Over the past couple of months there has been a determined effort to make the businessman Roger Jardine the “face” or “presidential candidate” of the Democratic Alliance (and Multi-Party Charter) in the 2024 election campaign.

In early October this year First Rand announced that Jardine, who was earning a R7,5m annual salary as its chairman, would be stepping down from the board at the end of November, some years early, “as he wishes to explore options to best serve South Africa, and this will require his full attention”.

This was followed by a series of briefings of leading journalists, many of whom have deep backgrounds in the ANC, who then wrote up the case for his candidacy as leader of the opposition campaign. The Sunday Times, which is owned by the Lebashe Investment Group, has made Jardine’s move the lead story on its front page for two weeks in a row now.

On Sunday, Jardine finally launched his Change Starts Now movement along with luminaries such as Murphy Morobe and the activist Mark Heywood. Mavuso Msimang, who seemingly was also meant to join, backed out at the last moment under pressure from the ANC.

This plan has been sold to donors of the DA, and like-minded businessmen, as critical to the effort to save South Africa from the ANC. And they have, in turn, pressed the proposal on the official opposition. A huge amount of money – running into the hundreds of millions – has reportedly been dangled in front of the DA leadership, like a carrot held out on a string in front of a donkey, should it agree to this proposal.

It is difficult to see however how this proposal, if implemented, would play out in a way beneficial to the DA, the opposition more generally, or South Africa’s democracy. To understand why it is necessary to get a proper sense of who Jardine is, given how unknown he is. 

Who is Roger Jardine?

Roger Jardine was born in September 1965 and raised in Riverlea, then a ‘coloured’ group area, that lies between old Johannesburg and Soweto. His father was Bill Jardine, a formidable rugby-playing shop-owning lion of the struggle who was a leading figure in both the UDF and ANC underground in the mid-to-late 1980s, and who spent long spells in detention as a result.

After the liberation movement’s unbanning Bill Jardine then co-founded the National Sports Council with Muleleki George and Steve Tshwete in March 1990. The NSC would be the instrument through which the ANC extended de-facto control over all sport in South Africa both pre- and post-1994.

After the April 1994 elections Bill Jardine served both as an ANC MPL and the President of the NSC in Gauteng. In 1997 the NSC – as part of a much wider ANC racial drive - first introduced a policy of gradually but purposefully enforcing demographic proportionality in all representative sports teams, beginning with a 40% racial quota in youth teams. As Bill Jardine explained at the time “We are sick and tired of seeing white-dominated senior teams as in cricket and rugby." Jardine also led the charge to force Louis Luyt out of rugby the following year.

When Jardine died of cancer at the age of 64 in August 1998 ANC President Thabo Mbeki, Tshwete and Gauteng Premier Mathole Motshekga all spoke at his funeral. Luyt meanwhile would go on to help co-found the DA in 2000.

Roger Jardine himself first made the news as a 15-year-old pupil at Riverlea Secondary school in early June 1981, for his involvement in an anti-government protest. A large group of pupils had gathered to protest the detention by security police of the head boy of a neighbouring school and had, according to the police version, thrown stones at motorists and given black power salutes. The riot police, under the command of Brigadier Theuns ‘Rooi Rus’ Swanepoel, then stormed the school grounds with their sjamboks, tear gas and dogs. Roger Jardine was seriously hurt, according to a report in the Cape Argus, after a tear gas cannister thrown by police had exploded as it hit him on the neck. 

He completed his secondary schooling at Woodmead, the progressive private school located to the north of Johannesburg, where he matriculated. He then spent a year at Wits before going on to study on scholarship in the United States from 1986 to mid-1992, receiving a BSc degree from Haverford College in 1989, and a MSc in Radiological Physics from Wayne State University in 1991.

After a brief period working in his new profession in the US he returned to South Africa in 1992 to take up a position in the ANC’s department of economic planning as co-ordinator of science and technology policy. In that position he worked inter alia with ANC NEC member Mohammed Valli Moosa in formulating the ANC’s science policy.

Following a large conference on nuclear policy in February 1994 Jardine told the press that the cost of running the Koeberg nuclear power station was prohibitive and his “division had decided after the conference that SA needed no more nuclear power stations. It would recommend that a new ANC-led government appoint a commission of inquiry into the nuclear programme. It could decide to close Koeberg before its planned decommissioning date in 2015.” (City Press 20 February 1994)

Post-1994

In February 1995 Jardine was vaulted, at the age of 29, into the position of Director General of the newly established Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, thereby becoming the youngest DG in South African history. He was thus one of the earliest beneficiaries of the (as yet undeclared) ANC policy of placing party loyalists in all top positions in the civil service.

