Jardine’s business ties don’t match political reality
Enter Roger Jardine. The respected man of business is about to trade his suit and tie for a political T-shirt. With about eight months to go before an election that must be held between May and August, Jardine faces a gigantic task.
Word on the street is that he does not lack for money.
He is on a mission to build a political base to provide insurance as he looks to head a DA-built platform, if not the DA itself.
To avoid being swallowed up by the blue party, he has to create his own thing. He comes from a strong ANC family, and joining the DA would open him up to charges of being a “sellout”.
He needs to create a barrier to give him a veneer of independence from the DA. That’s a challenging mission, considering he has just a couple of months to conjure up decent support.
His name isn’t recognisable in politics, so he has to spend serious money and time getting people to know him. That’s the first problem.
The second is ethnicity: he can be as nonracial as he likes, but the political terrain responds to ethnic affinities.
He will be challenged to sing and dance to isiZulu and Tsonga songs. That he is of Indian descent will limit his campaign.
Another difficulty is the political base he stands on. He has no obvious constituency. He will come across as someone recruited by the rich and famous to be their candidate. He will appear a mere piece of cloth to wrap around the DA to tone down the overwhelming whiteness and right-of-centre politics of the official opposition.
Voters may smell the money and DA agenda from afar and say: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”
Jardine may think his political credentials speak for themselves. In reality, they never do. A political narrative has to be crafted by a strategy and communications team.
His team already believes he can run a “hearts and minds” campaign similar to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.
Money might help political consultants say things to their clients that are believable at first glance, but the reality is that the South African situation could not be further from the US style of politics.
Obama ran on a well-established Democratic platform against a Republican Party strangled by a floundering George W Bush.
The platform was already in place for Obama to challenge him.
In South Africa, Jardine is being hoisted onto the shoulders of wealthy individuals who want to place him in a ramshackle “moonshot pact”. They believe his characteristics would make him a good president. They see a good, bureaucratic, CEO-style president and, therefore, a doer.
They may be right in their reading of him, but that is a secondary consideration right now. The first hurdle is to prepare him to face the electorate and pick up votes.
If he is to be the unifier of the opposition ranks, he must not enter politics as a hanger-on beholden to the DA and its funders.
The political arithmetic does not favour him or the “moonshot pact”.
The ANC will easily drop five percentage points out of natural decline and may drop more due to other factors.
But it is inconceivable that it will drop below 40%. The EFF will pick up at least 10%, even if they do not campaign.
In the event the ANC falls below 50%, the EFF could help it back to power, very quickly. That’s the situation the “funders” fear most, yet it is exactly the situation their money is likely to produce.
Rich people are used to having their way and buying success. However, the political terrain is a different kettle of fish altogether.
Trying to avoid our short-term destiny of volatility through ill-conceived joyrides into party politics will not help us.
What is required is an investment in the democratic process and the bulletproofing of the bureaucracy and other democracy-enabling institutions from the vagaries of politics.
Shortcuts will accelerate our decline instead of helping us.
Business needs to think more carefully about sponsoring acts that could render our hard-won democracy a ruse.
Rich people are used to having their way and buying success. However, the political terrain is a different kettle of fish altogether