Maimane must still prove credibility to blacks
WHETHER one has ANC, EFF or any political affiliation, anyone who wants to relegate Mmusi Maimane’s presence to a non-entity is either a fool or a denialist.
He is young, easy on the eye – easier than a fat BEE belly – and is undeniably a great orator who can connect to the Y Generation in a believable manner far better than any apartheid-attacking rhetoric can. The shocking win of the students’ representative council election by the DA student arm of Fort Hare proves the waning power of apartheid-attacking rhetoric and labelling of the DA as a white party to the born-frees whether they are rural or urban.
This group of young voters are interested in democratic principles and the rights conferred by the constitution in their own lives. When they see corruption and arrogance from the ruling party elders and political elite, it violates what they view should be the foundation of a democratic South Africa. They are simply not fazed by the story of the past but are rather concerned with the story of today.
The style of the modern communication used by the DA – powerpoints, motivational and inspirational talk – resonates with this generation immensely, more than talk of apartheid.
In light of these gains by the DA and the new elected leader of the DA, a party perceived as white by certain sectors, why is Maimane still considered by some black South Africans as a puppet of white South Africans?
This is the question I posed to the young politician in our telephonic interview.
To this he pointed out, eloquently, that most political parties tended to mobilise South Africans around race rather than issues, values and delivery, and that simply entrenched distrust among racial groups.
And of course what would a DA leader be without laying blame on the “ANC that wants to say if someone is black, they should vote the ANC”.
He added that South Africa had failed to have integrated conversations around race.
The crux of race relations in South Africa is that they are economy-based, as Maimane rightly diagnosed. But what is lacking from Maimane is the deeper and practical content and solutions on how to solve the crux of the reality that a white person’s great-great-grandfather took cows from my black great-great- grandfather and generations down in 1994, we decided on a peace deal.
Now people want their family’s cows back and that’s the crux of redistribution of resources, hence the pull of the EFF’s radical and populist rhetoric, no matter how impractical.
When Maimane talks about trust needed among races, or “building schools when they are removing statues” and the white favourite of invoking Nelson Mandela’s rainbow nation ideals it simply feels like manipulation through sentiment and it annoys black South Africans.
People are yearning for the content of reconciliation rather than the sen- timent of 1994. Until the likes of Maimane realise it, black people will view him as a white puppet.
Had Maimane, for example, rebuked publicly and unapologetically Allister Sparks’s comments of identifying Hendrik Verwoerd as a smart politician rather than sounding like another Helen Zille giving rational arguments on race without dealing with the emotional, deeply hurtful and offensive statements, he would have scored more political points with the people who see him as a symbolic black face of a white party.
Telling us how Sparks is a renowned journalist and how he was against Verwoerd made him Zille-like, hence the puppet name and failed to convince the sceptics that he can relate to the black experience fully.
This sensitivity is lacking in the DA in spades and will fail to connect to the hearts of sceptics it wants to cross over to it.
Until Maimane can manage this and relate to the racism black people experience, he will be seen as having more fluidity in whiteness than blackness, and all other parties are waiting to prove that he is, as Frantz Fanon puts it, black skin in a white mask.