The rise of Gayton McKenzie is a fascinating phenomenon that says a lot about South Africa. It is also congruent with the global phenomenon that has given rise to fascists such as Donald Trump in the US, Narendra Modi in India, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.
These figures use popular rhetoric to make complex problems look easy. Scores of people have been disenfranchised in their wake. Lately, a woman born in Soweto’s Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital of immigrant parents has been publicly torched by the words of McKenzie, the sport, arts & culture minister, among others, who say she does not qualify to take part in the Miss SA pageant. That McKenzie has no clue of the constitution he swore to defend when he became minister is glaring.
South Africa is a perfect candidate for populist, ruinous politics due to the intractable crisis of inequality and poverty. The May 29 elections showed that populist parties on the Left represent the new political growth market. That is why Jacob Zuma’s spaza shop and McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance got the fattest worms at the polls. With them is the EFF, whose policy packages are based on populist ideas.
The McKenzie phenomenon is one of many problems in our body politic. The ANC has a strong tendency to go for populist options. How it thought the National Health Insurance Act was a great idea in its present unimplementable form shows its propensity for populism. Its ideas about land redistribution, or nationalising the central banks and mines, reflect a populist pressure cooker building up in the bowels of the once sensible party. The idea of prescribed assets — using private funds to drive public investments — represents precisely that.
This week, the rhetoric of change permeated the ANC as its top brass reviewed the outcome of the May 29 poll. “Adapt or die” was the headline. It is easy to pontify about a forked road, but carving out a new path is extremely difficult. That new path would require new personnel or ideas, not the same people who took the party beyond the crossroads and into a road of demise.
The ANC is not capable of introducing a new political culture, with new processes. As a result, its leadership growth path and attendant policy routes are obsolete and can only produce ideas from the past. In two years, it will be facing the same questions about the party’s and South Africa’s future. It will have wasted the intervening period and left with only populist options to campaign to retain its municipalities.
The economy will still not be able to absorb millions of unemployable people, who will easily respond to people such as McKenzie.
Only this week, the Bureau of Economic Research sharply defined the structural unemployment crisis, highlighting that the largest employers were unable to absorb the bulk of unskilled and semi-skilled labour.
With more unemployable people and a lack of policy response to both skill them and create small businesses to hire them, McKenzie will always be in business. The current band of populists may not be the ones to reap the rewards of the discord they are sowing now. But their actions serve to get out of the already conducive environment, a situation where a populist wildfire could be created around South Africa.
Populism is no light matter, as it is a threat to democracy. In our case, it is being fermented by an economy that doesn’t work for most
McKenzie’s boss has not been offended enough about his statements, judging by his silence. Yet former finance minister Tito Mboweni was publicly castigated by the same boss for questioning then Zambian president Edgar Lungu’s decision to sack central bank governor Denny Kalyalya and replace him with Christopher Mvunga. By the time sensible people wake up it may be too late to stem the rising tide.
In the Philippines, many clapped as Duterte bragged about killing suspected drug dealers, encouraging citizens to turn drug dealers in, “dead or alive”.
In India, Modi has become synonymous with the decline of a secular constitutional culture and the rise of a new Hindu supremacist nation.
In the US, it’s common for Trump to say immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country”. Isn’t that the same message as the harmful noise about Miss South Africa contestant Chidimma Adetshina? Populism is no light matter, as it is a threat to democracy. In our case, it is being fermented by an economy that doesn’t work for most.
At the time of writing, there was nothing to suggest that Adetshina had herself committed a crime to obtain her citizenship. She pulled out of the competition citing security concerns.
The controversy around how her parents might have entered South Africa illegally does muddy the waters of public opinion. But ministers need to do better than shoot from the hip.
• Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory.
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