Politics is not ideological purity

DA leader Helen Zille File photo: Sibusiso Ndlovu

DA leader Helen Zille File photo: Sibusiso Ndlovu

Published Nov 20, 2013

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The DA really needs to state - and, better still, demonstrate - where it stands on the issue of redressing the legacy of apartheid, says Allister Sparks.

Cape Town - Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s first chief of staff, once famously advised his boss: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” As it turned out, Obama was too cautious a leader to use the economic crisis he inherited from George W Bush as a launch pad to become the great reformist many hoped he would.

Nevertheless, Emanuel’s advice has gone down in political folklore. As he explained at the time, a crisis presents “an opportunity to do things you thought you could not do before.”

It is in that context I would like to commend what has become known as Rahm’s Rule to the leader of the DA, Helen Zille. This is not because I regard the kerfuffle in the DA over its handling of the Employment Equity Amendment Bill as a crisis of any great magnitude. It’s just a speed-bump. But it does come at an awkward moment for the DA, just as it is making a major pitch at the bright young “born-free” black voters whom it rightly sees as its core constituency of the future.

By “dropping the ball,” as Zille put it in her detailed explanation of how things went wrong, the DA presented the ANC with an opportunity, as that rising young star in our media, Songezi Zibi, put it in Business Day last week, “to reinforce what a significant number of black people already believe about the DA: that its primary concern is to defend the economic and social privileges of white South Africans”.

Zille’s explanation helps clear the air but the DA really needs to state – and, better still, demonstrate – more emphatically where it stands on the issue of redressing the legacy of apartheid. And here is where Rahm’s Rule presents the DA with an opportunity, not just to clarify present policy, but to take a leap ahead of the game with a bold new policy announcement. It should go something like this...

At a time when the new South Africa should be redressing the inequalities caused by apartheid in a much broader and more equitable way than is being done at present, the DA declares that it accepts the core principles of racial equality set out in the Freedom Charter. Therefore, in fulfilment of the charter’s declaration that the people should share in the nation’s wealth and that the restriction of land ownership on a racial basis be ended, the DA announces that in all provinces and municipalities that it controls it will hand over state land to those who work it in rural areas, and to those who live on it in urban areas.

They, the people, shall be made the owners of those properties and shall be provided with the title deeds attesting to their legal ownership. This will draw millions of previously disadvantaged South African citizens into the mainstream of the national economy. It will change their lives and the future of our country.

When I put forward the idea last month of giving land belonging to the municipalities and the state to the millions of black people who have been living on it for years, either paying fealty to chiefs in the former Bantustans or rental to urban councils, it drew an enthusiastic response, showing that it would be a winner.

Setting it in the context of the Freedom Charter would make it doubly so, for that document is close to holy writ in the black community.

Yes, I know there are elements among the “true blue liberals” in the DA who are fussed about the Freedom Charter because they think it has a whiff of socialism about it, and, yes, there were Communists among those who drafted it, but it was carefully phrased to be inclusivist. We have heard from these doctrinaire liberals before, both in the old South Africa and the new, and they have long prevented the DA and its predecessors from gaining the credibility in the black community they deserved for the long fight leaders like Helen Suzman, Colin Eglin and Frederik van Zyl Slabbert waged during the darkest years of apartheid when the ANC was banned.

But now the times they are a-changin’. After five years of the Zuma administration, both the ANC and the country are running into serious problems. Factionalism is rife and the economy is in distress. Cosatu looks to be heading for a split, which will change the whole configuration of the ruling alliance.

I sense that some time after next year’s election, we shall find ourselves entering a new phase of coalition politics in which the DA could, and should, play a pivotal role.

Small wonder, therefore, that Zille has put her foot down and declared that there will be no more pandering to what she calls the “formalistic liberals” in her party. Politics is not about ideological purity; that is for religious and communist fundamentalists, which is why both end up being so disastrous.

As the old adage has it, politics is the art of the possible. And liberal politics, as Zille has pointed out, has many different interpretations in different contexts. In South Africa it has always been identified as being for racial equality and trying to help the underdog.

So there is nothing about affirmative action that is incompatible with liberalism. Nor is there anything in the Freedom Charter that advocates nationalisation, which is what has always made the formalistic liberals so fearful of it. The dreaded “n” word doesn’t appear anywhere in what is quite a brief and simple document.

The one paragraph that tends to be cited as covertly communist says that “the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people”. Well, as the Free Market Foundation’s Leon Louw points out, “the state” and “the people” are not the same thing.

Moreover, that paragraph is promptly followed by another that sounds distinctly capitalist. “All people,” it says, “shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions.” So the Freedom Charter is certainly pragmatist.

The point is it was written 58 years ago, and like all founding charters, including the Bible, must be read and understood in the context of its time. Such charters cannot be altered or updated to take account of changing circumstances. They are too venerable for that. Which means they shouldn’t be read literally, like some legal proclamation, but rather as the expression of a broad vision that a severely oppressed group of people conjured up at a particularly dark moment in their history of the kind of society in which they wished to live.

Today we are trying to build that society. So instead of quibbling about its detail, let us honour it for what it is:

A vision, like Martin Luther King’s dream.

And above all, let us start acting to make at least some part of that dream come true, by extending one of the most fundamental of all human freedoms, home ownership, to the millions of our people who still don’t have it because of their skin colour two decades after liberation.

* Allister Sparks is a veteran journalist and political commentator.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.

Cape Times

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