The DA nears its turning point
The decision by the DA to campaign on the claim that all was well under both the Mandela and Mbeki governments and that corruption and the rot began only under Zuma, should not surprise. The proximate reason for this is to try to gain support among the COPE electorate as COPE itself collapses. Over 7% of the vote is thus at stake. Secondly, there are an increasing number of disillusioned ANC voters - even Ronnie Kasrils doesn't know who to vote for - and the DA desperately wants to spread its support among this group, which also tends to look back nostalgically at previous ANC governments.
The problem, of course, is that the DA is thus deliberately perverting history. The DP opposed the Mandela government root and branch and refused to participate in it because corruption had really began to blossom then with the arms deal and crony capitalism in all directions. Even Mandela himself said he was shocked by how much corruption there was in the ANC.
The Mbeki regime continued this trend and many of the greatest beneficiaries (think of Smuts Ngonyama and the Telkom deal) were close associates of Mbeki. There is no doubt that Mbeki knew just what he was doing. He was similarly determined to support the Mugabe regime at all costs, even though that meant repeatedly insisting that rigged elections, murder and torture were fine. And, of course, he was responsible for well over 300,000 unnecessary Aids deaths through his systematic refusal to allow ARV drugs to be given to HIV sufferers.
When I interviewed Jacob Zuma about this in 2007 I suggested that the only way to understand Mbeki's Aids policy was to take the view that Mbeki was psychologically disturbed. Zuma replied "Oh yes. And for a long time now." This would, indeed, be Mbeki's best defence if he were summoned to The Hague on charges. It also seems to be the understanding of other world leaders. How otherwise to understand the fact that Mbeki has never been offered an international job of any kind? Not even the most junior UN commission.
President Clinton was so amazed by the deluded and paranoid tone of Mbeki's communications with him that he had them investigated as a possible hoax. Doubtless, once he realised that they were genuine, word would have gone out far and wide that Mbeki was simply wacky. Further Mbeki stunts such as the World Conference Against Racism in Durban (2001) which ended in a complete shambles of anti-Semitism would only have confirmed the view that Mbeki was a dangerous liability. The USA, Canada and Israel all walked out of the conference and the Bush administration was so angry with Mary Robinson for presiding over it that it vowed she would never hold another UN post. And nor did she.
Thus the DA is lining up in praise for the Mandela administration which gave us Sarafina II, the arms deal, crazy labour laws, crazy affirmative action laws and much else besides. It is also lining up behind the even worse Mbeki administration, led by a man who is now an international pariah.
There are four separate reasons why this new DA line is not just a mistake but a betrayal. First is the fact that the DA is the heir to a tradition of principled liberalism stretching back to 1959. The old Progs knew that they would not be popular for preaching the doctrine of "merit not colour" but they did so because they felt it was morally right and because they wanted to feed that idea into the political mainstream. This meant accepting many bitter defeats but in the end their stand was borne out by increasing support and their consecration as the official Opposition.
All of this was betrayed when Helen Zille announced that the slogan of "merit not race" was itself racist. At that precise moment the DA ceased to be a principled liberal party and became rudderless. I put this to an old friend who is a Lib-Dem minister in the British cabinet. He exploded. "Good God! Well, other liberal parties have gone off the rails you know", was his response.
Secondly, one of the distinguishing (and distinguished) characteristics of South African liberalism was that it dug out the facts and told the truth. This was true as far back as the 1920s and the days of Alfred Hoernle and later of Ellen Hellman. They prided themselves on telling the absolute truth, based on proper research and serious analysis. South African affairs were so shrouded in racial hysteria and suspicion that it was of critical importance that somewhere there had to be a body or bodies which strove to tell the unvarnished truth. This was reflected by such liberal bodies as the South African Institute of Race Relations and the National Union of South African Students.
If you want to really understand the apartheid years go back to the SAIRR publications of those days and the copious documentation provided by NUSAS. Similarly, Helen Suzman sought to get the facts about apartheid through her interminable parliamentary questions. Because Nat ministers then paid a great deal more respect to Parliament than their ANC successors, the result was a huge fund of information which the democratic movement in general (including the ANC) relied upon. This continued into the contemporary period with international journalists relying heavily on what they could get out of the DA's research department. Typically, government departments didn't even answer the phone while the DA happily gave you chapter and verse.
But all that has now been almost casually chucked away. The former head of the DA's research department, Gareth van Onselen, left the party and is now a prominent independent critic. More important, the DA has now decided quite deliberately to falsify the facts of history, even the facts of its own history. With that the truth-telling tradition of a century has been discarded for the sake of pure electoral opportunism. This is what is meant by rudderless.
How can any journalist trust what the DA says any more? There seem to be no fixed principles the DA is now willing to hold on to, let alone the sort of unpopular principles which cost you votes. If the pollsters now told the DA that black voters admired Mugabe Helen Zille would doubtless give a speech in which she found the old ogre was not so bad after all. If it seemed that black voters admired Idi Amin ....well, you can fill in the blanks. There are no principles any more, so nothing is off limits.
The third reason why this new turn is a sad mistake is that it partakes of what one may call the Scottish Nationalist fallacy. Up until 1974 the major British parties all ignored the SNP but in that year the SNP suddenly won six seats and the other parties were thrown into confusion. They all, as one man, then recommended in favour of a separate Scottish parliament. This seemed the only way to keep Scotland within Britain and thus to enjoy the benefits of North Sea oil. By these means the main parties sought to steal the SNP's clothes. The result in the end was a separate Scottish parliament with an SNP majority and the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence. All that the major parties had done by espousing devolution of power was to legitimate and reinforce the SNP.
After all, if what you really liked was more power to Scotland, why espouse such Johnny-come-latelies as Labour, the Lib-Dems and Tories? Clearly, the SNP were the real thing. It is exactly the same with the DA's endorsement of racial-favouritism and BEE - this will not win black votes but merely legitimate ANC policies. No one who wants even more affirmative action is going to vote DA. Obviously, such a person gravitates to the ANC as the real McCoy. It is the same with a whole raft of other ANC policies adopted by the DA.
Finally, the new turn is a mistake because it embodies a studied insult to the DA's old core vote. What it says to them is: we know you won't like what we're doing now but the fact is that you've got nowhere else to go. Apart from the fact that people always have somewhere else to go, there is simply a price to pay for this sort of insult.
Already, it is as easy to find disillusioned DA supporters as disillusioned ANC supporters, all wondering whether they should spoil their ballots or stay at home. At worst it will mean the emergence of a new party of principled liberalism determined to re-discover the principles the DA has now abandoned. At the least it will involve a major settling of accounts once the election is over. For now, the tumult will be contained by the sheer pressures of the election. If the DA result was really spectacular - the 30% that Zille used to talk about, winning Gauteng and so on - a lot might be forgiven. But anything less than that will mean that the reckoning will be hard indeed.
RW Johnson
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
