Saturday, February 1, 2014

Flip-flops, somersaults, bed-hopping: SA politicians learn to play our game


 
By Jenerali Ulimwengu

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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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