Three recent events compel attention and suggest the narrow path South Africa treads between possible salvation and collapse. We don’t have the luxury to follow advice from Yogi Berra, the famed US baseball catcher, who said: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Two of the events occurred on the same day, just over a week ago.
The most shocking was the daylight assassination of father and son, liquidators and curators Cloete and Thomas Murray. They were gunned down after being forced off the most visible highway in Gauteng, the NI, and their vehicle was raked with bullets.
Their assassins sped off — undetected to date. The duo’s involvement in the Bosasa liquidation proceedings and a slew of other high-profile corruption and organised crime cases lent credence to suggestions that the wilder shores of old Sicily are the template for today’s South Africa: the arrival of a full-blown mafia state.
More or less at the same time as this double murder, Cyril Ramaphosa addressed a civil society gathering at Johannesburg City Hall.
Any citizen who turned up there hoping the president would grasp the nettles of the polycrisis devastating South Africa right now — scant electricity, no growth, few jobs and indeed the crime surge — went to the wrong address.
Ramaphosa advised his audience that his number one priority was ‘’the unity and renewal of the ANC”. That unity has been achieved recently by lashing together in a “new” cabinet suspects fingered by the Zondo commission, state capturers, Bosasa beneficiaries and the normal grifters and incompetents.
The few constitutionalists and economically competent members of the executive will find “renewal” last on the list of these chancers. It’s the latest iteration of the Catch-22 conundrum: there is no renewal of the country possible while the unity of the ANC remains paramount; and that unity prevents the renewal.
The third event, Monday’s failure of protofascists in the EFF to shut down the country, was at one level proof positive of an interesting and unusual feature of our politics.
Unlike successful leaders with dubious policies in other countries, Julius Malema’s party can now with confidence be labelled “unpopular populists”.
However, it would be a mistake to ignore the clear and future danger posed by the constitutional delinquents and wannabe insurrectionists led by Malema.
After all, even a small mosquito carries cerebral malaria. The fact that after Monday’s non- shutdown the ANC in Gauteng continued its cosy governing arrangements with the EFF in Johannesburg indicates that this deadly swamp is far from drained.
And their 10% might be handy next year when a failing ANC needs a prop to stay in power.
If national salvation is impossible from an ANC which privileges party unity over country needs and an EFF which uses access to democracy to destroy it, a lot of responsibility rests on the political forces outside both of those parties.
History offers some examples of leaders who have seized the moment. German chancellor Helmut Kohl would hardly be remembered by posterity had he not, in the teeth of opposition from Margaret Thatcher and suspicion from Mikhail Gorbachev, driven through the improbable reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The same event propelled FW de Klerk to turn his back on his party’s promise never to negotiate unconditionally with the ANC. And before then, from a prison cell, Nelson Mandela commenced negotiations with his enemies absent a party mandate to do so.
History also offers far more examples of leaders and movements who missed their moment.
The non-EFF opposition here needs to grasp a difficult nettle. Can they, through imaginative arrangements, innovative offerings and a rare display of unity, offer weary and depressed voters a real choice next year? One that can form the fulcrum or pivot of a new government?
When a country faces great peril, history will not forgive those who resile from the challenge of a course correction.
More than 20 years ago, party strategist Ryan Coetzee and I believed the great danger was unchecked ANC hegemony. We forged a plan to join together two historic enemies, the Democratic Party and New National Party, to better consolidate the opposition to challenge for power. Hence the birth of the DA.
I am not suggesting it would be possible or even best to collapse all opposition parties into one big new movement, though it would doubtless galvanise both opposition supporters and disenchanted ANC voters.
There are a lot of current incompatibilities covered by the term “opposition”. And no shortage of personality cults posing as parties.
But between that option and the status quo of dozens of different opposition parties doing their own thing and cannibalising each other’s supporters lies a range of alternatives.
Whether it is a joint list while maintaining separate parties, or an opposition pact to stand together for common principles and use a basic agreement to enthuse voters and co-operate after polls close, there is no shortage of ideas.
It requires an adult conversation between leaders and groups prepared to do what the ANC has refused to do: put the country’s interests ahead of narrow party advantage. And what the EFF can never do: advance democracy and sound economics ahead of nihilistic destruction.
Surely that’s a challenge worth seizing, a chance worth taking.
