In one of his last addresses John Kane Berman, former CEO of the IRR, was asked what the greatest achievement was of the organisation he had dedicated his public life to? “Survival”, he said, a piece of wisdom applicable to this election.
Kane-Berman was talking about the IRR, not South Africa, when he put “survival” top on the list of organisational accomplishments. But the 2024 election puts a question mark behind the country’s survival too.
How Long Will South Africa Survive? RW Johnson, the country’s most prominent living former Oxford don, wrote two books asking that question, the latter in 2015. The answer I will get to at the bottom is that there is a 20% – 25% chance that the republic will not make the end of the 2020s.
On one hand, survival talk is difficult because it can send people “running around like headless chickens”, to use a phrase doing the rounds in corridors of power. All or nothing can be a pitch for anything. Panic blocks intelligence.
But on the other hand, survival questions can focus the mind too. After acclimation soldiers learn to operate neatly in the understanding that today could be their last. I have interviewed farmers who faced death threats with a cool focus, and creative insight that they say they would otherwise have lacked. The same goes for many terminally ill cancer patients.
An example of the kind of basic point that gets sharp focus when survival is at stake is to avoid strengthening existential threats. That could not be more obvious.
A clear threat to South Africa’s survival is the EFF. That fascist organisation is led by a man who upholds the potential threat of genocide as a political tool. The party has filled a stadium with the chant “kill the boer” and has repeatedly advocated street violence and land invasions while stigmatising white farmers with racist tropes. Advocate Dali Mpofu, the EFF’s de facto legal spokesperson, wrote lengthy essays in the Sunday Times explaining that the Constitution is only good up to the point that it serves the EFF, which will achieve its revolutionary goals by highwater or by hell.
Roadmap to SA’s destruction
In other words, to read the manifesto of the EFF is to read a roadmap to South Africa’s destruction. I doubt that the reader will need more justification.
What about the FF+? I have provided platforms for FF+ representatives and often defended the FF+ from false equivalence with the EFF. The FF+ is not a fascist organization. MP Pieter Groenewald, the FF+ leader, is a decent man and who would not contemplate committing genocide.
Furthermore, the FF+ deserves credit for voting against BEE in 2013 (when the DA was ANC-lite) and providing clean administration at local levels in many places since. The EFF, by comparison, has yet to do anything worth complimenting.
However, the FF+ promotes secession, which is death to South Africa. To be fair, its manifesto calls for “self-determination”, and claims that the party is “fully committed” to Sections 30, 31, 185, and 235 of the republic’s constitution, which cover language, cultural groups, religion, government oversight, and the provision for legislation to recognise forms of “self-determination” of some sort within the country’s borders. If it stopped here the FF+ would be doing well. But the manifesto does not stop here.
“This is not a situation where either this or that can be the only solution,” the FF+ manifesto states, adding that “we find ourselves in a situation that requires this and that solution as well as a further variation of solutions. That is why the FF Plus supports the various initiatives promoting these solutions, including CapeXit.”
CapeXit is nominally a political party, which calls for the termination of the republic of South Africa as defined by this republic’s constitution.
Split into pieces
South Africa would not survive if the republic turned into a fascist dictatorship where most private property is nationalised and the “commander in chief” decides who gets what from Pretoria. Another way for South Africa’s survival to end is for the republic to be split into pieces. The EFF openly calls for the former, CapeXit for the latter. Any rise in prominence of the one adds to the other. Neither will admit it, but they are in a mutually beneficial relationship.
It is a terrible mistake for the FF+ to promote CapeXit. On its own, CapeXit is little more than a faint internet meme plus posters on lamp posts and banners on bakkies. It is unlikely to win a seat. But the FF+ has ten seats in the National Assembly and may achieve a similar number in this election, so it provides CapeXit with a single, but serious, touchpoint on legitimacy.
This is important precisely because the FF+ boasts, and rightly so, about being ahead of the curve in voting against BEE in 2013. Fast forward a decade and roughly 25% of Parliament voted against the latest BEE measures, like the Public Procurement Bill.
That is a triumph that should be built on by removing BEE by 2029, with 51% of Parliament having been led by the statesmanlike FF+ at its best. Instead, the FF+ lends its hard-won credibility to the secession movement by providing its only parliamentary platform.
Last vote
If the polls are roughly accurate then roughly 20%-25% of the National Assembly will be anti-South African by the end of the week in the very simple sense of calling for the end of this republic’s existence as a sovereign, constitutional democracy. That is the EFF and MK. Unfortunately, the FF+ is included in that calculation, since they support CapeXit, which supports secession.
Cooler heads should prevail after the election. The FF+, unlike the EFF or MK, has evidenced the kind of adaptive administration that can change for the better. It should drop its support for CapeXit.
Until it does it will weaken the larger constitutional opposition to the rise of fascism in South Africa, which is currently the most powerful, existential threat.
If the 20%-25% of parliamentarians that promise to break South Africa down, or apart, get their way before 2029 you might ask yourself as a voter, “Did I vote against my own country’s survival?”
Image: Gabriel Crouse
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