The 1996 Constitution formalised the office and role of the leader of the opposition.
Section 57(1)(d) of the Constitution obliges the National Assembly to recognise “the leader of the largest opposition party in the Assembly as the Leader of the Opposition”.
The first holder of the post was also the briefest occupant of the office: FW de Klerk, leader of the National Party, served for just over one year, resigning the post in September 1997. Doubtless after helming both the country as president and serving afterward as deputy president to Nelson Mandela, leadership of the parliamentary opposition proved very weak tea indeed.
De Klerk quit by his own choice, and his successor, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, also had a brief tenure of less than two years until the voters ejected him from office in the 1999 general election.
I was the next holder of the office, and the longest serving opposition leader in Parliament (1999 to 2007) though as I often point out, this at best is a very mixed accolade. After all, the most successful opposition leaders are those who obtain power, something Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer triumphantly proved last Thursday in the UK.
The privilege of being in opposition
One of my motivations for standing down from that office was a conversation I held with another former opposition leader (from the previous era), Colin Eglin, who advised that I should not attempt to emulate the longest-serving opposition leader of the pre-democratic era, Sir De Villiers Graaff, who clung on, despite ever diminishing results, for 21 years.
In the 30 years since democracy was birthed here, it is only the immediate past leader of the opposition, John Steenhuisen, who has migrated from the hard benches of opposition and entered the portals of ministerial power. This was consequence of the electoral earthquake on 29 May, whose seismic result is the brave new world of power sharing in a super-sized government of national unity.
For all the churn in personnel (since 1996 there have been eight leaders of the opposition) only two parties – the National Party (later rebranded as NNP) and the Democratic Party (later the Democratic Alliance) have been voted as the largest opposition parties and hence entitled to the privileges of the post.
Such “privileges” often eluded me during my tenure. I once described being the leader of the opposition as akin to “making bricks without straw”. The leader has more time and media attention than others and can lead off debates in Parliament and try to influence the political weather. But most of the advantages are with the government and, certainly and formally, all the power.
Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert, who served as opposition leader in the tricameral Parliament noted it was not a happy or easy role, requiring “iron in the soul”.
Some recent sniping by ANC members of the new GNU at their DA counterparts in the vast “team of rivals” inspanned by Cyril Ramaphosa for using regulations and ministerial decree to change or adapt policy misses a deep irony.
In three decades of ANC rule, precisely to neuter Parliament and concentrate authority and control in the executive, vast swathes of power were ceded from the legislature to the Cabinet. In this sense, the ANC – now reluctantly obliged to share the spoils of ministerial office with their opponents, find themselves hoist on a petard of their own construction. Its ministers can hardly complain when DA ministers use the same rule book and regulatory regime to advance their agendas.
Unlearning old habits
But if the ANC is having to unlearn the habits of three decades of one-party rule, so too the DA. Its expertise, unmatched over the decades, has been to provide robust opposition in Parliament. Now, it must shed the habits of a political lifetime and adjust to a new role of collective responsibility for governance. And what role its 70 or so MPs, who are outside the comfort of ministerial, deputy ministerial and parliamentary chair positions play in the new Parliament is a new and perhaps unanticipated challenge.
De Klerk would later write that the impossibility of squaring a role in government with an opposition stance outside of it, hastened his decision to leave the first GNU in 1996. And the small Democratic Party of that time – unburdened by any such duality, reaped the electoral dividends and supplanted the once mighty NP just three years later.
But if only two parties (NP and DA) have for 30 years, provided the formal leadership of the opposition to the ANC until this month – it is worth noting that both fully operated in and navigated the political mainstream. Both parties voted for and supported the Constitution, both believed in market economics and, latterly, the DA supported the brace of reforms embedded in Ramaphosa’s Operation Vulindlela, even if it meant a further retreat from Parliament’s legislative oversight.
Yet the consequence of the DA decision, widely supported according to the polls, of the party entering government now sees a party and leader completely outside the constitutional consensus as leader of the opposition.
If the largest opposition party (DA) enters government, then the logic of the Constitution suggests that the second-largest opposition party will qualify for the role of formal parliamentary opposition leadership.
Step forward John Hlophe, parliamentary leader of Umkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) – the disgraced and debarred judge, the first high court supremo to be impeached by the Parliament he has just joined, is (according to this reading of the Constitution) the new leader of the opposition. Never mind the rude severing of the separation of powers and the shamelessness of his entrance into Parliament (dozens and dozens of MK MPs were forced off the list to make way for him). Those are just two of the most immediate and dangerous signals offered by Jacob Zuma’s revenge party.
On Tuesday, the former judge who was stripped of his office by Parliament for attempting to suborn two constitutional court judges, was chosen by the same Parliament to join the selection committee (JSC), which the Constitution mandates to nominate new judges.
Surreal script
And if even Kafka couldn’t have written this script, it gets more surreal and far more dangerous: Neither Hlophe nor his party believe in the Constitution itself. They want to throw it out and replace it with an atavistic (and in their case feudal) throwback to the grim days of apartheid. No bill of rights, no judicial oversight, no individual or property rights for them.
In the MK Party worldview, the current order will be overthrown and replaced with untrammelled majoritarianism. They would also junk the fiscal and monetary rule books and inflate the currency and beggar its economy.
So going forward the parliamentary debate, and quite a chunk of public opinion, will be influenced by a person and party who do not believe in the constitutional order and all its implications, and whose economic prospectus is a warmed up combination cooked up in the political kitchens of Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
Even if the MK Party is a Zuma family cult, and the founder tires of the project or goes to jail in the next while, its 58 MPs headed by Hlophe will be in place in Parliament for the next five years. And while there were very few ANC MPs in the past who had any shared history or much sympathy for the previous DA opposition, no such limitations apply in the ANC-MKP crossover.
The parents might have divorced, but the children of the previous union have much in common. So, while, correctly, much of the national attention focuses on the government, watching the opposition space will prove fascinating. Maybe even alarming.