JOHANNESBURG - As the ruling African National Congress increasingly threatens to polarise into mutually hostile radical left and radical right factions, or opposing Afro-communist and Afro-nationalist camps, an important question arises.
It is simply whether there is a viable third way, not in the sense of a coalescence of indecisive moderates but, rather, in the sense of an energising coalition of South Africans committed to chartering a middle way - to borrow a term from Buddhist philosophy - to the future. The short answer is that there are two possible middle ways.
The first is for centrists in the ANC to assert themselves forcefully and to offer a revived form of the leadership exemplified by Nelson Mandela during the transition from the old South Africa to the new, as well during his five-year term of office as South Africa's first democratically elected president.
The second is for the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) to shed its image as a party of opposition and to succeed in its stated ambition to become a party of government. This through a vigorous campaign to recruit new members from the at least 13 million South Africans of voting age who had either failed to register to vote in the 2009 general election, or who did but - for one reason or another - failed to cast their ballots on April 22.
Before assessing the chances of either of these options succeeding, it is useful to analyse the recent manifestations of the uneasy relations between the rival factions in the ANC.
Following the attack launched on the communists by Billy Masethla, a former director-general of the national intelligence agency and a member of the ANC national executive committee, Julius Malema, the president of the ANC Youth League, pressed for Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary general, to resign his position of national chairperson of the South African Communist Party (ASCP) .
Malema's demand - which has been, determinedly resisted by Mantashe - is redolent with suspicion that Mantashe is using his high ranking post in the ANC to promote the aims of the SACP. This reinforces Masethla's accusation that the left is trying to take over the ANC for its own ends. There is an echo in Malema's pressure of Mantashe of the questioning attitude adopted by Peter Mokoba, an earlier ANC Youth League president, towards the arrangement that allows members of the SACP to hold dual membership of the ANC.
It should be noted, too, that Malema has sarcastically referred to Jeremy Cronin, the deputy secretary of the SACP and perhaps its leading theorist, as a "white messiah". This after Cronin sought to tutor the Youth League on the need for it to offer a serious and collectively thought out case for nationalising the mines instead of tried to "make policy on the hoof."
Furthermore Malema has opposed a call by Buti Manamela, his counterpart in the Young Communist League (YCL) for Thabo Mbeki, the former president, to be indicted on charges of genocide for the death of tens of thousands of South Africans from AIDS. The gravamen of the charge being that Mbeki wilfully refused to make anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) available to people living with AIDS.
Malema's rationale for rejecting the call is that the ANC and its alliance partners should not prosecute their own members; a proposition which, if extended to its logical conclusion, could be offered as an excuse not to indict ANC members for, say, embezzlement of public funds or the rape of female comrades by macho ANC men.
In an escalation in the verbal war between the YCL and the ANC Youth League, Manamela has dismissed Malema as a petty bourgeois capitalist who has little or no sympathy for the indigent South Africans who died because ARVs were denied to them during the Mbeki presidency.
But to return the issue of whether the ANC itself can establish a viable middle way between the communists and nationalists: President Jacob Zuma seems an unlikely candidate to rally the centrists against the radicals on at either end of the political spectrum.
He is too indebted to the left for his victory over Mbeki at the ANC's national conference at Polokwane in December 2007. He is moreover inclined to seek approval from his immediate interlocutors, an approach which taints him as a ditherer and which, all too often, loses rather than wins him friends.
Nothing is written in stone, however. Zuma may prove to be capable of rallying the centre to stand firm in defence of constitution and its underlying values of equality and freedom under the law. Though the manner in which he avoided standing trial on charges of corruption can hardly be considered an auspicious portent of his commitment to the rule of law.
Nor, for that matter, can his appointment of Menzi, Simelane as the new national director of public prosecutions (NDPP); bearing in mind that Frene Ginwala - who chaired the inquiry into whether Vusi Pikoli was a fit and proper person to serve as NDPP -chastised Simelane for interfering with the national prosecuting authority's constitutional duty to prosecute without fear, favour of prejudice.
Zuma's leadership style brings to mind the words of W B Yeats about the centre not holding, the best lacking conviction and the worst being "filled with passionate intensity."
The recent 50th anniversary of the formation of the Progressive Party (PP) in November 1959 is pertinent to the prospects of the DA serving as the nucleus of a coalition of middle way parties powerful enough to withstand the antagonism of the radical parties at the opposition ends of the left right continuum.
The reason why the PP is relevant to the DA is simple: the PP went through several mutations to become the Democratic Party (DP), which, in turn, went though a mutation in 2000 to become the DA. A single line connects the PP to the DA.
The trajectory, which traces the progress of the PP in all its mutations from its formation in 1959 to the establishment of the Democratic Party (DP) in 1989 and the DA in mid -2000, offers some hope to present day leaders and DA.
The PP started its quest to win a place for itself in the old South Africa disastrously. In the 1961 elections, the first after the foundation of the PP, all but one of the 12 parliamentarians who had broken away from the moribund United Party a short while before lost their seats.
Thereafter, however, the PP rose steadily to become the official opposition party in the late 1970s. In the years that followed it played an important role in persuading the white electorate - and, as importantly, the ruling National Party (NP) - of the need for a negotiated settlement based on universal adult suffrage and the equality of all South Africans.
It is no exaggeration to conclude that the NP appropriated DP policy when it presented itself as the party of settlement by releasing Mandela from prison and rescinded the decrees outlawing the ANC, the SACP and the Pan Africanist Congress.
The DP began its campaign in post-apartheid South Africa on an equally disastrous note, winning less than 2% of the vote and a mere 7 seats. Fifteen years later it defines itself as a party of hope, having won more than 16 % of the vote (and 67 seats) in the April 22 general election, as well as emerging as the governing party in the Western Cape.
If the challenge facing the PP in 1959 was to persuade a generally conservative, and fearful, white electorate that the enfranchisement of the black majority was unavoidable if a revolution was to be averted; the challenge facing the DA today is to build on its gains by attracting an increasingly large proportion of the black vote and by forming tactical coalitions with like-minded parties.
It is a tough ask. The DA can, however, take comfort in the description of the ANC by Tony Leon, its immediate past leader, as a "large black United Party."
The actual UP is remembered as a party which sought to appease diametrically opposing interests and which eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, losing phalanxes of members and representatives to the Progressives through the 1970s. The establishment of the Congress of the People by ANC dissidents late last year may be a sign of the ANC succumbing to the same process of inner decay and creeping decrepitude.
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