SA’s political battlefield intensifies as election time looms

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WHILE some opposition parties intend to intensify the heat in the National Assembly and local government elections this year, putting an end to President Jacob Zuma and the ANC will not be easy.

“Opposition political parties in South Africa are on a long march to dent the ANC majority,” writes Susan Booysen in her latest book, Dominance and Decline – The ANC In the Time of Zuma.

Booysen said the DA’s 6 percent growth from 2009 to 2014 and the ANC’s 4 percent slide in popularity, while good, “the DA’s growth has been modest and it has no guarantee that a new party may not still rise and eclipse it”.

She said in the age of ANC dominance, “the DA’s influence on politics in South Africa has also become bigger than its electoral performances”. Yet “the curse of opposition politics” remains intact.

“To challenge the ANC effectively, opposition parties need to grow. To grow, they need to conquer chunks of the ANC support base.“

Booysen believes the DA made a wise decision to recognise that it was time its leadership addressed its racial identity image.

Political anaylist and author Eddie Maloka said the DA “is in desperate need of a Moses who will lead its flock to the land of milk and honey”.

Only time will tell if the DA’s making of history when Mmusi Maimane became the first black person to be in its highest office will translate into more black voters for the party.

Undoubetly Maimane’s “belief that, out of the ashes of apartheid, a prosperous and united South Africa can emerge”, is on the mark.

A black leader of a historically-white liberal party who is bold to categorically state that “the racial inequality of the past remains with us today,” is headed for somewhere in this country.

KwaZulu-Natal DA member and provincial MP, Mbali Ntuli also believes the DA must start a new conversation that resonates more with the majority of South Africans.

“The DA needs to be setting the agenda on bigger and more meaningful issues. We must be talking about issues relating to rural development, the role and importance of the king, our relations with the rest of Africa, whether to decriminalise prostitution and marijuana, the latter more for its potential value in biofuel.

“Nkandla was once a good story, which happened a few years ago. I am just bored by the current rhetoric in South African politics.”

United Democratic Front leader Bantu Holomisa said this week: “We have long maintained that South Africa has no serious government to speak of.

“The days of our people paying allegiance to a political party based on its liberation struggle history is over. The majority of our people, who are young and smart, want delivery and clean governance. If the ANC wants to be relevant, it must change gear but we know their leaders are busy looting the country. In 2016 the UDM will implement our national congress resolutions adopted in Bloemfontein in early December.”

Holomisa said corruption featured prominently in the UDM’s congress resolutions, adding that “corruption now threatens national security, therefore we will be calling for the adoption of a Bribery Bill in the National Assembly at the first sitting of Parliament this year”.

Abuse

At its congress the UDM denounced the decision to sack the Minister of Finance, Nhlanhla Nene, as “irrational”, as was “the deployment of ruling party cadres without skills into high positions of power within the state and/or state companies”.

IFP chairman Blessed Gwala said his party planned to “expose the ANC government’s corruption and unbecoming ways of managing the national economy”.

Gwala said although the office of the Auditor-General was “credible and doing a fine job overall, more needs to be done to get to the root of corruption in government departments where state resources get abused in the service of narrow party-political interests”.

He said in KwaZulu-Natal in particular, the IFP was concerned that so-called government imbizos were being “used to promote the ANC in an under-handed manner.”

Blessed Gwala said the IFP had not “gone on leave in December, but had already started campaigning for the forthcoming local government elections to help our people attain clean governance in their localities”.

He said “more South Africans needed to be educated about how the economy works so they can link joblessness, price hikes and currency fluctuations to the recklessness of the governing ANC”.

Last year South African author RW Johnson warned that the country faced the possibility of a regime change driven by the fast rate at which foreign investments had “essentially dried up”.

The past two years have seen Parliament shed its lacklustre image “where opposition matured, and, bolstered with larger numbers, it no longer appears as a pushover that submits to ANC majoritarianism”, said Susan Booysen.

Booysen believes the DA has been effective in using the courts when it has failed in Parliament because of its small numbers.

“The DA’s persistence in legal challenges resulted in the release of the spy tapes in 2014 – after five years of legal counteraction from Zuma to avoid it.”

Gwala said the IFP was also concerned by the power of ANC numbers in Parliament and said, “when the ANC uses its majority vote, it makes the opposition look weak and fragmented. All oposition parties must work even harder this year to protect common principles of integrity and anti-corruption”.