WATCHING POLITICS PLAY OUT IN REAL TIME
Recent media events have put South Africa’s politicians and government officials on show. These are opportunities to put the people who make decisions in front of the people who bear the consequences of these decisions
Last Thursday, News24 held the Cape Town leg of its On the Record summit. These sorts of gatherings are valuable for a number of reasons, not least because you get a chance to see people in the flesh who you normally only interact with through the prism of media.
It’s also fun to see South Africans react in real time to some of the things politicians and government officials presume to say. For example, on a panel about organised crime, Gen Shadrack Sibiya, the head of organised crime investigations at the police, said South Africa isn’t a mafia state because “criminals do not tell the government what to do”.
He was greeted with mocking laughter and predictable heckling. I felt quite embarrassed for him.
Another panel, “The Kingmakers”, featured the DA’s John Steenhuisen, ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba, new kingmaker on the block Songezo Zibi of Rise Mzansi, and Mmusi Maimane. I’m never really sure who Maimane represents, but (checks notes) currently it appears to be Build One South Africa, which is an awkward name for a political party, though a great pay-off line for a hardware store.
If you were the sort to do a semiotic analysis, the way the panel presented would have made you smile. On a slightly too shiny blue sofa sat Steenhuisen and Mashaba, as far apart as they could manage. Both wore ties — in Steenhuisen’s case a red one, though mercifully not of a Trumpian length. On stage left of the sofa, individual chairs were placed for the more casually attired Zibi and Maimane.
Steenhuisen sat squarely and stolidly facing the audience, in his classic DA-spreading fashion, while Mashaba sat slightly askew, appearing to be stuck in an uncomfortable position of giving Zibi and Maimane the cold shoulder, while also trying not to face Steenhuisen too directly. That might be symbolic of the political position he finds himself in, or it could just have been a very uncomfortable sofa.
News24’s assistant editor for politics and opinion, Qaanitah Hunter, was the moderator, which slightly diluted the bro factor. But clearly, the “kingmaker” sobriquet was well chosen.
Much of the discussion, as you would expect, circled around the idea that opposition parties might form some sort of coalition to unseat the ANC in 2024. Steenhuisen even has a catchy term for it: the “moonshot pact”. Not just a prophetic reference to the propensity for SpaceX’s rockets to blow up on the launch pad, this also refers to like-minded political parties creating a plan to form coalitions for next year’s polls.
Like-minded! What a dreamer. Mashaba presented the starkest example of why this wouldn’t work, and also of why ActionSA is a party with some very compromised principles.
“In a coalition agreement, we don’t have to agree on everything, but you have got to accommodate everyone,” he said. “At the end of the day, the DA really needs to understand that we need the Patriotic Alliance [PA] on board, whether we like it or not.”
To give Steenhuisen credit, he was unequivocal in his response. “There’s no point going into government with people who are going to do the very same things that you are trying to replace and fix — corruption, maladministration, poor governance and the like,” he said. “Second, you can’t go in with the politics of extortion, with a gun against your head, and be told that, if you don’t make [PA leader] Gayton McKenzie the mayor, then you must walk.”
If you needed more reason why a moonshot pact is unrealistic, take this bon mot from Mashaba, during a discussion about how polling trends are forecasting that ANC numbers will show a significant drop in 2024. “The ANC will need God if they are going to get in the mid-30s next year. But they
don’t believe in God.”
It’s going to be difficult being in a coalition with a party that is claiming the ANC is godless. Wait until they find out about the DA’s pretty little rainbow pedestrian crossings.
Steenhuisen made a number of overtures to Zibi, inviting him to participate in a moonshot pact meeting. Zibi’s response provided one of the soundbites of the day. “We need to think a little bit harder about this. We’ve just said South Africa needs a reset — it doesn’t need a reset from fragmentation, it needs a reset from a lack of imagination,” he said.
It’s an appealing thought. Can’t we try something new for a change, rather than endlessly circling the ANC’s bloated, dying body and biting chunks out of it when opportunity allows?
