GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Mathews Phosa and the Save SA cowards

Mathews Phosa’s "Damascus moment" confessional is important for all the wrong reasons. It was a treatise not of what he is prepared to do, but what he is not. And that, right there, is the problem.

To be clear, it was not a morally virtuous declaration of bravery. It was cowardly. For all his indignation at the ANC’s conduct, the conclusion he arrived at was, "I remain a member of the ANC". There was no conversion.

In a blinding light, Saul saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. And, on reaching his destination, he had his sight restored by a Christian, one of the very people he had been persecuting. And so Saul became Paul. But Phosa remains Phosa.

The brave thing to do, one might even say the right thing, given the depth and breadth of Phosa’s ostensible concern, would be to resign from the ANC.

But then the post-apartheid ANC doesn’t really do bravery. It hasn’t been brave since the struggle days. Instead of action there is posturing. And it’s all been done before.

Not a single element of Phosa’s manifesto indicated any new resolve. Even his opposition to the president, by his own admission, was nothing new. "I remain against the continuation of the current leadership of our party," he says.

"Enough is enough," Phosa declares. Clearly not. Enough is not enough. More enough, he seemed to be saying, only this time with some condemnation in accompaniment.

"The right-minded inside the ANC must speak out," the cliché has it, sung by those in the commentariate vested in the ANC the same way its army of unthinking zealots is. But speaking and doing are two different things. Condemnation constitutes some power, to be sure. Producing actual change is something else altogether. The ANC has been vilified, internally and externally, for some five years now. The decline has not been arrested.

Yet Phosa used the phrase "Damascus moment" and so all and sundry fell over each other to welcome his non-news as just the most wonderful thing ever.

The whole of the Save SA crowd are cowardly in the same way. They are not bound by moral conviction to the Constitution, as they feign; they are bound by blind loyalty to an organisation that has become the epitome of everything they claim to abhor. And they cannot conceive of a world where they are divorced from it. They are weak. Weak, weak, weak.

The arms deals, HIV/AIDS denialism, silent diplomacy, corruption, maladministration, state capture — Phosa remained loyal through it all.

Even their title is a lie. They have no interest in saving SA. Ironically, just like the ANC, and the president they claim to despise, they believe the ANC is SA, hence the name. The movement should be called "Save the ANC". That would be more honest.

If these people are concerned about SA, it is not to the ANC they should be looking but to the DA. It is the only viable political alternative to the ANC and, if the decline really is to be arrested, both those appalled at the ANC and those leading the DA should be talking about a new way and a realignment of South African politics.

Binary thinking is a blight on democracies the world over. It acts like blinkers and, once on, the world only ever appears to be one of two things. For SA it is the ANC or the DA.

But there is room for a third way. Indeed, the environment would seem conducive to it. The ANC is at its weakest; the DA at its strongest. The ANC is fractured, the alliance fraught. Now is the time for those with the courage of their convictions to really put the country first.

As the alliance has splintered, on its periphery are alienated and disenchanted groups and individuals, the outcast and the ostracised. Zwelinzima Vavi has been rejected; Irvin Jim, following his lead, has led a breakaway; Sipho Pitanya has established Save SA; and a myriad other former ANC cadres, from Ronnie Kasrils to Trevor Manuel, have positioned themselves outside the ANC, with their animosity targeted at it.

Meanwhile, the opposition is coalescing to a greater degree than it ever has before. The advent of several metro coalitions has forced it together in governments but, even before that, it was striving to lead a more united front.

Joint press conferences, co-ordinated action in Parliament, shared court applications; the ANC’s disintegration has served to bind the opposition. Even the EFF, the radical alter-ego of the ANC, has found its way into the nest. Necessity makes for strange bedfellows.

But the final and obvious step seems to elude everyone. There seems no appetite for it. No leader with a clear vision, on any side, able to define a third way, to bring the alienated and the concerned together or to compel them to engage with realignment as a viable alterative.

All are stuck in their camp. All have their blinkers on. And all they ever do is bemoan the state of decline and decay.

Such an attempt is by no means guaranteed of success. For it to work, many people would have to put their egos aside. There would have to be many compromises and whatever emerged from it all, if anything ever did, would probably not satisfy absolutely the hardliners on either side.

But, if the DA is to win over the crucial 15% it needs to be a national government contender, and the ANC’s national destruction is to be halted, this is what is required. At the very least, someone should give it a go. They owe SA that much. But it requires more than words. It requires deeds; that is the real test of bravery.

Mathews Phosa has had it tough in the ANC. He has, over a great period of time, been treated terribly. Former president Thabo Mbeki systematically drove him away from the party. Jacob Zuma, for entirely different reasons, seems to have had the same effect. Through it all he has endured no end of moral crises.

The arms deals, HIV/AIDS denialism, silent diplomacy, corruption, maladministration, state capture — Phosa remained loyal through it all. But, he tells us, the National Assembly speaker’s decision not to grant a moment’s silence was the breaking point.

What kind of a breaking point is that? And, in the end, it broke nothing at all. It elicited no more than an article and one that confirms, not terminates, his loyalty to an organisation that continues to hold South Africa hostage to its own demise.

In fact, if confessionals are the currency in which those alienated from the ANC trade these days, how about some contrition too? An apology for the wrong. Some introspection about how damaging blind loyalty can be?

No. Introspection would open a door those in and around Save SA would not be able to close. So they choose instead to cower before a force they believe ultimately to be irresistible. Even in their pain, it calls to them, and they respond. Weak.

It’s selfish, is what it is. One can forgive the DA, perhaps, for not at least attempting such realignment. It has its solution on the table, a change of power. Those on the ANC’s outskirts can boast no such offer; for they cannot see the ANC for what it is. They, like Phosa, have been struck by a blinding light, only the lesson stops there. Grasping in the dark, they are simply feeling out the only path they know. It’s the path they have always been on. The path that leads to Luthuli House.

It is ironic that the one thing that seems to unite both the ANC and the DA is their admiration for Nelson Mandela. He has become the contested metonym for both parties; the former desperate to benefit from whatever remaining historical capital it can squeeze from its supporters; the latter, desperate to suggest it is the contemporary manifestation of the ideals Mandela embodied.

But truth be told, neither of them actually has what Mandela had: the ability to rise above history itself and plot a new course. They lay claim to an idea they seem incapable of actually realising. The cruel irony is that the idea of Mandela keeps them apart more than it unites them. In reality, he seems to have taught them nothing at all.

So we watch on, as both parties allude to things that exist only now in our collective imagination. So many leaders, across the political spectrum, all in agreement about one thing: the ANC is broken. But not one among them who seems committed to examining anything other than the path before them. It is the only path they know. And they daren’t stray from it on pain of death. That’s not leading, it’s following. But it’s what we do best in SA.