Boris Johnson — liar, hypocrite and zealous proponent of British cadre deployment — has been hoist by his own buffoonish petard. The Tories, having hitched their wagon to his shabby star, are in total disarray. And yet Labour, the official opposition, is nowhere; bleating in the distance about how terrible Johnson was while offering nothing but platitudes as an alternative.
In the US, every week brings to light yet more evidence of how hard Donald Trump’s inner circle tried to overthrow democracy in 2020. Trump himself has extracted an estimated $250m (R4.2bn) in donations from frightened Republicans by punting his Big Lie that the election was rigged. The US Supreme Court, weighted towards evangelical conservatism by Trump, has put women’s rights to bodily autonomy in the hands of overwhelmingly male lawmakers. And yet the Democrats, shuffling cluelessly through the corridors of power as they watch their historically unpopular president disappoint everyone except the GOP, have a fairly good chance of losing the 2024 election.
I was going to say that the ANC has been a dumpster fire for the past 10 or 12 years, but this is unfair to dumpster fires: at the very least, a mound of burning trash generates heat and light. The ANC of Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa has burned and burned and burned but produced nothing. Whether it be tens of billions of rands looted by tenderpreneurs, hundreds of billions wasted on the national tragedy we euphemistically call “cadre deployment”, the relentless destruction of ports, railways, roads, hospitals, schools, or the almost total paralysis at Eskom, this is a government whose incompetence and criminality are smeared across every aspect of public life.
How is it that such obviously aggressively bad parties have such weak competition?
And yet there it remains, still in power by a massive margin (at least by the standards of modern electoral politics), the opposition splintered and impotent. The next biggest party, the DA, can rely on just 20% of the vote. Despite its megalomaniac claims on Twitter, the third biggest, the EFF, hasn’t budged beyond 10%.
How is it that such obviously aggressively bad parties have such weak competition?
Is it complacency, rendering them slow and self-obsessed as they convince themselves that voters would be made to vote for the other lot?
Is it because their election campaigns invariably become little more than an expression of outrage that people do, in fact, vote for the other lot?
Is it despondency, with the brightest and best becoming sickened by the whole circus and leaving politics to go and make a pile in the private sector?
I don’t know the answer to those questions. But I know that if SA’s opposition parties have any hope of sending the ANC to join Boris Johnson on the scrapheap of history, they must assume nothing, do all the running and, above all, remind us what they stand for and not what they stand against.
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