At a party you’d be hard-pressed to find better company than a group of ANC veterans reminiscing about the old days. They care about each other, remember long-dead friends and relatives and they’re warm to outsiders.
I remember the night after the 1999 election. As editor of the Financial Mail I’d almost become an election issue by endorsing Bantu Holomisa who, with his then partner Roelf Meyer, had done an extraordinary job of sticking it to the ANC. “Put this Bantu Back In His Place” read the cover of the offending FM editorial, the “place” being parliament.
Cyril Ramaphosa, who had recently led a black consortium to buy half the FM and Business Day, came under fierce pressure from his party. There were calls (including from some journalists) for my sacking, which Ramaphosa thankfully and even bravely ignored. There were radio shows driven by what I had done.
When he plays the Great Reformer it’s done behind the backs of his comrades, inside his own office where he can talk like a sane person
It’s hard to describe what intense public pressure can feel like. I hated it and I forced myself to go to the ANC’s post-election victory party at the Indaba Hotel past Fourways. It was dark when I got there and there were hundreds of cars. Inside, the music and laughter were deafening as I stood at the entrance, pretending to look for someone.
Just as I was about to inch further in a big, grinning, Tokyo Sexwale bounded up and embraced me. “I was hoping you would come,” he said as he led me into the middle of the room and made a show of me. The people around me could not have been nicer or more generous.
These are solid South Africans. They have kids and debts. So how come they get so much wrong so often? Ramaphosa thought he could show the party the error of its ways when he became leader. He would need them to learn from their own mistakes. But they never do. Instead, he marches to their tune and when he plays the Great Reformer it’s done behind their backs, inside his own office where he can talk like a sane person.
He doesn’t dare run to voters as a reformer. Just the opposite. “We cannot, and must not, go on with the new South Africa when we still have inequality in some areas of life,” he proclaimed this week as he signed the National Health Insurance Bill into law. “And healthcare, which is the most important area of life for anyone, is one area where we need equality. And, believe you me, we are going to have equality, whether people like it or not.”
Of course no South African in their right mind would not want a functioning public health service, so it hardly needs saying that Ramaphosa’s flourish on Thursday was obscenely cynical and unworthy of the office he holds. The modern ANC version of equality is broken roads, no water and the stink of sewage for all. He isn’t, anyway, trying to win over the public as the election campaign peaks. He is talking to his own party national executive who, like all revolutionary elites, need to know their guy can keep the hungry masses at bay.
The cynicism is knowing you can sign a bill to initiate a “policy” you know you don’t have the money to fund and knowing you’ve failed to run the health service you already have and knowing it won’t matter to you personally because it’ll be in court until you leave office in 2029.
If it’s really “equality whether you like it or not” in health, can education be far behind? Why should a tiny minority of kids get to go to private schools with working chemistry labs and computers and sports fields when the majority can’t? Hurry, hurry and get your children through Michaelhouse and Kingsmead before they are opened for free to the communities closest to them.
We could get rid of business class in South African airlines — and should hotels really be allowed to reserve the right of admission to people who need a place to stay at night?
The real tragedy of it all, though, is that the main opposition, the DA, is going to struggle to get a quarter of the national vote. It surely cannot continue like this. By choosing to ignore race as even a subsidiary, let alone central, proxy for the social problems we have to fix, it effectively sits out the fight, its precious “non-racialism” supposedly intact. It isn’t.
The DA is all over the place. It started off this election by forming an association with smaller parties and is ending it by telling people not to vote for smaller parties. It’s time, surely, for new leadership to put it in contention to win the country, with or without a credible partner, in 2034. That’s just a few heartbeats away and perfectly, patently, pretty please, possible.
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