The goal, as ANC Chief Strategist Joel Netshitenzhe disclosed a few years later, was to extend liberation movement control “over all levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on." Early DP/DA critiques of cadre deployment would list Jardine as one prominent and early example of this trend.

Capture of the state was the first objective of the ANC, capture of the parastatals ran parallel to it, and the extension of ANC hegemony over all centres of power in economy and society followed thereafter. The ANC’s Cadre Policy and Deployment Strategy, adopted in late 1998 to guide the work of the National Deployment Committee, stated that the liberation movement “must strengthen” its “leadership” not just of the civil service but “all parastatals and statutory bodies” and “all other sectors of social activity”, including the economy, science and technology, sports, and mass communication. The essential role of the cadre was to ensure that key goals of the movement – notably race discrimination in pursuit of race proportionality – were enforced everywhere.

Post-1999

Despite a public falling out with his (second) IFP minister Lionel Mtshali in 1998, Jardine served as DG until the 1999 elections. He then moved on to become CEO first of Kagiso Media and later the Kagiso Trust where he was mentored by Eric Molobi and was involved in setting up a number of BEE deals. He also concurrently served as chairperson of the boards of the CSIR and the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa (NECSA) in the early to mid-2000s. He also joined the boards of a great number of private companies in this period being appointed inter alia to the board of FirstRand just as the Financial Sector Charter came into operation in January 2004.

Jardine began work as CEO of the construction company Aveng in July 2008 ahead of the scheduled award of Eskom’s huge R120bn “Nuclear 1” contract to build a 3000MW nuclear power plant, which was intended to be the first of many. The consortium led by French company Areva, in which Aveng had been included a few months before, was regarded as the front runner to win the bid. Areva promised to “invest” between R10bn and R30bn back into South Africa should it be victorious. (Financial Mail 7 March 2008)

However, in September, just as the contract was due to be awarded, Thabo Mbeki was peremptorily forced from office, and the project was shelved by the ascendent Zuma ANC. Thus, rather than managing Aveng’s role in this state mega-contract Jardine would instead spend much of his time as CEO dealing with the unpleasant fallout from the collusion scandal that hit the construction industry shortly after he was appointed. This related to sometimes decades old cartel like practices that had been outlawed by the 1998 Competition Act but had continued regardless.

While CEO of Aveng in 2011/12 Jardine personally donated money to the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (Mistra), the recently established Mbeki-ite thinktank run by Joel Netshitenzhe. The First Rand Foundation - along with Standard Bank, Nedbank, and Absa - would all be regular funders of Mistra over the following decade.

After stepping down as head of Aveng in late 2013 Jardine was appointed CEO of Primedia early the following year. In 2016 he was one of the twenty-seven former ANC government Directors-General who signed a letter calling for an Independent Public Inquiry into state capture by the Gupta family. In July 2017 he also publicly defended Primedia (and other) journalists against harassment by the BLF, then acting as a proxy of the Zuptas.

However, it was also under Jardine’s management of Primedia that its flagship radio station, Talk Radio 702, took a marked turn towards stoking inter-racial discord in South African society. This became particularly noticeable after Eusebius McKaiser rejoined the station as a host in July 2016. McKaiser drove the effort in 2017 to have Helen Zille expelled from the DA for suggesting that South Africa could learn from Singapore, as much of Asia had done, and build on certain legacies of “colonial” (or white) rule, rather than trying to smash these completely. With the power of the 702 platform behind him McKaiser indulged many of his worst impulses, both on his shows and on social media, and gleefully sowed chaos and division within opposition ranks in the run up to the 2019 elections.

In late 2017 First Rand announced that Jardine would take up the position of independent non-executive chairman of the board from 1 April 2018 and would resign from position as Primedia CEO at the same time. Looking at the First Rand website it is striking how the bank has been diverted from its core purpose towards enforcing the ANC’s particular racial goals. The group proudly boasts of prioritising race in both employment and procurement decisions, and indeed of enforcing race requirements on its suppliers as well. The group aims to “recruit and promote a disproportionately large number of black individuals”, it states, and “procures from BEE-rated companies and has a special focus on procuring from black-owned and black women-owned entities.”

A leader of the opposition?

