[ad_1]
Tony Leon is the most prolific of all the former leaders of the Democratic Alliance (DA), South Africa’s main opposition party, as befits the chairman of a communications company.
In his last and fifth book, The future: reflections on my troubled land , he comes across as articulate and persuasive.
The Democratic Alliance, since its initial establishment as the Progressive Party in 1959, has opposed injustices committed by the apartheid government. Today, most of its support comes from demographic minorities. His current challenges are to make black people more visible among his senior leaders.
The recent turmoil has included veteran party leader Helen Zille propelling Mmusi Maimane to the party leadership. The other was Tony Leon’s role in pressuring Maimane to resign after a series of AD tactical mistakes resulted in electoral losses in 2019.
The new and most useful content of his book can be found in Chapters 2 and 3. They provide the first insider account of the ousting of Maimane, the first black leader of the party, in October 2019. His meteoric rise and that former DA parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko, as well as the attempt to recruit Mamphela Ramphele, the outspoken liberation struggle activist, were seen as the DA breaking out of its old boundaries to win over African voters. Their departures have disappointed such hopes.
Leon also plunges into the turmoil that accompanies him within the DA due to the choices made by Zille, who has retained important positions in the party and refused to relinquish power.
Leon reflects on the DA’s biggest challenge: “how to maintain its majority support among minorities and increase its meager share of voters among the black majority” (page 21).
These puzzles remain unsolved for the party, even after two decades of democracy. African voters represent four-fifths of the electorate. For the DA to ever become the ruling party, even in a coalition, it has to convince more than racial minority voters.
Strengths
The future raises classic political questions that have been debated for over two centuries. One of the most important is: what is the optimal mix of markets and state in the economy?
A pragmatic – and not dogmatic – response would certainly be different from country to country and from era to era.
For example, in the 1950s, socialists like Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Gamal-Abdel Nasser in Egypt knew what to do to fight unemployment: the state would have to set up steel and textile factories to employ tens of thousands of workers. people.
But in 2021, an automated and robotic steel and textile plant typically employs far fewer workers. Jobs now reside in tourism, computer coding, and digital industries such as web design. These require accomplished skill sets. With long-term unemployment of 42% (and reaching 93% in a small country town like Touws Rivier), it’s a hot button for South Africa.
Another hot topic Leon brings up is the issue of affirmative action. He underlines what he sees as a contradiction – the fact that the country’s Bill of Rights enshrines non-racism, while the government pursues a policy of affirmative action.
Leon points out that the mechanistic application of affirmative action for demographic proportionality (blacks are the majority) results in ‘Indian’ police officers (from a demographic group representing 3% of South Africans) being banned. to be promoted to all upper echelons where there are less than 34 positions. It is the opposite of a non-racial society where any individual can be promoted solely on the basis of merit.
A lot of The future is responsible for summarizing two decades of media presentations on corruption in the government of the African National Congress (ANC) and the descent into kleptocracy under the presidency of Jacob Zuma between May 2009 and January 2018. Leon attributes the main cause to the ANC cadre deployment policy. Practice ensures that key government positions are occupied by loyalist supporters. This is similar to what the United States calls the “loot system”. It has been criticized as valuing party loyalty over ability, competence and probity.
Leon also attributes the cause of the corruption to the fact that the ANC removed the authority of the Civil Service Commission to promote civil servants solely on the basis of merit.
The weight of its arguments can be judged by the fact that the government is now publicly discussing restoring the mandate of the Public Service Commission on this issue.
The future also discusses foreign policy. The ANC’s historic allies were the Soviet Union (Russia) and Cuba. The US, UK, Germany and other EU states remain South Africa’s main trading and investment partners. Leon, a former ambassador to Argentina, argues that the ANC’s rhetoric and vintage stances on the Cold War fail to optimally handle the complexities of these global realities.
Criticisms
The future Repeatedly reminds readers how many terrible predictions and prophecies about South Africa’s future have turned into a harvest.
The book offers its readers both the virtues of the liberal vision and its limits. The virtues of the liberal view include support for individual human rights, acceptance of doubt and uncertainty, and tolerance of dissenting opinions. The limitations are that it sometimes opposes state interventions in the market to alleviate social injustices and to address some of the issues raised by identity politics.
The future has more than one chapter on the emigration of millionaires and billionaires from South Africa. They are supposed to be driven out mainly by affirmative action by the state, preferential buying and other economic policies, as well as by the wave of crime. But it doesn’t even contain a sentence about the immigration of two million working-class Africans from other countries, and what that might tell us. Leon’s proximity to the plutocratic classes corresponds to his distance from knowledge of the realities of the working class.
He gives an example of how affirmative action caused the emigration of a white postdoctoral fellow from the University of Cape Town. But he doesn’t mention how the university attracted top academics from other African countries.
One chapter explicitly, and the book as a whole, is imbued with the perspectives and arguments of private bankers and investment bankers. But the contrasting arguments of the labor movement, including the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the largest labor federation, and the research done by the NGOs that back it, only appear in a sentence or two for dismissal.
Likewise, this book and the Democratic Alliance, which the author once directed and with which he is still associated, give readers the impression that they are judging South Africa’s foreign policy on the basis of its conformity with the foreign policy of the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and have a white ear for the importance of Pan-African empathies.
There is no nuanced perception that Western powers selectively invoke human rights abuses against their targeted regimes, while enthusiastically selling weapons to human rights violators they see. as business-friendly.
The future is a good read, and should be on everyone’s shelf. This critic hopes that former South African President Thabo Mbeki and incumbent Cyril Ramaphosa will not leave everything to their biographers, but will also write their own memoirs. It is good that the former presidents as well as the former leaders of the official opposition are telling us in their own words their perspective on what happened.
Keith Gottschalk is a member of the ANC, but writes this in his capacity as a political scientist.
By Keith Gottschalk, political scientist, University of the Western Cape
Source link
