Is the DA helping to re-elect the ANC?

The politics of unintended consequences is perhaps one the hardest arts to master.

For example, as the ANC made its case before Parliament, in support of the government’s decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC), it evoked time and time again the idea of "ubuntu".

The ANC’s Honourable LKB Mpumlwana put it like this: "The foreign policy of the ANC government is anchored on the values of ubuntu."

It is madness to reduce something as serious as the doctrine of human rights to an ill-defined platitude but it does give the ANC a get-out clause for that very reason. If no one knows what ubuntu is exactly, it can be anything.

The problem is the DA plays this game too. As it has tried to reposition itself, it has adopted — often for no reasons other than populism or political correctness — words and phrases it cannot define either. And ubuntu is one of them.

In the 2015 parliamentary debate on the white paper on foreign policy, DA foreign affairs spokesman Steven Mokgalapa described "our Constitution and foreign policy ideal" as "based on ubuntu", although he admitted there was some confusion in the committee over "the meaning of ubuntu and its interpretation".

The ANC’s withdrawal from the ICC could not have been predicted, and the untended consequence of the DA adopting this sort of language as its own is that its opposition to the move is somewhat undermined; its authority too.

If no one can agree on what ubuntu is, exactly, but everyone is in favour of it, it is rather hard to oppose. Which is exactly what the ANC wants. Best just to stick to human rights.

Significant or extreme political events are often the ultimate test for any decision or idea. Pressure reveals flaws. Being able to predict them and how your actions might be interpreted is essential to making principled choices that will stand up over time.

There is one fundamental error the DA is making at the moment, not explicitly but implicitly, and its implications could be profound for the party in the long run.

It is the message, hidden in a great deal of DA communication, that the ANC’s condition is abnormal, the consequence of Jacob Zuma alone, and, if he is removed, the party will revert to being an ethical and constitutionally democratic organisation.

It started first with the adoption of Nelson Mandela as the party’s moral beacon, at the expense of its own heroes. Constantly it is Mandela, and the ANC of 1994, that the DA suggests is its benchmark. "He remains our moral icon," Mmusi Maimane said last week.

It was accelerated in the run-up to the 2014 election, when Thabo Mbeki was added to the list and championed by the DA as an efficient and generally excellent president. "Presidents Mandela and Mbeki took SA forward," Helen Zille said.

"Under Presidents Mandela and Mbeki, SA made progress. They had a good story to tell. Basic services like water, electricity, sanitation and housing were rolled out. The economy started to grow. Unemployment dropped and many people’s standard of living rose. Measures to fix the injustices of the past were introduced. In those days, most people believed that SA was going in the right direction. But then the tide turned."

And it has been augmented by the DA’s constant appeals to the ANC of old. In the run-up to the latest motion of no confidence, it appealed to the public to write to the ANC caucus, to apply pressure to it. The pro forma letter read: "I urge you to put your loyalty to building a better SA ahead of your loyalty to President Zuma, and vote in support of the motion."

In the background, these and other similar suggestions about the ANC’s inherent virtue are to be found in other DA positions, such as on Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan (a metaphor for the good ANC) and his standoff with Zuma.

Implicit in all of this is the following message: "We the DA believe the ANC has within it, historically and today, the ability and the moral conviction to turn the tide. The only thing holding it back is Jacob Zuma and, without him, it can revert to its better self."

It is important to understand that this message is implicit. Thus, that the consequences of it are entirely unintended. On face value, each of these messages served, in the party’s mind, a different purpose on the day.

In the case of Mandela, the embracing of him complemented the "Know your DA" campaign, when the DA sought to present itself as grounded in the historical fight for justice in SA and its heroes as anti-apartheid activists with proud struggle credentials. It was trying to cleanse itself of the perception it was a party that served primarily white minority interests.

In the case of Mbeki, it was trying to demonstrate it was able to appreciate what the ANC had achieved, in an attempt to endear itself to disillusioned ANC supporters suspicious of the party’s virulent anti-ANC rhetoric. Likewise, to play the ANC off against itself.

And, in the case of Zuma, it was trying to apply pressure to the ANC by suggesting its members are agents of change, capable of exercising discretion under tyrannical pressure, should they so chose. In turn, that the DA puts the country first, unlike Zuma; an appeal to patriotism.

