TOM EATON | Schrödinger’s pact: the many-party physics of Rise Mzansi, Bosa and GOOD

Given all the big things that are happening in the world it feels slightly perverse to focus on the weekend’s merger of South African micro-parties Rise Mzansi and Bosa and nano-party GOOD. But, I tell myself, big things are made of tiny particles, and perhaps this subatomic union may yet contribute to the slightly out-of-control science project that is our country.

According to the leaders of the new speck of electoral matter (who were carefully and somewhat hilariously listed ‘in no particular order’ on their introductory tweet) South Africans have become frustrated by politics as usual and want answers.

I do, too. For example, I need someone to explain to me how the newly formed Unite For Change is, in its own words, a ‘new political party’, but is also made of three parties that will ‘remain fully intact as entities’. Is this where physics crosses over into mysticism, where a thing can be both singular and a trinity?

Second, given the history of bad blood between Mmusi Maimane and Patricia de Lille, whose idea was it to give the UFC the same acronym as the Ultimate Fighting Championship?

Most curious, however, is why Songezo Zibi and Maimane agreed to a marriage of extreme inconvenience that will offer them nothing but failure.

No, that’s unfair. De Lille doesn’t bring only failure: before the failure she also brings confusion and some noisy accusations. And this time, she would point out, she’s also bringing her 29,000 voters.

Indeed, to have just 29,000 supporters after 30 years in mainstream politics suggests De Lille has stopped being a politician many years ago and is now simply running a large social club, or perhaps a kink community, for people who enjoy being led nowhere extremely slowly by someone who is guaranteed to abandon them when something better comes along.

Of course, what she and her new allies probably won’t admit is that that tiny flock is a living monument to the fact that she engenders almost no confidence in the broader electorate.

Indeed, to have just 29,000 supporters after 30 years in mainstream politics suggests De Lille has stopped being a politician many years ago and is now simply running a large social club, or perhaps a kink community, for people who enjoy being led nowhere extremely slowly by someone who is guaranteed to abandon them when something better comes along.

To be clear, I don’t believe in kink-shaming. Everyone has their own reasons for voting how they vote. If people put their cross next to GOOD because they left their specs at home and thought they were ordering GOOP from Gwyneth Paltrow, then that is between them, De Lille and posterity.

The 130,000 voters who aligned with Rise Mzansi and BOSA, however, probably had slightly more specific motivations, which is why the UFC is a mystery.

I’m generalising, but my sense is that many of the people who voted for Zibi and Maimane voted for them rather than for their parties, largely because, as a business insider and DA outcast, they seemed to represent an alternative to the sort of knackered politics embodied by eternal beneficiaries of sheltered employment like De Lille.

For some I’ve spoken to, a vote for Zibi, particularly, felt less like an ideological Hail Mary than a technocratic intervention; a way of parachuting him directly into parliament and onto important oversight committees, and the rest of Rise Mzansi be damned.

So what are those voters to make of the new arrangement, just days old but already smelling of politics as usual and weighed down by the albatross Patricia dangling from its neck?

Perhaps the answer is that all of this is too small to matter. Perhaps it was also inevitable.

After all, the laws of physics are hard to bend. Energy cannot be destroyed, unless it touches local politics. Our sun will die in 5-billion years. And when it does, Patricia de Lille will just be joining a new party.