South Africa’s rallying point
ANALYSTS SAY RALLIES OVER MINISTER’S SACKING WILL HAVE LITTLE POLITICAL IMPACT
Zuma loyalists pour scorn on protesters as analysts see little impact of demonstrations
The last time white people came out in their numbers to protest against anything was when they were marching against democracy.” Thabiso Dlamini | ANC supporter
JOHANNESBURG T here was never going to be a march of a million people, but even before Friday’s protests in South Africa calling for President Jacob Zuma to resign, members of his party were deriding the demonstrations as the one-off roar of privileged white people.
The crowds that protested in the country’s main cities of Pretoria, Johannesburg and Cape Town did transcend South Africa’s ever-present racial divide, but not in the numbers likely to worry Zuma and the governing African National Congress. At most 20,000 people of all racial groups rallied in the two main cities, Pretoria and Johannesburg.
For many white South Africans, it was their first political protest — a fact that angered some black activists in one of the world’s most unequal countries.
“The last time white people came out in their numbers to protest against anything was when they were marching against democracy,” tweeted ANC supporter Thabiso Dlamini, with the handle Modern Day Pantsula, who also posted an apartheid-era photo of white protesters holding a banner ‘Hang Mandela.’
The protests over Zuma’s dismissal last week of respected finance minister Pravin Gordhan came too late to make a political difference, according to analysts. The ANC’s National Working Committee closed ranks around Zuma on Wednesday, forcing prominent ANC members who had earlier criticised the president, including his deputy Cyril Ramaphosa, to apologise.
With Zuma seen as likely politically safe until the end of his term, the marches still went ahead, and a viral post circulated on social media on the eve of the march, ‘Protest 101 for white people.’
“Friday’s protest is going to be horribly middle class,” it began, proffering ironic advice to protest newbies. “Wear sneakers and socks. You’ll need to move fast when the Nyalas arrive,” it said, referring to police anti-riot vehicles with water cannons. “Do NOT sing kumbaya,” it ran, adding that it was not de rigueur to quote first black president Nelson Mandela (loved by many ordinary South Africans but seen by radical political movements as a sell-out) recommending instead Steve Biko, a black socialist detainee killed by apartheid police in 1977, or Che Guevara, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary.
The protests came after international ratings agency S&P on Monday downgraded the country’s credit rating on its foreign denominated debt to junk status — or sub-investment grade, causing the currency, the rand, to plummet.
A second international ratings agency, Fitch, also downgraded South Africa’s credit rating to junk status on Monday — on both debt held in foreign and local currency — a more damaging development.
A third agency, Moody’s, has put South Africa on negative review, meaning a downgrade is under consideration.
The protests were led by the opposition and civic action groups including Save South Africa. Critics said middle-class white South Africans who joined the protests only did so because their comfortable lifestyles could be impacted by the ratings downgrade. “Imagine what could have been if we white South Africans were as outraged at apartheid, torture and death squads as we are at Zuma right now,” tweeted columnist Max Du Preez on Tuesday.
Marius Oosthuizen, a University of Pretoria lecturer, wrote in a column on news website the Daily Maverick that to people in South African townships, the marches “look a little elitist and far too pale”.
“To my angry friends, we whites look like ignorant brats fighting over our many toys.”
For South Africa’s middle classes, the fall in the rand’s value may make their next overseas vacation costlier. But for impoverished black South Africans, the rising cost of food staples and transport will bite hard.
Samuel Masemola, 44, an unemployed man from Temba, a township north of Pretoria, struggles to feed his six children, yet he did not hesitate to vote ANC at the last election in 2014. “Before the election they come to us in our place and they lied to us. They said, ‘We are going to make everything different,’ you see. I’ve been thinking that party was going to make good things for us.”
Masemola had not heard about the ratings downgrade, nor did he mention Zuma’s sacking of Gordhan. He came to protest because the ANC had not improved his life.
“The president must go,” he said, adding that he wanted to join the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, although it is widely perceived as a “white” party. He claimed the ANC has been losing support in his neighbourhood.
“Of 100 people, 70 hate this party. Thirty, they like it. Seventy, they don’t want it.”