SA intellectually bankrupt
DA stalwart Wilmot James, who is taking a year’s leave of absence, reflects on his time in the party and parliament, and on how the ANC has crushed new thought inside and outside the ruling organisation
FORMER DA MP Wilmot James left the party this month to take up a one-year position as a visiting professor of health, security and diplomacy with Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons in the US.
James is an intellectual. He has written or edited 17 books, been published in a long list of academic journals and held several positions and fellowships in the academy.
Underpinning it all is a deep love of ideas for their own sake. These sorts of people are in short supply in South African politics. So the Financial Mail sat down with James to discuss intellectualism and politics, and the condition of the relationship between the two.
He opens with a bleak observation: “Political parties consume intellectual capital – they don’t produce it.”
It is hard to argue with that. Certainly President Jacob Zuma, through design and effect, has hollowed out the ANC. Even that is generous. His comments about “clever blacks” and insistence that our universities produce patriots and “progressive intellectuals” suggest a nasty, anti-intellectual streak.
James agrees. As a result, he says, “Zuma has permitted intellectual dishonesty to flourish”.
Institutions such as parliament, ostensibly the home of political intellectualism, have been badly infected in turn.
James, first elected to parliament in 2009, has a general contempt for the way in which committees are run, describing them as “dull” and a number of the chairs he has served under as “doctrinarian”. Of one the chairs, Marius Fransman, he says: “He was really just a thug”.
He adds: “Bipartisanship is rare. The only way it happens is to make the ANC feel like an idea is its own.
“[The late DA MP] Dene Smuts, who cared about ideas, got a lot of bipartisan things right. But it is dead now. It was never a driving force in this parliament. And we’d better do something about that.”
James reserves special criticism for the health committee, on which he served as the DA’s “shadow minister” before he departed.
“The health committee is run a bit like a post office,” he says, “where routine and procedure are far more important than comment”.
There can be profound consequences for this kind of obsequiousness.
James argues that the Life Esidimeni tragedy – in which about 100 mentally ill patients died – would not have happened had the health committee been alive to its task. Civil society and the media suffer similar problems.
For almost a decade under former president Thabo Mbeki there were only fleeting signs of life, as the ANC’s hegemony crushed or consumed allcomers.
It is true that the disintegration of the ANC under Zuma has brought with it something of an unintended rejuvenation. But for James it has not resulted in the rise of the true, independent public intellectual.
“There are very few nonpartisan public intellectuals who have strong beliefs and principles and can argue from a point of moral philosophy.
“Instead, we have a raft of partisan pseudo-public intellectuals advocating what is Julien Benda in 1927. Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organisation of political hatreds,” Benda wrote.
He bemoaned the degree to which public intellectuals – what he called “clerks” – had abandoned the pursuit of the truth in favour of political concerns.
There is much that is relevant to South Africa in Benda’s argument.
The rise of politics as theatre – protests, rallies, marches, a fracas in parliament – which Benda describes as “the desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action”.
Inside the DA, ideas still matter; only, not like they used to.
James believes the party’s appetite for ideas is not being properly fed. He describes it as a kind of “benign neglect”. But he acknowledges it is a national problem, not particular to the DA.
By way of illustration, he says: “There has been no national response to date on the drought and the lack of water; no one has thought ahead or planned.
“This is related to the general disinterest in ideas.”
Of the DA, he says: “The party doesn’t value policy much beyond market research and it is not invested as much as it should be in producing new policy.
“There has been a lack of production of position papers.”
He has a point. There has been a marked decline in policy production in the DA over the past few years, as it expends ever more energy on becoming an “activist party”. Mmusi Maimane, two years into his tenure as party leader, has yet to produce a new policy platform, despite repeated assurances that one is imminent.
“It doesn’t have a think-tank,” says James. “Such a thing might feed into policy but it would also be linked to elections and getting votes, only its goal would be to generate better, more captivating arguments and insights into the South African condition.
“You need the intellectual infrastructure. In the long run it matters because it boils down to quality, both in terms of ideas and people. Once you compromise on that, you go the way of the ANC.”
James undertook many intellectual initiatives, especially as DA caucus chair.
“I organised internal lectures on policy. They were well attended, with outsiders, academics largely, to talk about policy, and [these were] supplementary to the caucus.
“I also held outside events, addressed by former leaders like Tony Leon and Trevor Manuel.”
But James’s brush with the party’s formal policy-making structures did not turn out as well.
His time in charge of policy, reporting to federal executive chair James Selfe, was brought to an abrupt halt after some public confusion between himself and then national spokesman Maimane over policies such as BEE and affirmative action (AA).
Some of that he attributes to the leadership style of Helen Zille.
“She was so dominant in the DA’s discourse. She tried to control the policy process by what was, in my opinion, an overly elaborate process of approval. I was taken off policy.
“There was the fallout over the AA and BEE policies. I went overseas and when I came back I was no longer responsible.”
Of the DA under Maimane, he says: “There has been a change in attitude. There is less centralised control.”
He has made good use of this. After standing against Maimane for the DA leadership, a brave battle but one he lost comprehensively, he has quietly occupied the party’s backbenches, doing what he loves best.
One of the results was an impressive policy in response to the ANC’s National Health Insurance scheme, unusual in the DA in that he personally oversaw its production. Titled “Our Health Plan”, it is meticulously researched, based on international best practice and fully costed. It is a model of what in-depth policy should look like. But it was met, to James’s great disappointment, by little interest in the South African media.
“The reception in the medical community and insurance community and among international experts was very good,” says James, “but the public response here was awful. Essentially, there was none.
“The media? I have no idea why they didn’t engage with it. There are parts that are technical, but to have silence was remarkable.”
It’s not really that remarkable though, because James understands the bigger forces at play.
James is critical but not discouraged, and has every intention of returning to DA politics. He remains fully invested in the party.
His departure, even if temporary, is a sad loss, and his experience speaks to a political environment outside the DA that is intensely hostile to intellectualism and one, inside the party, that shows a relative lack of interest in it.
Gareth van Onselen writes for Financial Mail.