Cape Town — The formation of a new political party in South Africa, the Congress of the People (COPE), has introduced a fluidity to the country's politics not seen since liberation 15 years ago. On Saturday the party launches its manifesto for parliamentary elections expected to take place in April.
Zubeida Jaffer sat down with party leader Mosiuoa "Terror" Lekota ahead of the event.
Lekota cut his political teeth in the black consciousness movement and was first jailed on Robben Island after leaders grouped around the activist Steve Biko were arraigned in a major show trial of the movement in the 1970s. Until recently he was chairman of the governing African National Congress (ANC) and South Africa's minister of defence.
In the northern suburbs of Cape Town, Mosiuoa Lekota sips a glass of cold apple juice. A small boy, with large, innocent eyes, toddles into the lounge, and Lekota takes the child onto his knee as he speaks. There is no sign of the anger, agitation and frustration he displayed a few months ago when he left the ANC.
Sensing the calm, the child sits quietly as Lekota talks of how his recent contact with South Africans from all walks of life has energized him. "We are attracting people from all sectors of society, many who had abandoned politics," he says. "Young people in particular see in COPE a party of their time."
He ascribes his sense of well-being to having acknowledged the mistakes that he says he and others in the ANC made after taking power in 1994. "I share responsibility for failures in full," he says. "It is not for lack of effort. It is partly because we missed some fundamentals." He feels at peace since deciding to make a fresh start. "There is nothing more painful than being at loggerheads with one's conscience."
The party he leads will launch its manifesto in the coastal city of Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape on Saturday, barely two weeks after the ANC's impressive launch in nearby East London. Discussing the manifesto, Lekota identifies two areas in which COPE wants to bring change: promoting non-racialism and boosting the economic empowerment of black South Africans.
While COPE does not challenge the ANC's broad philosophy on these issues, it believes substantial improvements need to be made in the way they are implemented. Lekota wants to draw on the strengths of all South Africans, irrespective of race, gender or religious affiliation.
Huge effort has gone into popularising the concept of non-racialism, he says. But some fundamentals have been missed in its implementation. He argues that the language used by the ANC government has sustained an apartheid mentality. "We should strongly have spoken about South Africans," he says. "We did not read the mood and were unable to fashion an approach that would help all sections of the population feel they belonged."
South Africa's Constitution entitles all citizens to equal rights and benefits and binds them all equally to responsibilities, he says. But instead, in the ANC "we communicated a message [to some groups] that in this democracy you pay tax but when it comes to your rights, you are less of a citizen." He says COPE will stick closely to the founding provisions of the Constitution and make sure that it uses language that is fully inclusive.
This will require a new way of promoting empowerment. Instead of emphasising black economic empowerment, COPE will call for economic empowerment for all and help those who need it on the basis of a means test. "In all sections of the population, people are poor," he says. "We need to find ways to reverse these trends in all communities." If COPE has its way, Black Economic Empowerment (widely known in South Africa by its acronym, BEE) will become Grassroots Economic Empowerment (GEE).
Lekota says that under the ANC not only has there been an emphasis on being black, there has also been an emphasis on being ANC. "We need to depoliticize the civil service and draw on people from all political parties with the necessary skill to do the job."
He believes COPE has revived people's hopes of achieving a genuine democracy in South Africa. "If we stay on course, we will inject new life into the political process."
Will his message of change resonate with the South African public? Much depends on what the party not only says but does in the coming weeks. Many of those moving into COPE take their experience of the ANC with them. Will they leave behind that which is bad and take with them that which is good? It will not be easy to breathe fresh life into the country's fledgling democracy if citizens discover that hidden behind a rhetoric of deepening democracy lies a shallow interest in self-promotion.
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Since 1994, South Africans have been encouraged to believe that greed is acceptable, that personal well-being requires the massive accumulation of material wealth, that the welfare of their neighbours is not essentially their responsibility. The collapse of the global economy says something different. It is challenging South Africans to reconsider the dominant way of today's world and force them to rethink their "anything goes" approach.
If the country cannot reshape the way in which it does the business of politics, what will be the future of that small boy with the large innocent eyes perched on Lekota's knee?
Zubeida Jaffer has reported on South Africa's struggle for democracy for three decades. Author of the recently-launched book, Love in the Time of Treason, she is visiting associate at the Centre for African Studies of the University of Cape Town. Her blog is at www.zubeidajaffer.co.za
