Will South Africa Be Okay?. Jan-Jan Joubert
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is always fighting, especially with itself. It creates the impression of a limited upbringing and class, a lack of social graces and, above all, a lack of gravitas. Decency costs nothing, and the attractiveness of good manners comes naturally to anyone who has been raised properly. Afrikaans-speaking voters of all races have the need to feel at home in their party in every sense – something I think may be less of a need on the part of white English speakers, for instance. If the DA wants to remain the home of the vast majority of Afrikaans people, there has to be an observable pursuit of decency in the party. This also applies to the handling of the six Afrikaner issues, mentioned above, that specifically caused voters to stream to the FF Plus. The DA can offer strong and well-considered (rather than overhasty) leadership with calm, expert advice and reconciliatory solutions that will distinguish the party from the ANC, the EFF and the FF Plus.
The speed cop mentality among some in the DA reached a nadir with the Patricia de Lille debacle. Let’s face it: like most of us, Auntie Pat – the former Western Cape DA leader and mayor of Cape Town – is no angel; she is a human being. But there are many people within the DA as well as supporters of the party, and they are often Afrikaans speakers, who reckon the DA went overboard in its treatment of her. Ultimately, after all kinds of public accusations from within the DA that she had been corrupt and had enriched herself were proven to be false and came to nothing, it boiled down to her having apparently sent an SMS telling councillors who had to decide on the matter, who she wanted as city manager, and that they had to vote for him. While this was undoubtedly wrong behaviour on the part of De Lille, there are many who believe this wasn’t the end of the world and that a public reprimand together with a warning would have been sufficient punishment. Finally, however, she had had enough of fighting and resigned to establish her own party, Good. De Lille as well as her thousands of supporters is the DA’s loss. The DA has to ask itself whether internal disputes cannot be handled better.
Apropos of the speed cop mentality, it is simply astounding how readily DA parliamentarians in particular become embroiled in squalid mudslinging matches with other people and even with each other on social media, mostly without first contacting the other person privately and verifying the facts. If there is something about modern life that boggles my mind, it’s the consuming urge of some people to parade their entire lives on social media. Mrs Mora van Zyl, an ex-teacher of mine, used to have a big notice at the front of her classroom with the message ‘Just think again …’. This is good advice for all of us, especially as far as email and social media are concerned. You don’t always have to react first. You need to react wisely and in a solution-oriented manner. Because politicians are no angels, the DA, if they wish to tackle this chink in their armour, need to introduce clear, strict rules with regard to conduct on social media in particular, with specific penalties. The problem obviously won’t solve itself.
Thirdly, it is now really high time that the DA publishes proper policy on government issues, as befits an official opposition. The finalisation of some policy proposals, particularly about contentious issues, has been dragging on for years. One could see the evidence of this lack of direction in the DA’s posters for the 2019 elections. What exactly does ‘Fair access to jobs’ or ‘One South Africa for all’ mean? No, I don’t know either. With properly defined policy options, proper discipline can put a stop to contradictory pronouncements. But what proper policy amounts to, and what requires leadership, is that there should not only be policy options but that certain options should be explicitly excluded. Many people are of the opinion – and the Sunday paper Rapport pertinently warned the party about this in an editorial – that the DA’s obsession with garnering as many votes as possible to unseat the ANC as government means they don’t want to alienate any voters and therefore don’t exclude any policy options. Well, they will just have to bite the bullet; in politics, if you try to be all things to all people, you’ll soon be nothing to anyone.
One of the issues the DA urgently needs to clarify in the interest of its Afrikaans-speaking supporters of all races is the party’s stance on language in education. And it’s really not so difficult, because the Constitution makes the situation crystal clear. If the DA were to actively, and in a reconciliatory way, live up to the clearly defined provisions in the Constitution and the South African Schools Act, a large part of its Afrikaans problem would already be solved. But that would require the party’s spokespersons on education, particularly in Gauteng, to acquaint themselves thoroughly with the Constitution and the South African Schools Act, specifically as far as language as the medium of instruction in schools is concerned. Once again: is the DA serious about this?
Fourthly – and it’s the same as what we have said already about black voters – if the DA wants white Afrikaans voters to care about the party, the DA should be demonstrably and continuously involved in the everyday lives of white Afrikaans voters. There are many white Afrikaans people who – rightly or wrongly – feel excluded and targeted in South African society. As a reader put it recently in a letter to the Sunday Times, under the previous dispensation in South Africa it was a sin to be black. So is it now a sin to be white? he asks. In short, Afrikaans people want to feel at home and that they belong. Of course, caring in particular about one grouping in no way has to mean that that group will be advantaged above another, or that anyone will be neglected.
Fifthly, there is the serious and notable trend that more and more white and Coloured Afrikaans speakers feel physically threatened by crime. Among the rich and the middle class, it is theft and robbery in particular – which may lead to other crimes such as assault, rape and murder – that strike fear into people’s hearts. Among the working class, it is specifically gang violence that fans terror. Part of the problem is the almost total lack of political will and capacity on the part of the ANC government to resolve it. This leaves the DA a gap to organise community policing in DA wards as a sign of empathy and as a practical contribution to the resolution of the problem. The other crime issue that affects white Afrikaans speakers in particular emotionally is farm murders. If the DA wants to prevent and reverse the defection of some of its Afrikaner voters, the party should, as a top priority, show empathy and, secondly, come up with a community-driven solution for farm murders.
If the DA sticks to the same path it has been on, its trajectory won’t change. One of the country’s senior journalists I admire the most told me in 2019 that ‘the DA holds the ideal of a non-racial South African constitutional democracy in its hands’. This is a huge honour and responsibility, if that observation is correct. For its supporters, the DA is the only party that offers a practical alternative to the ANC – a way to govern the country better and more honestly for the good of everyone regardless of race, language, gender, belief or origin. It is the millions of people that view the DA in this light who would hope the party pulls itself together with practical policy decisions and behavioural change – for the good of South Africa as a whole.
3
Where do the FF Plus votes come from … and where are they going?
THE FREEDOM FRONT PLUS showed the second-highest growth of all the parties in the 2019 general election. Its number of votes rose from 165 000 to 414 000, its share of the vote from 0,9% to 2,38% and its representation in the National Assembly from four seats to ten.
Only the EFF showed bigger growth. That in itself is of course the sad story of this election – the political forces are centrifugal rather than centripetal, and the parties perceived by most people as the furthest left and the furthest right in parliament showed the most growth.
If you wonder why, it’s no use asking the DA – which bled many of those votes – about the reasons. If they knew, they would have prevented the losses. You need to go to the people who gained the votes, namely the FF Plus itself.
This is an important exercise because many outside Afrikaner ranks, as well as some less traditionalist Afrikaners, struggle to understand how anyone can see the FF Plus as an option for the future.
The phenomenon of people who shifted from the DA to the FF Plus is largely, though of course not exclusively, limited to white Afrikaans speakers, commonly known as Afrikaners. It was basically a case of Afrikaner infighting, which is a bit like Jewish infighting – it’s intense, and it’s internal.
In an interview with the top-class profile writer Hanlie Retief