If you want to fall into a deep, dark pit of despair, then take a quick tour of the South African political party landscape. Among the 356 parties registered to participate in the upcoming elections you have convicted criminals competing with populists who would sell their mothers for one vote; grifters who want a seat at the top table so they can get their snouts into the gravy alongside the ANC; and wannabe dictators who would be happy importing far-right policies and methods to our country.
From the institution-wrecking Jacob Zuma to the dictator-wannabe Gayton McKenzie, from the perennially hopeless Pan Africanist Congress of Azania to the hopelessly delusional and grotesque Cape Independence Party, this election is proving to be a case of quantity over quality. We had a mere 19 parties competing for parliamentary seats in 1994.
It was therefore quite refreshing to witness the launch of new-ish party Rise Mzansi’s manifesto on Saturday. Unlike many of the kitspartye (instant parties) we have seen in recent times, Rise Mzansi has been working quietly, assiduously, over the years to understand what has gone wrong in South Africa and to find solutions. The party’s relatively young leaders have over the past three years traversed the country, sometimes sitting in meetings of 10 or 20 people, collecting experiences, hopes and solutions.
They might not have succeeded completely, but they were trying to build a party from the ground up. Their serious, erudite, sensible reflections are reflected in the manifesto they launched on Saturday.
Whereas we are inundated with stories of the past by the ANC and its offshoots such as Zuma’s new party, Rise Mzansi’s manifesto launch was about what a future — difficult to build, for sure — looks like. While the ANC and Zuma, for example, are consumed by who among them was a spy during the apartheid years, Rise Mzansi was detailing how its government would create jobs.
While the likes of McKenzie and others have run around making a spectacle of themselves, Rise Mzansi has been serious, quiet, engaged in a mature and important endeavour.
While the likes of McKenzie and others have run around making a spectacle of themselves, Rise Mzansi has been serious, quiet, engaged in a mature and important endeavour. It comes across as a serious crowd of people who want to engage seriously and then get to work implementing things. It is not the dangerous, xenophobic, clickbait and clown show that is the Dudula movement, McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance, or others.
Therein lies the problem for Rise Mzansi, Mmusi Maimane’s Build One SA and any other party that aims to seriously engage with our problems and come up with creative policies to solve them. You see, just as the quality of contesting leadership has deteriorated markedly, the quantity of serious voters in SA has also diminished. Rise Mzansi may be serious, but it needs to acknowledge that a huge chunk of serious voters has walked off the political participation path since SA denigrated serious, educated, hardworking leaders like Thabo Mbeki (with all his flaws) and embraced a singing, criminally-charged, populist leader back in 2009. That is why voter turnout was below 50% at the last local election, with a huge chunk of citizens not even bothering to register to vote.
Even our two biggest parties have walked away from serious politics. Ramaphosa has over the past year dabbled in a sordid “fear factor” type of electioneering exemplified by messages like “they will take away your social grants if ANC loses” and a hilarious attempt to hide the party’s failures under Zuma and paint the past 30 years as a general success. Who does he think he is fooling?
Meanwhile, the DA’s disgraceful and shameful demotion and ousting of Ghaleb Cachalia over his comments on Gaza is illustration enough of a two-faced leadership. Watching DA spokesperson Solly Malatsi obfuscate, distort and fudge on the Palestine issue in a cringey interview with Stephen Grootes last week was perhaps the most embarrassing thing I’ve seen on television in a while. The liberal DA is illiberal, and that’s pretty sad for a party that likes to claim it upholds liberal values in South Africa. Perhaps that explains the continued exodus of the likes of Khume Ramulifho and Cachalia from its ranks.
In an election race where a serious engagement with issues will be lacking, Rise Mzansi will find itself overwhelmed by the noise brigade. For example, while everyone is shouting about how they will overhaul this or that, Rise Mzansi’s head of policy, Mandla Isaacs, said the obvious: “A lot of our problems do not require revolutionary ideas. The fact that we have power stations that don’t work doesn’t require you to bring revolutionary ideas. It requires you to fundamentally have a capable state that puts the right people in charge of key institutions, lets them do their work and protects them from political affairs.”
Few will want to hear simple, clear, sensible solutions like that. Instead, they will be following discredited leaders around, enjoying the food parcels and voting for someone who says they will expel all foreigners from our shores. It’s going to be a hard slog for serious voters, serious parties and their leaders. They must try though.
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