WHERE IS THE OPPOSITION?

Despite years of misrule, the other parties have been unable to shake the ANC out of its complacency

We moan a lot. It’s understandable, though. You have to be dead to not moan and rant in SA. Unemployment is the highest of 128 countries tracked by Bloomberg, inequality is the widest in the world, crime is at pandemic levels, poverty is endemic, corruption is everywhere.

The ANC is always the culprit. Whether it’s foreign policy (we like the Mugabes and the Putins of this world), local government (potholes and no water in Koster), economic policy (how many forms have you had to fill in today?), it’s always the ANC’s fault.

So I would humbly like to ask our opposition parties to help me understand why, 28 years in, they have been unable to even shake the ANC out of its complacency. SA has been in reverse gear since 2008, yet opposition parties seem nowhere near ejecting the ANC. In fact, the ANC has now taken over the job of opposition.

On Saturday, ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa was in Mangaung, which the ANC has destroyed through corruption. He told his audience: “Our meeting today will lead to a number of changes, as you have heard. We are continuing to work to correct the many things that have gone wrong in our country, including things like corruption, criminality, state capture and all those issues. We will get this country right.”

Did you get that? He says his party will “correct the many things that have gone wrong ”— on its watch. Yes, he is saying the wolf will protect the sheep.

Where is the opposition? I am no longer entertaining the argument that many

South Africans vote on the basis of loyalty to the party that fought the liberation struggle for them. If South Africans really voted on this basis, perhaps they would dump the ANC for the PAC or the Azanian People’s Liberation Organisation. They don’t and that is simply because those two parties are stuck in the 1970s, are poorly organised and have no plan to move themselves or the country forward.

Of those opposition parties that operate in the present, some tough questions have to be asked too.

The DA is losing black leaders at a rate of knots and no-one in its inner circle seems to be asking what’s going on. This is a problem and the perception of racism that clouds the party will continue to see the DA haemorrhage black leadership and support.

The EFF is a personality cult draped in the policies of the ANC’s radical economic transformation (RET) faction. What the leader says is gospel, and when he changes his mind as he often does his new utterances become the new gospel.

So what is the future? Former president Kgalema Motlanthe told the Centre for Development & Enterprise last week that “the kind of formations that are going to take this country forward are still going to come and will be fashioned by a realignment of forces”.

That is depressing. We don’t have the time. What the ANC needs now is the knowledge that power can and may be lost by a viable opposition coalition as quickly as May 2024 when national and provincial elections are due. At the current pace, even if the ANC falls below 50% it will easily jump into bed with smaller parties and stay in power.

There is an even scarier scenario. If the ANC’s RET faction wins at the party’s elective conference in December, we are in real trouble. The RET faction knows that if it wins the internal ANC battle it will have to face up to the SA electorate in 2024 and that it will be rejected.

It would have to rig the elections by capturing the institution that will ensure a free and fair vote: the Electoral Commission of SA.

It can do it too. Remember that the ANC disbanded the Scorpions in just three months in 2008, paving the way for Jacob Zuma’s ruthless capture of the state in the 10 years thereafter.

If it can pull off that heist then we are in another realm, a place where being an opposition politician may well be a ticket to trumped-up charges and jail. The opposition needs to wake up.