A fragmented opposition for meaningful change in South Africa is a costly mistake

Following almost 30 years in power, it is reasonable to believe that the African National Congress (ANC) can no longer be trusted to be the source of solutions to South Africa’s myriad of challenges. In fact, it is common cause that this governing party is the source of many of the problems facing South Africa today and escalating.

Hopes have been dashed for a modern African democracy. Instead, problems pile up. Meanwhile, this governing party remains tightly married to a South African Communist Party that has never been electorally tested. Emotional nationalism, rather than the logic of realpolitik, has guided economic and foreign policies. There is a simultaneous lack of shame in accepting bailouts from the West, while accepting narratives that appear to send misplaced political "wink winks" to countries like Russia and China. 

The ANC’s constant need to keep sending much-needed South African public funds to Cuba under the guise of brandishing a political middle finger to the USA also lacks logic, especially in the face of high levels of joblessness and poverty back home, where the country's people are struggling with soaring costs of living.

Many in the middle-class – irrespective of racial background – have long been forced to give-up the pretence, swallowed their pride, and started knocking on the doors of friends, family and trusted associates to ask for help as debts pile up – accompanied by calls and letters of demand from their creditors – and what they earn no longer covers their month-to-month living expenses. Fewer and fewer people can claim not to know of someone facing difficulties and needing assistance through short-term loans. It’s harder for many single parents who used to get by with the basics; the basics which have become luxuries.

Crime ranges from brazen daylight armed robberies, on one hand, to the undoing of the country’s infrastructure – particularly electric (Eskom) and rail (Transnet) infrastructure, while authorities seem too weakened – some claim elements of them are complicit – to stem the tide of rot.

Then there are those who go about dumping household rubbish wherever it’s convenient for them – as long as they believe no one is watching them while they do so – and others go about ripping off lights, tiles, windows, fences, taps/faucets, and whatever they want to use in their own homes or to sell, irrespective of whether the items stolen sit on private or public property. 

Throwing used bottles, cans and paper out of moving vehicle windows or while one walks on pavements in broad daylight is done without thinking twice and with no sense of social conscience and guilt.

All of this happens in the absence of a strong, credible, audible voice to set the tone from the front, leaving the country rudderless.

To begin finding itself again and in order to recover sustainably from decades of opportunistic and organised plunder and impunity, South Africa will need a complete overhaul in political leadership, come the 2024 general elections. It is only when this happens that there will be a chance for needed systemic changes, too.

Sovereignty must return to the hands of citizens, not political parties and their untouchable elites. A bonus would be a change in the electoral system, which would mean those elected in Parliament would be accountable to the electorate and not to political party bosses who can give party representatives – in the current system – instructions to support or oppose votes in the National Assembly whose outcomes would enhance that will of the people and their democratic rights. 

For change to have hope, all those men and women - with, no doubt, good intentions, who start their own political parties because they believe only they would be the president South Africa needs - must stop and look into the mirror. Doing things repeatedly in the same way while hoping for different outcomes is a sure sign of madness. Many small parties have been formed since the advent of the post-apartheid era with personal ambitions of those who formed them to unseat the ANC. Not even one of them has come close to achieving this.

We have the well-spoken Holomisa, Lekota, Malema, the DA, the IFP, Reverent Meshoe, and many other lesser-known parties and their leaders who have since either been swallowed up Patricia-de-Lille-style by the very parties they had hoped to unseat, or simply become comfortable with warming opposition benches while they earn big salaries and perks, even as they remain helpless in the face of a myriad oversight committees whose efficacy – and membership – is often questionable at best.

Its sheer dominance means the ANC can make any number of destructive economic decisions, with so-called opposition parties powerless to stop it, in practice, through parliamentary processes.

The most realistic recourse is to run to the courts at tremendous cost, which means no South African opposition party can be effective without bottomless funds to fund lawyers. This is hardly a recipe for healthy democracy.

Progressive opposition formations and individuals must stop belly-gazing, believing that they must produce the next president, or no one must, and that all will be well. It is time they all came together in the same way many anti-apartheid movements did, whose common enemy was apartheid, even if some of them had little else in common. For the health of democracy, and to steer the country in the direction of growth and recovery, a uniting idea or person must emerge ahead of – not after – the 2024 general elections as a viable challenger to the ANC.

Until then, and while all opposition party leaders run around believing that only they can be the next best thing for South Africa, we shall forever be complaining but nothing will change beyond the next election.

And yet all of those interviewed by this writer prefer to go into the next elections alone – a tested and failed approach – then only determine whom to go into coalition deals with based on election results. This splintered approach ahead of elections has repeatedly proven to be ineffective.

But South Africa can no longer wait. And while all its lights continue to flicker – aided by Eskom or the navel-gazing attitudes of opposition parties – the country’s dream to be a leading light in Africa and the world will remain deferred.