THE POLITICS OF IDEAS

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 oneyear 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 SA 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 chair, 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 all comers.

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 pseudopublic intellectuals advocating what is ➦

What it means: The DA is not doing enough to produce new policy; Maimane has yet to announce a policy platform