What does Songezo Zibi want to do with his new party, Rise Mzansi? What are his ambitions for a life in politics?
Some time ago, I listened to him tell a story. When he returns to the Eastern Cape villages in which he was born and bred, he said, and gets out of his fancy car and the old people confront him with a question. Things in the country are not right, they say. What are you doing about it?
A whole world lives in that story. The way I read him, Zibi is an old-fashioned black nationalist, heir to a tradition going back at least as far as the late 19th century. According to this tradition, black SA constitutes a single, coherent moral universe, and it looks to its educated elite for leadership.
By these lights, Zibi, as a successful professional, is a modern incarnation of the mission-educated elites of yesteryear, men and women whose people expected them to lead. He is taking up the burden and the duty that in his understanding has always fallen on the shoulders of people like him.
You can see this sense of leadership playing out in his public performances. I remember, for instance, watching a video clip he put on social media the day he went for his first Covid-19 vaccine. He explained how he blocked off a couple of hours of his day, scouted the medical facility, found parking, how quick and easy it all was, and how, within no time, he was back at work. He was offering his actions as exemplars, guiding others through their hesitations and doubts.
Politics as an expression of ordinary lives
In this view of the world, the ANC was once the genuine expression in politics of a black moral universe. On Sunday mornings in the 1990s and 2000s, Zibi recently recounted, women would put on their black skirts and red blouses to go to church. In the afternoons, they would swap the red blouse for a green one and now they were in the colours of the ANC, ready to attend a political meeting. The movement from church to politics was seamless; they were two dimensions of one world.
With the decline in the standing of the ANC, the argument continues, the connection between politics and the collective lives of ordinary people has been severed. It is a crisis from which SA must urgently recover.
And that, as I understand it, is Zibi’s mission in politics. Not to build a mass party people will join in their millions, nor to form a majority and take power. His task, rather, is to rekindle an idea: that the role of professionals is to lead their people; that politics can once more become an expression of ordinary lives. Zibi’s mission is to remind South Africans, and in particular black South Africans I think, that they still constitute a single moral universe.
Zibi, as a successful professional, is a modern incarnation of the mission-educated elites of yesteryear, men and women whose people expected them to lead.
It’s a benign and noble idea, and listening to Zibi describe it is satisfying. The question, I guess, is whether it is also quixotic. Is there a common moral universe, submerged and suffocated, but ready to be drawn to the surface? Was there ever one? Is this what SA politics can become?
I fear that SA’s electoral system is likely to take the country in a less edifying direction. The threshold for political representation is dangerously low: a party needs about a quarter of a million votes to get a meaningful place in the legislature; an independent candidate requires 40,000 votes to get into parliament. The mirror the electoral system holds up to SA is not of a common universe, but of a thousand warring parts. It is hardly surprising that the two most successful new entrants into party politics thus far are Action SA, with its bedrock idea of a hatred of foreigners, and the Patriotic Alliance, which appeals to the narrowest ethnic nationalism.
Into this noisy new world comes Zibi’s quiet voice of sanity and reason. If that voice can be heard above the din, if he can convince a sizeable proportion of South Africans that they are a single people, he will have accomplished an inestimable service.
• Steinberg teaches part time at Yale University.
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