As Colin Eglin’s centenary passes unnoticed, Paul Mashatile employs Trumpian tactics to undermine institutions others built. The contrast is stark, writes Tony Leon, from principled constitutional craftsmanship to power-hungry opportunism masquerading as progress.
Monday, 14 April 2025, marked the centenary of the birth of Colin Eglin.
Both this anniversary and the man himself are mostly forgotten – likely by most people under the age of 60 and certainly by those who depend on “struggle narrative” as a replacement for real history.
The Eglin era
I was interviewed on Monday by Radio Sonder Grense (SABC radio station, RSG) to offer reflections on the man who twice served as leader of the liberal parliamentary opposition under apartheid. And, when the country switched in 1990 from repression and exclusion to the unchartered terrain of democratic negotiations and inclusion – he played a significant role in the birthing of our Constitution.
During the Codesa negotiations (1991-1993) which created the interim constitution and the ground rules for the 27 April 1994 democratic elections and a new Parliament, I literally and metaphorically sat behind the large frame of Eglin. He was Democratic Party chief negotiator, and I served as a party “special advisor” to the talks.
My fellow advisor, the late Professor David Welsh, noted that all the notes we scribbled to Eglin sitting in front of us, were piled up next to him, unread. “We are here to give advice to someone who doesn’t take any!” Welsh observed.
Indeed, Eglin, with his formidable intellect and blunt manner, had a specific and definite view on the evolving process, melding principle with pragmatism. He had little interest or need to consult his party colleagues, but built a close relationship with the two big players: the outgoing National Party government and the incoming power, the ANC.
By the time the final Constitution was inaugurated in 1996, Nelson Mandela would herald Eglin (who later received a state gong for his efforts) as “one of the architects of our Constitution”.
Objectively, Eglin and the Democratic Party (which evolved in 2000 into the DA) played a role of some significance beyond its lack of political heft at the time. In fact, its deep (many thought naïve) attachment to the ideal of non-racial liberty in preference to the siren calls of race nationalism and insurrectionary violence was not exactly a vote winner. Its scant 1.7% of support in the 1994 elections reflected this.
While Eglin and the DP, alongside other party negotiators, were doing the hard yards and burning the midnight oil at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park (where Codesa convened), Paul Mashatile was an activist in the Gauteng structures of the ANC and SA Communist Party. He was barely noticed on the national stage and indeed ploughed his political furrow as a provincial politician in Gauteng.
His first emergence in the national spotlight happened years later, in 2006, when he splurged R96 000 on a single dinner in a French restaurant in Sandton and charged the full amount to the Gauteng provincial government.
The “Alex Mafia” in which he was a leading light, which landed lucrative tenders for failed projects, but enriching Mashatile and his circle also emerged into public prominence at that time. His high spending ways have been his norm and has attracted the attention of investigations by News24 and other media outlets.
Eglin and other founders of our constitutional order either rest in oblivion or are encrusted in a sepia-tinged mythology. This airbrushes away any suggestion that parties other than the ANC played a role in liberating SA from apartheid’s shackles or had any hand in the creation of our new democracy.
Mashatile’s Trump tactics
Today, by contrast, Deputy President Mashatile sits at the apex of “the constitutional project” others created, a heartbeat away from the Presidency itself.
Impatiently waiting his turn at the top, Mashatile has decided that his shortcut to president is best routed via blowing up the current GNU and replacing it (or rather the DA) with far more congenial partners to his style of governance, such as the EFF and MK. And like the bonus ball in Lotto, if this emergence leads to the early exit of Cyril Ramaphosa, so much the better.
In a truly extraordinary and historically illiterate rebuttal to recent attacks on him, Mashatile and his enablers offered a response.
Mduduzi Mdaba, Mashatile’s head of office writing, advised News24 last week that the DA’s current and entirely parliamentary and thus constitutional opposition to the proposed VAT increase, was of another order entirely.
He wrote: “By sabotaging the Budget… Mashatile has correctly asserted they don’t deserve to be in the GNU.
“The behaviour is not new. Historically, those resistant to change have sought to destabilise progress, from the rightwing (sic) AWB’s violent disruption of Codesa to the DA’s current obstructionism with the assistance of News24.”
There is a lot to absorb from this poison pen.
For starters, it suggests an unbroken affinity and attachment between the violent invasion of Codesa by right-wing thugs of the AWB in June 1993 where the DP was as much at risk as all other parties there, and the DA’s March 2025 perfectly nonviolent opposition to an item in the Budget.
Second, the imprecise and historically bizarre comparison gathers pace in this jeremiad by describing opposition to the VAT increase (and the fiscal framework) as “sabotage”. It seems that every party bar the IFP, including Mashatile’s ANC, now opposes the VAT increase. And it is tiresome to indicate that the fiscal framework vote is but one of several votes before the final Budget is approved, amended, or unamended by Parliament at a later stage.
A man with unexplained riches, a shaky grasp of legislative processes and scant knowledge of real history (or an enthusiasm for its fake variant) seeks to lead the country, apparently as soon as possible.
There is something rather Trumpian about all this, though Mashatile and his cronies would bristle at the comparison and are hardly possessed of Donald Trump’s huge power and performative abilities.
But even an inartful use of Trump tactics (falsifying facts, bulldozing constitutional opponents and mischaracterising all and any who stand in your path) has its limits when applied by lesser imitators. It might even, as Americans see the cost of Trump’s tariffs price everything beyond reach, start to lessen the true religionists in the MAGA world.
Just look, for example, at the reverse-Trump effect in countries as far apart as Canada and Australia. In both places, Trump imitators (Pierre Poilievre of Canada’s Conservatives) and Peter Dutton (Australian Liberal, in fact conservative, leader) were, before Trump issued his “liberation day” tariffs on course to remove the sitting governments. Now polls suggest the reverse outcome is likely.
There is, beyond Mashatile’s ham-fisted and cack-handed attempt to paint moderate constitutionalists, such as the DA, in the insurrectionist and supremacist colours of the AWB another linkage between Trump tactics relating to SA and the ANC’s posture in the world.
The ANC’s Trumpian style
Many reasons have been offered (from the influence of Elon Musk to a dislike of woke diversity mandates, like BEE and foreign policy adventurism) for the extraordinary and exemplary attention Trump gives South Africa and his mischaracterisation of some of the facts on the ground.
However, perhaps his executive order in February calling out the SA government for seizing “ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” has less to do with his attachment to local minorities. Perhaps his shoutout has more to do with reminding his supporters in his heartland that he has the backs of white Christians everywhere in the world, including in the US, even if there are millions of desperate refugees from Sudan or Ukraine, for example, who are real victims of ruthless oppression.
It is precisely the attachment to which the ANC foreign policy gives extraordinary levels of support to a faraway place like Gaza and its implacable hostility to Israel. The ANC claims it is acting as a moral superpower in the advancement of human rights and against genocide. Why, then, the singular attention to a Jewish state – to the exclusion of demonstrable and egregious offenders of human rights and fomenters of genocide which we are currently witnessing in places closer to home (like Sudan) or of ANC allies (such as Russia)?
The answer could also be Trumpian. Find an identity of interests, however remote, and in SA’s case mischaracterise Israel, for example, as an outpost of white Western settler colonialism in the heart of Araby.
For SA, though not for Trump, the current US focus on matters here, alongside tariffs and possible sanctions, could be extremely costly, whatever the motivations behind it.
The same calculation does not apply to SA’s foreign policy. It will not prove a cost-free exercise; whatever motives lie behind it.
