Mamphela Ramphele’s new “political platform,” or party-in-making, represents the latest in a series of bids for the substantial number of black voters presumed to be disillusioned with the rule of the African National Congress in South Africa. So far all bids have failed. Many black South Africans are indeed fed up with the ANC. Tens of thousands have joined often violent “service delivery protests” against ANC-run municipalities accused of corruption or neglect. Millions have stayed away from the polls. Yet, relatively few have been willing to vote for opposition parties. The last major new party to try wrest their votes, a breakaway from the ANC called COPE (Congress of the People), secured a respectable 7% at the 2009 general election, but has since descended into a shambles. The best hope for Ramphele’s outfit is that it will scoop up the black African voters poised to desert COPE, yet unwilling to vote for the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), because of its white roots and leader.
It is not easy to give an ideological label to Ramphele’s party, provisionally named Agang (“to build” in the Sepedi language). Leftists dismiss it as a capitalist party, and their stance is lent some credence by Ramphele’s recent senior positions in the World Bank and a major mining house, and by her concern to make South African economically productive, competitive and investor-friendly. At the same time she professes concern for “workers and poor people” betrayed by a “new elite,” and her policy portfolio is for now too vague to pigeonhole. Notwithstanding Marxist rhetoric emanating from in and around the ANC, there is not all that much by way of concrete economic policy to tell South Africa’s political parties apart. No significant electoral party calls for a break with capitalism; at the same time, none dare sound like rabid free marketers in a land so conscious of its gigantic inequalities. I expect Agang to meet more established electoral parties on the broad ground of the center-left.
What Ramphele stands for is similar to what the DA purports to stand for: good governance. She is presenting hers as the party of competence and integrity. A former medical doctor and academic, Ramphele is a self-appointed scourge of mediocrity. Her enemy is not capitalism, but crony capitalism. She wants a depoliticized, professionalized civil service and higher educational standards. She favors electoral reforms that will reduce the stranglehold of party bosses. She wants to rescue South Africa’s reputation as a global beacon of human rights from the disrepute brought by the ANC’s coddling of dictators. She encourages a public-spirited ethos in place of the current reign of self-interest and a shared South African citizenship to counter the country’s racial and ethnic fragmentation.
There is a market for this sort of product, especially but by no means exclusively amongst educated urbanites. One commentator has suggested that there is no rationale for a “black DA,” but actually there may well be. What Ramphele lacks, for now, is a machinery to reach out to the five or ten per cent of her compatriots who might be attracted to just such a prospect. Her baseline constituency does not stretch beyond the professionals and businesspeople who admire what they see as her readiness to speak unpalatable truths to power. A good few of an older generation remember Ramphele’s fame as a 1970s Black Consciousness activist, who was personally and politically partnered to Steve Biko, but survey evidence suggests that she is largely unknown to younger people. Biko’s legend is unlikely to rub off on a party that has very little in common with Black Consciousness. Ramphele seems uneasy with racial affirmative action and has told an interviewer that she stands for “South African” rather than “black” consciousness.
Whether or not progressives should welcome Agang depends on which is more urgent in progressive terms: leftward ideological course change or the strengthening of a state machinery currently too hobbled by corruption and incompetence to perform any kind of pro-poor strategic role. Agang is certainly not the long-awaited challenge to the ANC from the left. The problem with Agang-like parties that promise simply to govern better – apart from the possibility that their programs may fail to address structural inequalities – is that their ideological vacuity tends to attract opportunistic hangers-on, especially when they are dominated by a single personality. The answer depends also on whether it is more progressive to favor an incumbent left-leaning party with a clear majoritarian mandate or a strengthened opposition able to check that party’s authoritarianism and looting. Agang could help to build a countervailing power to the ANC, though it could also end up redistributing votes within the opposition rather than enlarging the opposition electoral share. The party’s significance thus remains to be clarified – by the fleshing out of its policy agenda, by the caliber of people it attracts, by the nature of its funding, by public opinion polls and above all by the next national elections in 2014.
Leave a Reply