JONATHAN JANSEN | The ANC-DA union: it’s a lot to take in

I still do not think the South African populace fully grasps the momentous occasion of the recent elections. The ruling party, having lost its majoritarian status (50% plus), decided that the best way to rule was to genuinely share power with other political parties. It could have chosen the path of racial politics so ingrained in our social DNA and gone with other black parties such as the EFF and MK on grounds of some epidermal solidarity.

Instead, it chose to coalesce with the DA, a white majority party as far as its senior leadership is concerned, thereby acknowledging the unspoken: the majority of South Africans are centrist in their politics wanting neither the populist, “pretend left” positions of the EFF and MK, nor the bitter, rightist politics of the DA’s conservative flank. Somewhere, something in the middle that attends not to ideology (in the bad sense of the word) and noise but to getting things done.

Make no mistake, there are good reasons for dumping both parties — the corrosive corruption within the ranks of the ANC and the self-righteous whiteness of the DA. But by working together on mutually agreeable terms, they potentially cancel out some of the worst features of their respective cultures.

Forget whites for a moment and think of how these manufactured divisions between coloureds and Africans caused harm between communities that once lived and worked together before hardcore apartheid became our fate since the late 1940s.

To be sure, we have a long way to go. My president is still black and my premier is still white, and both male. But perhaps within this coalescing unity they can start opening the doors to women, non-Africans (in the narrow, “particular” sense of the word) and blacks as leaders at the top of their parties — and keep them there, DA.

Meanwhile, those of us on the ground need to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, as the Good Book puts it. In corporations and universities, in the public and the voluntary sectors, in the faith community especially, we must build a real sense of integration among our people and throw off the shackles of our racially and ethnically divided pasts.

In a school on the Cape Flats where I now work half-days, I became aware of “the other integration” happening quietly and without fuss in the classrooms and corridors of our education institutions. Here so-called coloured students were learning alongside students from the faraway African townships of Khayelitsha and Langa as well as children of African nationals from Malawi and Zimbabwe. Forget whites for a moment and think of how these manufactured divisions between coloureds and Africans caused harm between communities that once lived and worked together before hardcore apartheid became our fate since the late 1940s.

And what a wonderful antidote to lurking xenophobia in the broader society when close and hopefully lasting friendships are cultivated among the children of the natives (in the general dictionary sense of the word) and the children of those who came southwards across the Limpopo. I have seen how the children of foreigners raise the academic bar in South African schools and how teachers from elsewhere in Africa enable all our children to achieve, especially in the sciences and mathematics. This is good for humanity.

In this regard, I certainly hope the new unity (oops) government (if not movement) rolls back the bitter legislation pushed in the past few years by the openly xenophobic minister of home affairs, Aaron Motsoaledi. I hope the counterweight of the DA in this unity government slow walks the NHI through implementation, for its ends are unlikely to transform health care in the absence of transforming health institutions. I hope the new alliance sets a singular goal for education and that is to build the school system from the bottom up with comprehensive and adequate sources of funding for early childhood education.

In the process, those who voted for the two largest parties can only hope that the two parties transform themselves in the course of this new venture in governance. First, that corruption is rooted out in the ANC and that the president begins to understand that his indecisiveness on critical leadership issues is one factor in the loss of faith in him and his party as reflected in the national share of the vote. Second, that the DA learns the meaning of truly inclusive governance at the level of leadership; the race-blind argument is, in fact and consequence, an argument for continued white domination.

Still our democracy was tested, and it stands tall.

The American government, through its ambassador here in Pretoria, congratulated President Cyril Ramaphosa for his election “and commend all the political parties for working together to form a government of national unity”. That sounded odd, like an adult commending children for eating their spinach and broccoli. And, of course, lacking in self-reflection given the insurrection in that country to try to overturn the election results there.