"Political Realignment in South Africa"

SOUTH AFRICA is showing signs of political realignment which, if current piecemeal developments were to keep unfolding, could drastically alter the national configuration, cutting across lines of race and ethnicity which have been carried over from the past. 

For those who analyse society from a perspective of values, rather than the more superficial categories of race or class, it presents a considerably more complex process which holds out hope of the kind of synthesis needed if South Africa is to truly escape its past of division and fragmentation.

The process is happening on at least three terrains. One is in government itself where a coalition co-exists with an alliance.  The ruling African National Congress (ANC) is in a tripartite electoral alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party. This is not really an alliance of three distinct organisations. Membership overlaps considerably. Few, if any, leading figures of Cosatu or the Communist Party would not be simultaneously members of the ANC. Many are members of all three. The Cosatu men are trade unionists with a workerist agenda. The Communists are mainly Marxist intellectuals, a high proportion of members having origins in the white and Asian communities.

It means the ANC is a very broad church indeed. Its membership ranges from tribally ordered communities to recently urbanised communities to church leaders, trade unionists and communists, as well as a small but growing elite in government and business, many of whose members spent their formative years in exile overseas in developed countries. The ANC represents a spectrum of values, even a tiny fringe of liberal idealists hanging on in spite of almost daily disillusionment. However, the numerical preponderance is with the tribally ordered communities and with those who have migrated from there to the cities and towns. (In the values codings used by Dr Don Beck and Ken Wilber to describe the mindsets of such communities, they are in the Purple of tribal order and the Red of urban struggle and Blue of the quest for order amid confusion). It is no accident that the ANC harps almost continually on Africanness and the need to redress the wrongs of the past. Racial solidarity is the great unifier across virtually all its constituencies.

Yet there are great tensions in the ANC. As the leadership embraces privatisation, the free market and the globalisation of capital (with little choice), Cosatu and the Communists are increasingly uneasy, especially as jobs in the formal sector are lost at an alarming rate. The stresses are there and they will not disappear.

Certain commentators look at events in Zimbabwe, where the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) developed almost overnight out of trade unionism, ending in an alliance with urban professionals, the business community and the farming sector which directly challenged the government of President Robert Mugabe, who now holds on in a sort of international limbo of non-recognition, following highly suspect elections. Colour-coded: The MDC is in the Blue of the quest for order, the Orange of entrepreneurial endeavour and (mainly among university intellectuals) the Green of humane liberalism.  Mr Mugabe's Zanu is in the Purple of Tribalism and the Red of struggle.

It is an intriguing notion, Cosatu forming the nucleus in South Africa of a new, workerist challenge to the ANC. But so far it is only a notion which ebbs and flows. The glue of office is strong. Also, there is the overlapping membership and Cosatu's declining numbers as the formal economy continues to shed jobs.

So much for the alliance. The coalition is with the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a regionally based offshoot of the ANC. It operates at national level, where the IFP is the junior partner and in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, where the IFP dominates. The coalition began with the Government of National Unity (GNU) which automatically followed the 1994 elections in terms of the transitional arrangement. So successful was it in ending violent hostility between the IFP and the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal that it continued after the transition phase.

In terms of values, the IFP has virtually the same profile as the ANC - tribally ordered communities (Purple), struggling urban communities (Red) and stabilised urban communities (Blue), as well as the same sprinkling of the urban elite in the Orange (entrepreneurial) and Green (egalitarian) mindsets. But the content of those value systems is significantly different. Whereas the ANC overlaps with Cosatu and the Communist Party, the IFP has always had strong links with the business community and a church influence which abhors communism.

These differences apart, it means national government in South Africa is dominated by groupings who tend to articulate the interests and values of tribally ordered society (though not as strongly on the part of the ANC, which is influenced by the Communists) and the urbanised African masses. Absent is the input of anyone representing industry, commerce, the professional sector or commercial agriculture, which drive the economy and provide the tax base.

It was not always so. The original GNU included the National Party (able to speak credibly at the time for the entire white community, including the economic sectors mentioned). But the Nationalists withdrew prematurely from the GNU, depriving it of an input from the value systems of social order (Blue) and entrepreneurial endeavour (Orange).  Many at the time interpreted it as an unwise withdrawal of the white community from government. A deeper and more meaningful perception is not so much race as that it deprived government of exposure to the values and strategic thinking needed to sustain a successful modern society.

The Nationalists are now back in government - in coalition with the ANC in running the province of the Western Cape and in a mode of  "co-operation" with the ANC at national level. It remains to be seen whether the New National Party (NNP), as it now terms itself, will be offered a seat in the national cabinet, in a sense reconstituting the old GNU. 

However, it also remains to be seen what it can contribute and indeed whether it still represents any meaningful constituency. Almost totally eclipsed in the last election by its traditional rival, the Democratic Party, it used its one remaining card - support among the working class, mixed-race "coloured" people of the Western Cape - to merge with the Democrats into the Democratic Alliance (DA) and govern the province.

That alliance broke down in highly questionable circumstances. It is by no means clear how much of the original Nationalist support base has been retained by the DA and how much will have reverted to the NNP. But it seems likely that the DA has hung on to at least a significant number of the Western Cape working class/"coloured" voters as well as middle class whites who do not identify with the values of the ANC. 

That is important for the DA. It has been attacked and derided for being "white" (racism is still a one-way street in South Africa, it's only the direction that has changed); for being elitist, capitalist, complacent, even "colonial". Yet now it appears to have gathered a working class support base and greatly expanded its middle class base. In racial terms we would be talking about "coloured" people and whites. In terms of values we are talking about stable communities who seek social order (Blue).

Re-enter the IFP. This party is in coalitions with the ANC at national and KwaZulu-Natal provincial level. But in KwaZulu-Natal it has also gone into coalition with the DA in about a dozen municipalities, expressly to keep the ANC out of control. It is quite a straddling act, involving three tiers of government.

For the DA it means working closely with the elected representatives of tribally ordered communities (Purple), volatile African urban communities (Red) and the more settled African urban communities (Blue). The DA begins to look nowhere near as "white", elitist, capitalist, suburban or complacent as its detractors make out.  It is by no means a merger. But such working relationships tend to develop a chemistry of their own. It could well end in the DA being invited by the IFP to join the provincial coalition, either in three-way partnership with the ANC (the smooth path) or to the exclusion of the ANC (the jarring one).

Then there is the transformation which seems to be taking place within the DA itself. Its recent national congress was held outside Soweto, the giant African township near Johannesburg. It was packed with African delegates and the gathering pulsated with African idiom and rhythms. Normally hostile commentators speculated that this could well be the nucleus of an MDC forming in South Africa as an alternative to the ANC. 

In value terms, the DA seems to be reaching into the previously unreachable categories of tribal order and the new township order, partly by its own recruitment and partly by striking up a close relationship with the IFP. If it can achieve a synthesis of these value systems with its own values of free enterprise and liberalism, something powerful could be set in motion in South Africa.  The next elections in South Africa are only two years away. However, it seems just possible that this time they will be contested on issues and values instead of being the racial census they have been in the past.

Graham Linscott