By Jenerali Ulimwengu
The sport in which African politicians perform
somersaults and flip-flops by jumping, turning in mid-air and landing
perfectly on their feet somewhere you could never have guessed they were
going, is being raised to an art form in South Africa these past couple
of months.
The most recent marriage of strange bedfellows is
the one in which an iconic lady by the name of Mamphela Ramphele
recently allowed herself to be named as the presidential candidate for
the Democratic Alliance (DA). So what, one might ask, if she is
qualified and the party thus appointing her is not the Cosa Nostra?
Well, she is qualified and the DA is not a Cape
Town branch of the Mafia. But, you see, Dr Ramphele is an erstwhile
African National Congress stalwart, a staunch anti-apartheid fighter in
those days, and still the leader of her very own Agang party, which she
formed after falling out with the ANC.
Plus, the party that nominated her for president
carries the generally accepted perception of being an outfit for white
liberals, headed by a firebrand politician named Helen Zille.
The issue here is that Dr Ramphele has accepted
the nomination without consulting with her party, which looks and sounds
like it feels it has been betrayed by its head.
In the confusion that has attended this dramatic
volte-face, no one seems quite sure whether Agang and DA have merged, or
whether the Agang leader remains Agang leader and runs for president
only as a guest star. The people she left behind are sounding like
abandoned children looking around for a new mother.
However, the great beneficiary emerging from this
brouhaha is likely to be Mme Zille and her DA, who can now shed the
label of “white liberals,” which has stuck despite a sprinkling of
blacks who joined recently, but who till now amounted to small beer. Dr
Ramphele, on the contrary, comes with some substance, even if she and
Zille cannot muster the heft to overthrow the ANC behemoth, just yet.
Ramphele and Zille are not alone in this South
African bed-hopping. Julius Malema, the young demagogue who got himself
chucked out of the ANC on disciplinary grounds, has been doing some
strange dating of his own. He has been courting Chief Mangosuthu
Buthelezi of the mainly Zulu IFP, no friend of the ANC.
What “Juju” could hope to gain from romancing a
spent political dinosaur like Buthelezi is hard to fathom, but there is
evidence the restless youth has been casting his net in other lagoons
too.
Recently, a middle-aged man with du Toit for a
name declared he has joined Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF),
because, he said, the young man’s policies and radicalism made more
sense than anything he had heard in recent times. Just goes to show.
It might be that the ANC is being gnawed at from
the edges. The lumbering organisation, for too long basking in the halo
of Nelson Mandela, is probably looking feeble and attackable now that
Madiba is no more.
Still, it will be some time before the combined
forces of Zille, Ramphele, Juju, Buthelezi, corruption, xenophobia, the
sliding rand and a defeat-prone Bafana Bafana, finally drive the ANC out
of power.
Before that happens, many more politicians will be
jumping in and out of bed with people they would not have touched with a
barge pole yesterday. And when it comes to that, they may want to come
to our region, where parties are nothing more than vehicles to convey
their riders to state house; the voters are the fuel.
Here they will learn that Mamphele’s ditching of
her party is not even original. We have parties in one of our countries
that have been abandoned so often by their leaders that they do not seem
to need them any more than headless chickens need their heads.
In another country, some bigwigs in the ruling
party formed a party, then used it to bargain for better terms where
they were, got them and so stayed put, until the next time.
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