JUSTICE MALALA | With virtually the same policies, these SA politicians should have tea

Even the most ardent supporters of the ANC will admit — some privately, most publicly — that the party needs a robust opposition. Those who love SA and its democracy will agree even more fervently that without an active, vocal and strong adversary we — any democracy, for that matter — are doomed.

We don’t need a lively and popular opposition because the ANC is bad, but because great ideas and policies need contestation, challenge and debate before we reach consensus and implement. We need a committed and forceful opposition because any party, even a party of liberation such as the ANC, can fall prey to bad ideas and poor leaders.

Sadly, the story of adversarial politics in SA over the past 27 years has been one of failure. The ANC still dominates and regards the opposition as merely a mild irritant. The opposition, in the meantime, is largely ignorant, arrogant, self-obsessed, stale, quiescent and out of touch with the country and its voters. These are not people who are preparing themselves for power soon. They are preparing themselves for the drumsticks and stale scones served at parliamentary committee meetings while the ANC runs the country.

The raging debate over the long weekend about former DA leader Tony Leon saying Mmusi Maimane was “an experiment that went wrong” underlines the point. Like so many of the DA’s utterances on Maimane, race and the country’s apartheid and colonial legacy, here is a party that has failed to grasp a simple fact: black people are not a grouping to be assimilated into power or for their inclusion to be an “experiment”. Black liberals are the party or they will leave, as Maimane and others did.

Something is wrong here. It cannot be the voter. Our opposition parties are failing a basic test: attracting voters. What are they doing wrong?

We know the history. The Democratic Party under Leon managed to gobble up every opposition group in sight and emerged as a right-of-centre party known as the Democratic Alliance (DA), its tummy full of National Party supporters disgusted with then NP leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk’s closeness to the ANC. Van Schalkwyk, lest we forget, was to lead the NP and the three or so members left in the party into the ANC just before the 2004 election. Exit the NP.

The IFP, with the oxygen of apartheid politics and Zulu nationalism out of fashion, was expiring and dying by the late 2000s. The PAC had never really graduated from a knee-jerk race politics and was roundly rejected by the electorate, as was Azapo.

On the right, the likes of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging and other “volk” fronts were exposed by the bright lights of democracy as nothing but racists. They slunk off into the hills, hardly heard from, leaving the FF Plus to occupy a small place in mainstream politics.

The newbies of 2008, Cope, decimated themselves swiftly and decisively through the most idiotic infighting of any modern South African political party. Within three years of its formation there was no Cope to speak of. By 2014 it was a terrible nightmare. Cope’s leaders are responsible for probably the biggest setback in opposition politics in the post-1994 era. They dirtied the water for everyone who contemplates launching a party.

The EFF is populist, fascist, disoriented by the ANC under Cyril Ramaphosa and would be a disaster if it were to run anything of significance in the country. Thankfully it won’t. It continues to grow, but at a snail’s pace.

All of this means we need a lively, credible (to the voters), organised opposition formation in SA. We need it urgently. We need it to happen not after an election in a bid to form some unstable coalition. We need it before the 2024 national election and with a view to the 2029 elections.

Why are Herman Mashaba, Maimane, Mosiuoa Lekota and Bantu Holomisa not speaking to each other about a new party? The men lead organisations that should not be fighting elections on their own. Their policies — where they have policies, something that is lacking in most of them — are literally the same. Why aren’t Julius Malema, Ace Magashule, Jacob Zuma, Mzwanele Manyi and others not talking to each other? They are all leading the same organisation. They even have tea parties together.

The SACP and Cosatu should stop leeching off the ANC and form a socialist party. The DA’s John Steenhuisen has said he is open to a coalition with a Ramaphosa-led ANC, but that may be a dream too far, though the two parties are remarkably similar in many respects.

SA has needed political realignment for years. It needs to happen soon or else we will be stuck in failure.