THE SORRY STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA'S OPPOSITION PARTIES: PART TWO
"It is also true that every new movement, when it first elaborates its theory and policy, begins by finding support in the preceding movement, though it may be in direct contradiction with the latter...In time...the new movement finds its forms and its own language." - Rosa Luxemburg, the great German Social Democrat/Communist, Reform or Revolution, (1900).
In the last twenty years of our post-apartheid democracy, South Africa's opposition parties have hankered after the past and scavenged this past in search of a winning political formula to power, and all in vain. What they have not succeeded to do so far though is to find "new forms and own language" that allow them to connect with the vast majority of our voters, at both an emotional and intellectual levels, better than the ANC. Our opposition parties have not been able "to elaborate...theory and policy" that can gain them popular support, legitimacy and consent. Whilst our opposition parties are "in direct contradiction" with the "preceding movement" (in our case the ANC), they are unable to completely cut the apron strings that still attach them to "the preceding movement", one way or the other.
In the memorable words of Rosa Luxemburg (ibid), "the new green seedling" of our post-apartheid political opposition to the ruling ANC has not "broken through its husk." It is still entrapped in the "husk" that is the miasma of the opposition leaders' egos, vainglory, self-interest, short-termism, petty mindedness, lack of clarity on theory, policy and strategy, unseemly public squabbles (whether it's the terrible and terrifying recent DAgang meltdown, the bitter hatred between the DA and the EFF, the ethnic demons between the IFP and the UDM, the undisguised intolerance amongst the various BC factions, the ghosts of the various and warring PAC cliques endlessly at each other's throats, the eternal suspicion between the FF Plus and every other black-dominated opposition party, as well as the unedifying ideological backstabbing that goes on between the ACDP and every South African agnostic, non-believer, African animist, Christian apostate and avowed atheist in the political opposition), and the opposition parties' inability to correctly study and draw lessons from what it is really that continues to make the ruling ANC to tick so, twenty years after the advent of our democracy.
The political opposition's failure to provide visionary leadership is at the heart of the political crisis confronting our garrulous but waddling opposition parties and at the core of their inability to come up with a more superior vision for South Africa than the ones the ANC offered in 1912 (to unite all the African peoples and tribes in South Africa), in 1955 (the ANC's Freedom Charter declaring that South Africa belongs to all who live in it), in 1969 (the ANC Morogoro, Tanzania conference's decision to open ANC membership to all South African freedom-loving and anti-apartheid democrats), in 1985 (the ANC Kwabe, Zambia conference, which opened all the ANC leadership echelons to any deserving South African committed to its Freedom Agenda), in 1989 (the Harare Declaration as a basis for negotiations with the apartheid regime), and finally, in 1994 (Nelson Mandela's beautiful and immortal 08 May Presidential Inaugural Address, which announced South Africa's post-apartheid freedom and democracy and extended our new democratic, human rights and constitutional cover to all who live in South Africa, irrespective of race, gender, ethnicity, class, religion, conscience, color, sexual orientation and disability).
The current combined political opposition in South Africa is neither able to match, let alone surpass, the clarion vision of the PAC founder, Robert Sobukwe's call for "the return of Africa", or, less so, the young Steve Biko's clarion BC vision of Black Power and Black Pride. At best, the political opposition's vision today is just a soupcon of the warped and arrested thinking of the minds of our political midgets.
The cumulative positive effect of all the momentous, historic ANC visions, at various stages of its progressive political evolution in the last hundred and two years, in its struggle against racialised discrimination, has been to build for its itself a huge, almost inexhaustible and almost unsurpassable reservoir of political goodwill amongst the overwhelming majority of black South Africans, and now increasingly, amongst less racially bigoted white South Africans since 1994.
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