It’s a sweltering day in Bloemfontein, November 1999. The cheerleaders for the blue team are leading a crowd of first- to seventh graders in a guitar-less and a-tonal rendition of Queen’s We Will Rock You. The Red and Yellow teams are a distance off to each direction from us, similarly making coordinated noises on faded green bleachers, exhorting the athletes on the field in front of us to go faster and higher.
This is not explained at the time, but the idea, in retrospect, appears to be that the rousing songs, uniformity of colour, and collective energy should engender a sense of solidarity with one’s team. In my case, these were the other students whose surnames happened to start with the letters S through Z. At the same time, the activity appeared to be directed at stirring a blind, if impotent, distaste for our adversaries. These adversaries were, to my right, the red team: students who, quite despicably, allowed their surnames to start with the letters A through I. They were rivalled in repugnance only by the yellow team on my left: those with surnames J through R. Eew.
At least that was the feeling on the stands, amidst the thunder of stamping feet and battle chants. The notion of finding common ground with the enemy would have been laughable in the circumstances. Yet there were moments away from the noise, perhaps underneath the stands or on the empty adjacent rugby field, where I found other kids who had also momentarily escaped the colour-coded sectarianism, to engage in mischief of mutual interest with each other. They appeared to remember, as I faintly did, that we were friends and classmates before donning our different colours that very morning.
Did we understand the lesson? Was the lesson that blind antagonism is fundamental to the proper functioning of society?
Fast forward twenty years: I stifle an inner chuckle inside a voting booth, inside the hall of the very same primary school where I first learned that those dressed in red and yellow were not to be trusted. I shouldn’t be chuckling. One’s democratic right to vote should be exercised in perfect solemnity. But since 2013, when the EFF first blobbed some red paint onto our national political palette – hitherto dominated by yellow and blue – I haven’t been able to ignore my amusement at the glaring similarities between this
charade and a primary school athletics meet. Of course, the analogy shouldn’t stretch too far. There are in some terms very real differences in ideology between our three main political rivals and, one hopes, these ideologies are determined by the opinions and desires of the general populace, and not the other way around. A prime example of the inverse is the USA, which has perfected the notion of democracy-as-a-sport. They have streamlined the process to only two teams, engaged in a perpetual and spectacular display of groupthink. No matter the merit of an idea proposed by, for argument’s sake, AOC. Even before inception, and for reasons wholly unrelated to its merits, that idea would automatically be rejected by about fifty per cent of the electorate. From that point, the politics of difference within the remaining fifty per cent would ensure that nothing is ever put into action. It would be ridiculous to argue that the package of unrelated partisan political opinions that constitute one’s identity as either a democrat or republican can exist in the same rigid form in any person before exposure to such a preposterous binary system.
At least South Africans now have three major options.
Questions around the origins and nature of our political differences naturally beg their corollary: What are our similarities? What are the matters of common interest? If there are any, what portions of the airspace in parliament and in our broader political discussions are dedicated to them?
This is where we are let down by our political cheerleaders (and probably the media. And, to be honest ourselves). Arguably, every Nkandla or Guptagate and other opportunity to score political points at the expense of the enemy also presents the opportunity to strengthen the very structures designed to avoid or mitigate those catastrophes.
These are our similarities.
Many of our most pressing national problems arise from complex socio-economic factors like inequality, which will take no simple fix. On these issues, our major political players pursue justifiably divergent policies and ideologies. However, the state’s ability to implement those policies, whatever their ideological provenance, is constantly hampered by legal-systemic faults in our structures of accountability. Corruption, in short. To fix this, we need to constantly tweak the power balance between state and citizenry, preferably through legislation. However, since this is precisely where our interests depart from those of the cheerleaders, who should be the originators of such legislation, the courts are often the only option.
Two recent examples of this willful blindness are, first, the position of NDPP, the head of prosecutions, and, second, the issue of party funding. Capturing the office of the national head of prosecutions was arguably Zuma’s greatest victory in the State Capture battle. So, when he ushered a series of personal hitmen in and quickly back out of the revolving door of the National Director of Public Prosecution’s office between 2009 and 2017, the question from the other parties should not have been “how can we best capitalise on the chaos to get to or stay at the top.”