By all accounts Jardine is a tough and capable operator who has earned the respect of many of the colleagues with whom he has worked in the higher ranks of business over the years. It would do South Africa’s democracy no harm if he and his associates formed a party to contest the 2024 elections and took the fight to an ANC that they feel has let the country down. The notion, however, that they should walk in and take over the leadership of the Democratic Alliance and the Multi-Party Charter coalition is a different matter.

Jardine grew up in a family immersed in the ideology and politics of the liberation movement. After 1994 he was a beneficiary of the ANC’s entry into state power and then, in one way or another, the extension of its influence over the private sector as well. He is to this day embedded in the networks of the Mbeki-era ANC, which now stretch deep into the upper reaches of the corporate sector thanks to “BEE”. This alone would create endless potential moral, political, and personal conflicts of interest and loyalty for someone meant to act as leader of the opposition project.

It is certainly possible for an insider to become disillusioned with a political movement, go into opposition to it, and end up as a reformer. But it was clear from Jardine’s address at the launch of Change Starts Now that he remains ANC to his fingertips. “This ANC”, he told the audience, was not the ANC of his parents, and it is “not my ANC”. He said he had talked to many of the “good people” of the ANC on his journey, and sought their counsel and advice, as well as the guidance of “my elders, the veterans and the stalwarts.” Though 2024 is not the same as 1994 the “ethos” and “values” of these leaders applied as much today as they did 30 years ago, he added.

The change he seemed to offer then was not “change from” the ANC but “change back” to some earlier iteration of his and his parents’ ANC. But the dire state of South Africa today is due in no small part to the disastrous policies that his generation of cadres – idealistic, driven, and capable as they undoubtedly were – successfully pushed through in the 1990s and 2000s.

Absent this acknowledgment many of his critiques and proposals lack a certain weight and credibility. For instance in his First Rand chairman’s report of 2022 Jardine noted that: “The state currently possesses neither the financial nor human resources to meet the social and economic needs of South Africa…. High-quality and reliable government services, such as a constant supply of electricity generation, reliable transport, and functioning healthcare and education systems are not features of our daily lives.”

This is no doubt true. But why are the state and parastatals so short of the necessary human and financial resources needed to deliver basic services? They used to possess them, so what happened? Well, it is because those institutions were forced by the ANC post-1994 to prioritise racial (and political) considerations over merit and value in decisions on appointments, promotions, and procurement – in much the same way that First Rand and other large corporates are bovinely doing today.

As Brian Pottinger has recently observed the reason the ANC has failed in government has largely been the result of its racial preference policies “in employment, investment, scholarships, tendering and trading”. The policies of “BEE” and “transformation” were sold on the basis of their promised upliftment of the majority, but they rapidly devolved into “a multi-tentacled succubus, draining the economic life of the country and supporting a one-way flow of state sanctioned, expropriated wealth into the hands of a monstrously hungry and unproductive new business and public service elite comprising slightly more than 1% of the population.”

There is a thirst for change among voters and the DA and MPC more generally offer the most serious and credible alternative for those voters fed up with the endless corruption and racialism of the liberation movement. The idea that the DA/MPC needs to crystallise in the minds of voters, if it is to make an electoral breakthrough, is that there is a better future awaiting for them and their families if they break completely with the failed status quo. Placing Jardine at the head of the DA/MPC seems self-defeating in the circumstances as the choice provided to voters would then be between three shades of the ANC - past (Jardine & Co.), present, and yet to come (EFF).

Whatever the short-term electoral benefits of making him their candidate, if any, it could have fatal consequences for the DA in the longer run. To begin with the DA would end up looking faintly ridiculous if, after warning of the dangers of ANC cadre deployment for decades, it chose as its presidential candidate in 2024 a prototypical ANC cadre of the Mandela/Mbeki eras. Parachuting in a leadership that is, at heart, not sympathetic to your values, your supporters, your history, and your cause, would be to combine all the worst errors the DA has made in the past - before multiplying the impact by an order of magnitude.

The goal of Jardine and associates, Peter Bruce wrote in the Sunday Times, is to “somehow gain a side-entry into the DA, to reform it and reposition it”. The obvious danger is that the real objective is not actually to strengthen an opposition they have historically detested, but rather to infiltrate and neutralise it. Having done so these ANC elements would be in a perfect position to then negotiate with the current ANC their re-entry into the highest reaches of power after the elections. Should this come to pass the result would be a shattering of the opposition and the restoration of ANC hegemony.