I recently attended an event hosted by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation featuring Fikile Mbalula and moderated by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh. I was struck not by the glaring absence of any erudition by Mbalula, nor by the questions posed by Mpofu-Walsh, but by the race-agnostic middle-classness of it all — people concerned by the effect of policy and politics on their own circumstances with scant thought for common or general interest.
Perhaps one of the 20th century’s greatest economic thinkers, Joseph Schumpeter, defined democracy as a means by which political elites competing for power could gain the support of voters for versions of the common good they have manufactured to sell — like soap — back to the voters, so they can exercise power. That seems apt. In the absence of success, both politician and voter must accept the outcome or compromise, as the government of national unity bears tortuous witness.
The problem is that the great unwashed are the ultimate determinants of the gift of power. They have their own set of circumstances to navigate, which influences their acceptance (or not) of the cleansing soap — and that’s where they lose sight of the point of view in which the category of totality is dominant.
Organisations that are traditionally geared towards marshalling votes in opposition to the narrow interests of the canapé-eating classes that grace the lawns of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation have essentially been neutered. The once mighty unions are a ghost of their former selves; their fire-eating leaders having been subsumed into the accumulative classes as they tend their personal investment vehicles and wine estates.
And so the trajectory of politics (in theory) lies with the youth — their noses glued to smartphones — the product of bad political marriages and accepting of a suboptimal regime that doesn’t begin to affect their fractured realities, which are defined by cannabis, pizza and bad music on the one hand, and nyaope, no hope and crime on the other. There’s no-one even to receive the Greta Thunberg baton, let alone man the barricades á la 1968.
This is no 1968 Alexander Dubček moment, as famously captured in Czechoslovakia when he described the dissatisfaction of the people with the party leadership: “we couldn’t change the people, so we changed the leaders.” It’s more like Charles de Gaulle mistakenly pronouncing at the beginning of the same year from his ornate palace: “L’année 1968, je la salue avec sérénite” — I greet the year 1968 with serenity.
Our faux serenity is reflective of the aplomb of the political classes, against a background of theft dressed up as the selective reapportionment of resources on the one hand and, on the other, a local Thatcherite version of the common good predicated on limiting the power of the state while seeking to capture the state itself. If we’re in for anything, it’s more like Marx’s description of tragedy and farce.
The players on the political stage have their champions in what passes for civil society. Rob Hersov is punting Gayton McKenzie — former convict and alleged fiddler of Central Karoo municipal accounts — for president, while lauding the Argentina of Javier Millei, which he calls a beautiful example. This is despite, or maybe because of, Millei’s recent utterances in support of Elon Musk after the latter gave what appeared to be a Nazi salute at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Millei said: “We will hunt them down to the last corner of the planet in defence of freedom; leftist sons of b*tches, tremble.”
Meanwhile Mpofu-Walsh, erstwhile champion of “Rhodes Must Fall”, seems to have found more than common ground in his recent podcasting bromance with Hersov.
Strangely predictable how class interests coalesce. I’m reminded of the lines of the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, who said: “All the history of every people is symbolic. That is to say: history and its events and its protagonists allude to another concealed history, are the visible manifestation of a hidden reality.”
• Cachalia is a former DA MP and public enterprises spokesperson.
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