When Helen Zille puts her mind to it she writes really well. She needs space, which is a reporter’s disease. But it explains why she’s so poor sometimes on Twitter. This morning she’s joined a debate I fear I may have started by suggesting a month or so ago that moderate older white people might end up voting ANC in the coming election just to ensure President Cyril Ramaphosa gets a decent majority and may therefore be able to continue his slow reforms of our institutions.
It has caused a lot of comment and upset some people. DA leader Mmusi Maimane has had three goes at it but I thought Zille’s piece in Daily Maverick today was good and gets efficiently to the heart of the argument. So, I’ve been saying the best way to keep Ramaphosa on his feet is to vote for him (which obviously translates into a vote for the ANC, enough to give any sentient being pause).
Zille argues that, no, don’t be so silly. To support Ramaphosa and his reforms, vote DA. That way when he’s in trouble the DA could support him. There’s good sense in that and I’m not unsympathetic to the point. In fact, it is consistent with what she told me years ago – she drew a triangle on a piece of paper and then two lines intersecting the bottom corners. One the right the DA would take votes and on the left the EFF would.
Perfectly plausible, though Ramaphosa would obviously see it differently. He’s trying to promote unity in the ANC, a Sisyphean task made more pronounced right now, as Zille points out, by the start of the ANC list process, the party machinery which chooses, in order, a list of names for people who would become MPs after an election, and members of the various provincial legislatures as well.
It’s a fraught time. Ramaphosa’s big problem in the ANC leadership, secretary-general Ace Magashule, is nominally in charge of the process of drawing up the lists and that mere fact is deemed a threat to Ramaphosa. Stephen Grootes was good on the list business in Daily Maverick this morning.
But it is too easy to list the many threats to Ramaphosa and not to factor in his own skills and strengths (and courage) as a politician. It took a hell of a lot of focus to win the party leadership last year and a lot more courage to shift Jacob Zuma off his perch as head of state. People underestimate Ramaphosa at their peril. It isn’t that he’s playing a "long game" — he isn’t. He is just proceeding with caution, trying to make as few mistakes as possible while his opponents inside the party scramble and, hopefully, trip themselves up.
Here’s Zille’s piece, well worth the read and her colleague Toby Chance did almost as well last week.
Both make essentially the same point — that the DA is there to rescue "constitutionalists" in the ANC. As perhaps they’ll soon be tested. Say, for instance, just for the election next year the government publishes its proposed amendments to the constitution to allow expropriation without compensation.
And suppose it is the tame revision Ramaphosa has promised us, little more than making explicit what all parties, the DA included, agree — that the constitution already allows for expropriation without compensation?
If the DA, taking Zille’s position, is there to help bolster Ramaphosa and his reforms and if the proposed clause that changes the constitution simply makes explicit what the DA says is already the case, and if the EFF opposes it because it is not sufficiently revolutionary, then would the DA support the ANC in amending the constitution and give Ramaphosa the two thirds majority he needs to get it through and to strengthen his position in the party?
And if not why not? Remember the amendment in my model does nothing more than make the constitution as it is clearer. And if Ramaphosa can’t get it through, his party may punish him. If he can, the sting gets taken out of the land debate. What does the DA want?
It’s a good question to ask this morning because a new poll from the SA Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) has just come out, more or less confirming what we all suspect — the ANC under Ramaphosa is recovering its support and the DA and EFF are not doing at all well.
The EFF just has to be suffering from the clear evidence that its leaders benefited personally from the looting of poor people’s money from VBS Mutual Bank. The excellent Pauli van Wyk supplies a new chapter in this saga today, piling the misery on EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu.
Anyway, the SAIRR numbers look good for Ramaphosa. Flat out, assuming the impossible and that 100% of the electorate voted today, the ANC gets 56%, the DA 18% and the EFF 11%. That won’t happen and the poll, calibrated to assume a more realistic 69% turnout, gives the ANC 59%, the DA 22% and the EFF 10%. Here’s the full report.
Those numbers will terrify both the DA and the EFF but also put both in line to partner the ANC, or Ramaphosa, through the land debate and thus shape its outcome. How hard, I wonder, will the DA try to make something tangible of Zille’s proposition: "A strong DA is also the best way to support Cyril Ramaphosa and other reformists in the ANC"?
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