Zibi and Maimane both spoke about the importance of getting South Africans to vote. Zibi said that 2024 would be “a turnout election. Collectively, we have to find between 3-million and 5-million voters, who have not voted, to come back to the polls. That is what changes the maths.”
News24 editor in chief Adriaan Basson summed up Zibi’s position in an opinion piece after the event. “Zibi, a former editor and private sector communicator who launched his party last month, doesn’t believe the DA’s moonshot pact will appeal to them. He may be right. If the main dishes on next year’s election menu are the ANC-EFF and a DA+ moonshot opposition coalition, there may very well be a few hundred thousand voters seeking a third way. Time will tell if he was naive or visionary.”
Maimane was succinct about his ambitions. “I may not like the ANC, but I love ANC voters. I want them to be part of our democratic project going forward.”
If you were looking for further proof that coalitions are bad for our country (an overly simplistic view, I know, and I’m reminded of Steenhuisen’s comment that we need to deal with realpolitik), you need look no further than the morality tale of the panel “How to Fix the City”, featuring co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Thembi Nkadimeng, Cape Town mayor Geordin HillLewis, urban expert Sithole Mbanga, and the then mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay, Retief Odendaal (he was ousted in a noconfidence vote the day after the event).
News24 described it: “The ANC’s bizarre arrangement with the radical EFF to elect a mayor of a minority party and share the rest of the spoils had now moved beyond Gauteng and won the day in Gqeberha on Friday when they managed to garner 62 votes for a successful motion of no confidence vote against Odendaal.
“In his place, the ANC and EFF elected Gary van Niekerk from the Northern Alliance as mayor. The Northern Alliance is a local party that attracted 2% of votes in the 2021 local government election. Van Niekerk jumped from speaker in the DA-led government to mayor for the ANC-EFF.”
The DA was quoted in Daily Maverick as describing Van Niekerk as a “puppet mayor” and a “Judas”, put into his position by the ANC and the EFF.
The party is reported as saying: “The ANC and EFF will now have unlimited access to the city’s R18bn budget and the ‘Judas’ mayor Van Niekerk will dance to their tune, all for the sake of a shiny mayoral chain and a large salary.”
Bizarrely, a couple of days before, public interest news agency GroundUp reported that “about 300 shack-dwellers from Area 11 informal settlement in ward 45, KwaNobuhle in Kariega, burnt tyres, whistled and sang songs” demonstrating against the ousting of Odendaal, because, unlike the ANC, he was actually delivering services.
According to GroundUp, one resident, Nceba Davids, said: “The reason you want to remove him … is that you want to loot.”
So much for the will of the people. It does make you wonder whether realpolitik is sometimes shorthand for
“screw the people”.
In the On the Record event, the audience played its part too. There seemed to be a fair bit of support for Mashaba, who received a round of applause when he took the stage. This was despite a less than complimentary introduction, with deliciously acerbic MC Devi Sankaree Govender saying something along the lines of: “Welcome, the owner of South Africa’s most expensive authorised unauthorised biography.”
Leaving On the Record, heading out of the Cape Town International Convention Centre, I walked under big banners for the next day’s Daily Maverick The Gathering: Earth Edition.
It’s encouraging that news organisations are taking responsibility for putting the people who make decisions in front of the people who bear the consequences of those decisions. It’s not enough to just do that in the form of digital content, as valuable as that is. We don’t just want to look into the eyes of politicians, we want to look at our fellow citizens alongside us, and look with them.
Since artificial intelligence is the flavour of the month, we might look to the strategy employed to test the systems for problems.
It’s known as red-teaming, and The Guardian describes the process: “Programmers and hackers from outside an organisation are encouraged to try and curtail certain safeguards to push a technology to ‘do bad things to identify what bad things it’s capable of’. These kinds of external checks and balances are rarely implemented in the world of tech because of technologists’ fear of ‘people touching their baby’.”
I hope someone is touching Steenhuisen’s moonshot baby, and checking where the potential for disaster is. Because it’ll be there, and if there’s one thing we’ve learnt from coalitions, it’s that one of the members will be ready and eager to take advantage.