Since election observers are accredited under the law, on whose authority will this set of observers operate?

As for technology, which kind does the party envisage? What happens in the event that, as interested parties to the election, the Moonshot Pact produces results that are different from those of the IEC?

In other words, how do we know that the technology is not being deployed for sinister intent? And what happens if others seek to procure their own technology and make claims and counter claims?

Viewed this way, it is clear that the DA’s moves are potentially dangerously divisive. They may split the country right in the middle, rendering the nation-building project — which is in the common national interest — that much more elusive.

Fourth, the DA’s appeal to the G7 is also a nefarious tactical gimmick. Their letters to the G7 are in fact saying that the elections have been rigged long before a single ballot has been cast.

They are doing this because the overwhelming majority of South Africans continue to reject the DA and its fear-based political rhetoric borrowed from the hymn sheet of the erstwhile National Party. Realising that their delusions of victory will not materialise, and they are therefore preparing the ground to dispute an electoral outcome based on the will of South Africans — at which point they will produce the appeal letters as prophesies: “we told you they were going to rig”.

This is dangerous for multiple reasons: principally, it risks inaugurating a venal political culture in which unscrupulous political entrepreneurs can brazenly undermine the integrity of the election process with unfounded claims and allegations. Misadventures like this have taken countries — in Africa and elsewhere — into unenviable zones from which this country must be spared.

• Ntuli is a member of the national executive committee of the ANC and head of elections and campaigns