Instead, we and our cheerleaders should have asked: “would it not be in our collective national best interest to agree that the selection process and security of tenure of the NDPP’s office should be more firmly entrenched than what the Constitution and the relevant legislation presently provide?” This would have required cooperation from all sides – at least fifty but probably sixty-six or seventy-five per cent of the National Assembly and the National Council of Provinces. Sadly, it would not be in the interests of those in power, or those in pursuit thereof. Thankfully, Ramaphosa’s voluntary, albeit ad hoc implementation of a more, shall we say, refined selection process than that used by Zuma, has forestalled the immediate need for a constitutional or legislative amendment concerning the appointment of the NDPP. The process for removal, on the other hand, has been referred to parliament for reconsideration. Not because our cheerleaders saw the need, but because the Constitutional Court ordered them to do so, at the instance of Corruption Watch, Freedom Under Law and Casac.
The point remains that many of the systemic diseases that plague our body politic’s ability to deal with more immediate problems like inequality should be cured through cooperation instead of antagonism.
When malfeasance committed by a specific functionary comes to light, the ruling party is for obvious reasons disinclined to strengthen structures that it would reveal or policies it’s looting. Opposition parties, similarly uninterested, though perhaps for other reasons, see only an opportunity to score points from that specific example of malfeasance. The structural faults in the system that allowed it in the first place are largely ignored, owing perhaps in part to our collective illiteracy in any political language other than antagonism.
A cynic may presume that the opposition’s reluctance to address systemic faults in our accountability mechanisms also derives from some hope that the incumbent band of cheerleaders can be dethroned, to allow the opposition to inherit an equally weak system, just as prone to exploitation. After all, when your turn arrives to eat, you don’t want the lid of the cookie jar screwed on too tightly. If that coffee is too bitter, at best for our opposition cheerleaders, an optimist may presume in their favour that they simply do not have the ability to cooperate across party lines in pursuit of what is obviously in the nation’s best interest: protection from their sort.
The result is the same.
The second example flits across my mind as I draw my cross next to the blue cheerleader’s face (old habits die hard I guess). If the cheerleaders’ failure to deal legislatively with the NDPP issue was a mere omission, their intentional frustration of the public interest in the PAIA saga has been distressingly active. I think back to January 2019, when the president at long last signed the Party Funding Bill into law. I think back to My Vote Counts’ years-long struggle through the courts, to finally convince our cheerleaders that perhaps we as voters should be able to check who gets paid by whom to make which laws and, ultimately, control which cookie jar.
In these days of Zondo, it seems laughable that this idea would be contested at all. But oh, how it was. Luckily, by-election 2019, the cheerleaders seemed to have momentarily set aside their differences, if only to short-circuit the inevitable Constitutional Court order compelling them to do so.
Little did I know as I drew my cross that both the blue and yellow teams would backpedal on the bill less than a week later. They would end up arguing – after our crosses had been drawn, the ink dried and the votes counted – that the obligation to disclose the identity of private funders scared away some of those funders, and generally inhibited the cheerleaders’ ability to shout their divisive battle cries at us for a few months before elections.
The real reason, of course, is that patronage is easier in the dark.
We will do well to remember, when our cheerleaders start up the war drums for the next election cycle, that before being yellow, blue or red, we were human beings of planet earth and citizens of South Africa. We may then also remember that we have a lot more in common than our cheerleaders would have us believe, especially in our need for protection from whichever team drives the machinery of state at any given point. Perhaps most crucially we should remember that large parts of our Bill of Rights, like most human rights
instruments, seek to protect us from the very State to which our cheerleaders aspire, and for very good reasons. A political party’s chief objective is to attain or remain in power. Service delivery and other inconvenient duties of power feature somewhere lower down the list, but only insofar as the performance of these duties serve the chief objective. Fundamentally, their interests are not aligned with ours. If we insist on antagonism, as democracy appears to do, that antagonism should not exist most prominently between rival political parties, but between citizens and the State, and then by extension between us and our cheerleaders.
We should take their chants, T-shirts and promises with heaps of salt.
