Class and racial limitations of the DA

Posted by Madibeng Kgwete: 23 May 2011

Based on the results of the recent municipal elections, various commentators in the mainstream media have started to marvel at what appears to be a definite shift in the voting patterns of the South African electorate.

In the last municipal elections in 2006, the African National Congress (ANC) obtained 66.3% of the national average. This year, the figure declined to about 62%.

Meanwhile, the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), has increased its support significantly from 14.8% of the national average in 2006 to almost 24% this year.

Based on these percentages, a presumption is being made that South Africa is heading towards a two-party state in which the DA may soon triumph over the ANC and become a ruling party at national level.

The possibility of a solidified opposition with enough muscle to defeat the ruling party at the polls is being marvelled at based on the benefits that may arise as a result of stiff competition between the two main parties.

It is generally acknowledged that when a ruling party faces the possibility of defeat at the polls, it becomes more competitive and that such competitive behaviour may ultimately benefit the voter.

Because of a variety of factors, however, South Africa is far from becoming a two-party state and is set to experience many more years of ANC domination.

Perhaps the biggest of those factors is the one most disdained by the minority elite; i.e. South Africans’ reluctance to accept that we have adequately addressed the legacy of apartheid and that we are ready to move forward as one united nation.

Many white people – especially the youth who repeatedly and desperately distance themselves from the atrocities of apartheid – do not understand why blacks continue to vote on the basis of what happened in the past.

On a Facebook friend’s discussion recently, a white man asked the question: “How much longer do us young generation of South Africans have to be taken back to apartheid?”

And my response: “Apartheid is still very fresh. There are people and institutions that are actively trying to maintain its economic, intellectual and cultural infrastructure.”

The man retorted with a familiar line. “I was not part of apartheid”, he said. “A black man who was not part of the struggle; how does he forgive?”

The discussion is one that should take place broadly and in an even-tempered environment, pure of the venom and bigotry that often characterises debates about past and present injustices as well as the bright, prosperous and just society that is envisioned in our constitution.

Unfortunately, we are not ready to speak with common purpose about the future we seek because we pretend to have dealt with our past despite glaring evidence to the contrary.

There is deep-seated mistrust based on our political history. Whites want everyone to move on and bury the ghost of apartheid because many of them, they say, cannot be held accountable for apartheid.

It is one thing not to be accountable for an act of injustice. It is something else to have benefited (and to continue to benefit) from it.

It is a fact that many in South Africa are reaping the economic benefits of apartheid and that their future generations, not guilty of apartheid, may also benefit from it.

Former President Thabo Mbeki, whilst still deputising Nelson Mandela in 1998, attracted widespread criticism when he spoke of South Africa as being a country with “two nations”, one of which is black and poor and another white and privileged.

The “black nation”, as Mbeki put it, “lives under conditions of a grossly underdeveloped economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure” and “has virtually no possibility to exercise what in reality amounts to a theoretical right to equal opportunity”.

The other nation, white and privileged, “has ready access to a developed economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure” which gives members of this group “the possibility to exercise their right to equal opportunity”.

It is precisely this racial and class divide that may determine – for a long period of time – the ability of the opposition, led by the DA, to garner enough votes to one day beat the ANC at the national polls.

For as long as South African society maintains the ugly shape that was moulded by apartheid, people are bound to continue voting along racial lines drawn by the same apartheid system.

The challenge, therefore, is not for white people to do everything in their power to maintain their apartheid-style economic privileges but to join hands with blacks towards an equal society in which all people are able to practically exercise their freedoms.

The great pity, though, is that the kind of equal society that Helen Zille talks about is not one of real economic equality but rather one of equal competition. And so the question arises: can there be equal and just competition amongst unequal people?

At the end of the day, it is the ability of black people to be free from economic bondage that will determine the success of the DA. And that, I am afraid, may not happen anytime soon because a lot of DA supporters seek protection from the poor, not inclusion.