There is a case to be made that Herman Mashaba and his new political party might just break into a potential political vacuum and be very successful.
According to reports this past week, Mr Mashaba is intent on establishing such a party and promises that it will be in operation by June of this year and that it will contest the 2021 local government election.
There is much in favour of Mr Mashaba’s success.
Support for the African National Congress (ANC) is slipping very quickly. There are now more people who are eligible to vote but choose not to than people who vote for the ANC. South Africa is a predominantly urban country that continues to urbanise, but the ANC is now attracting less than half its vote tally from such areas. The education profile of South Africans, despite its education system, continues to improve, even as ANC support slides among more educated voters. Our polls further suggest that, in a country where just 35% of people are over the age of 35, the ANC has lost the battle for the youth vote. Consider further that, against a record of ANC support historically tracking South Africa’s economic performance quite closely, the economic outlook is now dire and is likely to remain so.
We have previously written that an ANC defeat is on the cards for the 2024 or 2029 election, and we continue to suggest that such an eventuality must be on the strategic radar of any person or group with interests in the country. Ask not (just) what the ANC will do, but whether it will have the majority to do it?
Yet there remains little on the opposition benches that is seemingly able to effectively exploit the ANC’s predicament.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has shed considerable support and its long-term sustainability is still to be established. The Freedom Front Plus (FF+) has grown, but is trapped within a rather small market. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) spout a brand of racial nationalist populism that our polls reveal has limited political appeal (at this time). It remains significant that in a country with a youth unemployment rate of over 50% the EFF struggles to attract more than 10% of the vote.
Enter Herman Mashaba. Mr Mashaba is an interesting chap. A self-made tycoon, he knows first-hand the consequences for entrepreneurs and employers of counterproductive government regulation. Rounded on both by racist whites who resented his success and by ANC apparatchiks who presented these as evidence of a great betrayal. (Within the liberation movement, Mr Mashaba is at times cruelly caricatured as an Uncle Tom who sold skin-lightening creams to blacks during the darkest days of apartheid.) For a great many years, Mr Mashaba was a force behind the libertarian Free Market Foundation, in which capacity he went to great lengths to counter the socialist policy dogma of both the ANC and the National Party of old. Capable of taking strident and unpopular positions, Mr Mashaba was nearly unique amongst business leaders in his criticism of race-based BEE and affirmative action programmes and racial nationalist scapegoating in general. He enthusiastically joined the DA (observers have forgotten his support of Helen Zille) in order to become its Mayor of Johannesburg. His is a track record laced with much good old-fashioned common sense. The mayorship brought him face to face with the full horror of the extent to which ANC rule has wrecked the country, and perhaps the realization that those horrors cannot be undone bit by bit but only through a fundamental national political realignment.
If Carl von Clausewitz had ever met Sun Tzu, the two might have agreed that ‘all politics is based on deception’. It can be a nasty and grimy business. But Mr Mashaba is demonstrating the traits that suggest he might be up for it.
As Johannesburg’s mayor, and at odds with his Free Market Foundation leanings, he advocated for harsh action against undocumented immigrants and for stricter border controls – a position he maintains to this day. His association with the EFF, nominally in order to sustain that alliance in the city, surprised many, given his positions on corruption, racial prejudice, and misgovernance. He has deftly side-stepped corruption allegations centered on his EFF partners and done well to prevent the implications of these being much ventilated in the media. His about-turn in favour of race-based empowerment policy demonstrates a capacity for the politically expedient. His exit from the DA was stage-managed political drama of the highest order and he has found it easy to draw the media in behind him. That interest has skillfully been extended into the anticipated launch of his party. There is somewhat of a political skill set at work here.
Now match that to the emanating message.
Stare deep into the polls and one of the things that stares back is the impression of a small-c conservative market. Small-c conservatives are not classical liberals (just as liberals are not libertarians – I will ask my colleagues to prepare a short induction programme for journalists who in this country continue to confuse and misuse the terms). They have some things in common with liberals (and with libertarians), such as opposition to socialism and agreement on the importance of investment-driven growth. Small-c conservatives, however, blend (and sometimes contradict) these principles with nationalist rhetoric, populist stances, and a fudging of the lines between fact and fiction. Mr Trump remains best described by The Spectator along the lines of being an extraordinary man who draws no distinction between fact and fiction and assumes that no-one else does either.
In a practical sense, liberals will demonstrate an aversion to socialism, and believe in the importance of a small and effective state that regulates with a light and intelligent touch. They believe in fair taxation, that private sector-led investment is key to raising living standards, that immigrants should be welcomed, and that empowerment policy is important but must be based on actual socio-economic disadvantage and not race. While sharing the allergy to socialism, libertarians would be further allergic to any form of central authority and regulation, regard taxation as theft, agree on the private sector and be welcoming of immigrants, but reject the need for empowerment policy. Small c-conservatives may be highly allergic to socialism but welcoming of a powerful state, they would press for tax cuts, agree on the importance of investment (private sector or otherwise), may take a populist nationalist line against immigration, and be welcoming of racial nationalist policy if expedient.
What makes the political zeitgeist of South Africa’s common man? The following description might come close; tiring of the ANC, loathing the government, sceptical of the role of the state in their lives, somewhat swept up into whatever populist offering might be at hand (from ‘immigrants take our jobs’ to ‘wealth redistribution is important’ to ‘inequality is the greatest evil’), but wanting to get ahead in life, become rich (regardless of the effect on inequality), and own property (should the state should have no power to expropriate).
Mr Mashaba’s messaging of the past week (we paraphrase it) is very much on the mark, here, and ranges from the generic ‘it’s time for change’ to ‘socialism is nonsense’, ‘raising taxes is not the answer’ and ‘the immigrants are taking our jobs’.
Further in favour of Mr Mashaba is that he is very rich and can bankroll himself to an extent without the need for donor funding – although we have every reason to believe that much of that kind of funding will be forthcoming. Lastly, as in America and Britain (both of which have carried small-c type conservatives to power – the comparisons are not ideal but we leave the thought there for now), South Africans live in a fundamentally free society and open democratic society.
Add the slogan ‘Make South Africa Great Again’ and you have the full package.
The greatest obstacle in Mr Mashaba’s way will be actually setting up a sustainable political organization, which requires a skill set and experience he does not possess but which can be purchased from those experts with the requisite experience.
Liberals (what the DA purportedly wants to return to being) and conservatives will always struggle to co-exist in the same organization. The principled will clash with the populist and the two sides will fight, negating any political influence they might exert. But free them from each other and allow them the space to build their own movements and they may in time become occasional allies in the realpolitik world where governments must be formed, and deals must be struck.
It is no surprise that the ructions in the DA have offered up this possibility and it reflects on the mainstream political press corps that few have been able to see it; set as they are on the simplistic railway-track narratives laid out for them they cannot see the wood for the trees. Around the world, socialist (or so leaning) administrations are being undone by conservative movements. For some liberals, the relief at seeing socialist governments laid low has at times been allowed to translate into applause for such movements – a slippery and dangerous thing.
In the event that Mr Mashaba is at all successful in his new venture, liberals in South Africa must begin to weigh up the implications of where they will stand relative to that venture should it begin to exert some influence on a political market the biggest player in which continues to demonstrate an attachment to the kind of socialist dogma that has never worked anywhere in the world.
For liberals, a very clear picture of both wood and trees will be necessary for them to navigate the risks, opportunities, and contradictions.
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