Gordhan should sever old political ties

In 2009, Pravin Gordhan made clear his stance. He said he would be driven by “reality” and not ideology; he championed the value of being “pragmatic” and “sensible”.

He went on to say that he had aligned himself with the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the 1970s and explored Marxist methodology as a set of humane values and a way of achieving greater social justice.

That he has continued, in the face of internal ostracisation, to be loyal to the ANC in the hope that he might help transform it is indicative of a lingering inability to act in line with the logical continuum of the views he shared in 2009.

It is hard to cut the umbilical cord. It’s hard to move beyond ideology and hard to find another set of values that underpin and steer your pragmatism and sensibility. I should know.

Let me use the example of my father to explain, with reference to members of the SACP, who have shifted uneasily in their seats and signalled a Gordhan-like dissatisfaction with the status quo in the ANC.

My father, Yusuf Cachalia, was secretary of the South African Indian Congress, joint secretary with Walter Sisulu of the joint planning council of the Defiance Campaign and a one-time member of the SACP’s central committee.

I was privileged to get to know my father after I spent a decade of involuntary exile in the UK. He was a wise man. Like Gordhan, he had moved away from the Marxism he had embraced in the 1950s and 1960s and remained similarly loyal to the ANC. He died in 1995 and didn’t even live to see his life-long friend, Nelson Mandela, come to grips with the challenges of government in the new SA he had fought so hard for.

Throughout his political career, he was a close colleague of Yusuf Dadoo, a longtime chairman of the SACP. My father’s philosophy combined elements of Gandhism, Marxism and orthodox Islamic thought, and evinced an economic pragmatism that was informed by his core beliefs.

Many years of being banned and house-arrested from the 1960s onwards resulted in his foray into the world of business. He started a clothing company that grew into a retailing, manufacturing and wholesaling operation across parts of SA, Mozambique and Malawi.

It was in this context that I worked closely with him and got to know him.

We discussed everything from philosophy to politics, economics and religion, often as I accompanied him on his daily stroll to John Vorster Square to sign the daily report register. I was witness to a man whose world view was molded when days were dark and friends were few.

The victory of the allies over fascism, the immense human sacrifice by the socialist countries in this quest, the solidarity they showed towards liberation movements and the internationalism they espoused, made a lasting impact on him as he sought to bring about much-needed change and help foster a vision of a fairer society.

He was also influenced by the Nonaligned Movement of Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno and others.

I was also witness to a man who, having had first-hand experience of building a successful business, understood the unparallelled power of capitalism to create much-needed wealth and who firmly believed in the importance of redistributing this wealth in a way that fostered opportunity.

He was pragmatic and sensible, to use Gordhan’s words, and he understood the importance of freedom, fairness and opportunity — the cornerstone of the DA’s policies and values.

He was a modern-day social liberal and I believe that he would have been appalled by the rampant kleptocracy of the ANC. I also have to believe that he would have been able to sever, in line with his passage away from early communist solidarity, his erstwhile ties with the ideological straitjacket of Soviet-inspired precepts like “colonialism of a special type” and the two-stage national democratic revolution that continues to guide the ANC and that merely sees the ostensible adherence to “bourgeois” democracy as an expedient passage to another political and economic order.

I think he would have also questioned the ideology the left clings to. I think he would have questioned the exercise of power the right clings to.

I think, like me, he would have found the conservative, utopian zealots for sacking a centrist broad appeal for ideological absolutism an anathema. I think he would have seen that liberals and social democrats are the new realists. I think he would have broken with the old and stood with the new.

The question is, why can’t Gordhan?

YUSUF CACHALIA WAS A MODERN-DAY SOCIAL LIBERAL AND I BELIEVE HE WOULD HAVE BEEN APPALLED BY THE RAMPANT KLEPTOCRACY OF THE ANC