Each of these, on face value, you could argue is an understandable objective. But the unintended consequence of all of this is that the DA is constantly and repeatedly telling voters that it believes the real ANC — a better, more ethical ANC — exists out there and the party just needs to find itself. It is giving ANC voters hope, not in the DA, but in the ANC.

If moments of pressure reveal unintended consequences, there is a big, big moment coming in the not too distant future — the election of a new ANC president. And the DA is inadvertently setting the scene for that process to backfire enormously, should it all go against Zuma.

Should the ANC break with the Zuma regime and elect a leader who can be credibly perceived as a symbol for the rejuvenation and reinvigoration of the ANC, the DA will have helped disillusioned and frustrated ANC voters happily return to the fold; for it has been subconsciously telling them for years now the ANC is capable of fixing itself and, when it does, it "has a good story to tell".

That may seem counterintuitive but, to appreciate it, one must think like a disillusioned ANC supporter, not a DA zealot. One must try to hear the DA’s messaging from the ANC supporter’s perspective. It is a message of hope and promise that a better ANC does exist. And if it took the world to make you doubt the ANC, after seven years of Zuma extreme wreckage, it will take very little to win you back over.

Of course, the ANC might not go against Zuma. There is a scenario in which he is re-elected for the third term as ANC president; another in which an obvious surrogate for him is elected. If either of those happens, the risk in the DA’s various messages pays off and the unintended consequence is avoided.

But if one of those doesn’t happen, the DA will have unconsciously laid the groundwork for a massive amount of hope and belief to be invested in the new ANC leader, not least by those ANC supporters who had lost both hope and belief.

All of this is born from a lack of clear, long-term strategic direction on the DA’s part, and an inability to define itself clearly in the public mind as fundamentally different from the ANC.

That it considers itself fundamentally different from Zuma and what he represents there can be no doubt. But underpinning that is the concession that the ANC itself is worth believing in and that, when the ANC is at its best, the DA approves of both the ANC moral code and its record in government.

Although this process predates the election of Mmusi Maimane as DA leader, he has certainly given it impetus by using his own ANC credentials as a catch.

"I voted for the ANC that year," Maimane has said of his ANC days. "In those days I believed in the ANC’s promise of a better life. I shared the values of President Nelson Mandela and I believed that President Thabo Mbeki would steer us in the right direction."

Maimane says he joined the DA when that direction was abandoned under Zuma. What, then, if Zuma is abandoned by the ANC? Mbeki himself has chosen the past year to reassert himself into the grand South African political debate, after almost eight years of silence. You can be sure, among those ANC candidates for the position of ANC president, he has a few surrogates of his own; so outspoken has he been, you even get the sense he himself might fancy another run at the top.

"In those days I was an ANC voter. And I was an Mbeki supporter," Maimane has said. That really would be a crisis for both the leader and the party, given how absolutely Maimane has endorsed Mbeki and his performance as president.

Another window also closes for the DA, if the ANC is able to turn a corner. Despite the DA’s victories in some significant metros, the local government elections once again saw no significant breakthrough among black voters for the party. Although there are no official numbers (for the first time in a long time, the DA chose not to give a racial breakdown of its support), a good estimation is that it went from having secured about 5% of all black voters to 6%. Nothing more.

There is room in South African politics for a fundamental realignment, a third way, so to speak — a new party, based on the DA’s infrastructure and core ideological beliefs but able to bring on board a significant faction of disgruntled ANC members and supporters to form something new.

Julius Malema and the EFF are well aware of this window; he wants exactly the same thing, although in the other direction — a new party based on the EFF’s worldview. That should be of serious concern.

But that option too becomes almost impossible for the DA if the ANC is able to let go of Zuma. All those on the outside will return to the fold and the window will close.

These are big calls the DA needs to make. But if it carries on advocating the message that the official opposition believes a better ANC lurks just below the surface, it will pay a high price should that eventually actually be realised in any shape or form the media and the public are able to swallow — let alone disgruntled ANC voters, apathetic or alienated.

The party urgently needs to get some strategic clarity on how it conceives itself and the ANC, and to start relaying that message clearly and unambiguously.

Now is the time for the DA to put clear blue water between it and the ANC before it too is engulfed by the ANC-centric universe that already has so much of SA in its grip.

To lead the opposition you need a compelling alternative vision that only your party can provide — not a vision of how to fix the majority party, so it can repair the country’s problems.

Mmusi Maimane is leader of the DA, not the ANC. He needs to start to think, behave and articulate that, or the unintended consequence will be to risk helping re-elect the ANC.