In S. Africa, ANC Dissidents Pledge 'New Way'
Thématique :
sud afrique
Splinter Party of Mbeki Loyalists Set for Tuesday Launch, but Many Challenges Lie Ahead
By Karin Brulliard - Washington Post Foreign Service - Sunday, December 14, 2008; Page A16
JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 13 -- The South African city of Bloemfontein was the birthplace nearly a century ago of the African National Congress, the iconic liberation movement that toppled apartheid and dominates government.
Now the city is playing host to a splinter party that may herald an end to the ANC's supremacy and a new era in South Africa's young democracy.
Thousands of ANC dissidents are descending on Bloemfontein for the Tuesday launch of a political organization that they promote as an alternative to a ruling party that has abandoned its ideals for corruption, intolerance and factionalism after 14 years at the helm.
The breakaway party, called Congress of the People, is led by liberation struggle luminaries making promises of hope and change ahead of general elections next year.
"We are indeed a progressive organization that is charting a new way in our country," one of its leaders, ANC veteran Smuts Ngonyama, said at a recent news conference.
The breakup, triggered by the ANC's ouster of President Thabo Mbeki in September, has riveted South Africans. Newspapers regularly speculate about the next high-ranking ANC defectors. COPE, as the new party is known, said this week that it had more than 400,000 paid members, about two-thirds as many as the ANC.
Just how much support the new party can garner in a few short months is unclear. The ANC, which won nearly 70 percent of the vote in 2004, is a formidable brand with a deep legacy, and polls indicate it is unlikely to lose.
But surveys also show that public confidence in the ANC is waning as worries grow about the future of South Africa, where crime and poverty rates remain stubbornly high, and schools produce few skilled workers.
So COPE could wipe away the ANC's two-thirds majority, analysts say, and by allying with other small parties -- which profess delight about the split -- it could provide the first real opposition to the ANC.
"There is no doubt that COPE is not just another opposition party that can be easily dismissed," said Prince Mashele, an analyst at the Institute for Security Studies.
The effort has produced more political theater than substance. The parties have called each other names and demanded apologies. They have gone to court over the phrase Congress of the People, which the ANC claimed ownership of because it was the name of a 1955 event that spawned the party's historic Freedom Charter, which outlined the ANC's core principles. The court disagreed.
But the new party has offered little in the way of policies beyond a pledge to push for elections that let voters, not Parliament, decide who is president. The ANC says the fuzzy platform is evidence that COPE is just a group of bitter outcasts.
"I don't believe for one minute that the ANC is going to be challenged," said ANC spokesman Carl Niehaus. "That is, for lack of a better word, poppycock."
No matter how it turns out, the split was inevitable, historians and analysts say. Throughout its history, the ANC has been a political hodgepodge of communists, unionists, intellectuals and capitalists who allied in the fight against apartheid, which ended in 1994. Once in government, their goals often diverged.
In recent years, fissures within the party leadership began to form.
At their simplest, they boiled down to a split between those loyal to Mbeki, an aloof economist, and Jacob Zuma, a charismatic populist who has been battling corruption charges for years.
The tensions came to a fore at an ANC conference last year, when Zuma ousted Mbeki as party president and many Mbeki allies lost plum party posts. In September, the party forced Mbeki to step down as South Africa's president after a court ruling suggested that he had pressured prosecutors to charge Zuma with graft.
The sudden ouster unsettled many South Africans and enraged Mbeki allies, two of whom have led the split. One, former defense minister Mosiuoa Lekota -- commonly called "Terror" for his charging style on the soccer field, lambastes the ANC for supporting Zuma despite the lingering criminal charges and for condoning tribalism by playing up Zuma's roots as a Zulu, South Africa's largest ethnic group.
Mbeki has stayed out of the rift, though there are whispers that he orchestrated the breakup.
COPE supporters say the well-known former ANC figures have given the new organization a credibility that other opposition parties lack.
Zuma acknowledged as much in a speech last month, telling his audience that "voting is serious" this time.
"Someone who knows every corner of the house is now outside the house," Zuma said, according to the South African Press Association.
Others are not so sure.
"These really are yesterday's people," said Robert Schrire, head of the political science department at the University of Cape Town. COPE, he said, needs "leaders with a future, not leaders with a past."
A bigger challenge for COPE may be that it appears elitist. The party has used Facebook to rally support, and many of its followers are black professionals. The object of much of their disaffection is Zuma, who stirs up crowds with a liberation anthem about a machine gun and lacks the formal schooling that critics say is necessary to lead South Africa through tough economic times.
But the ANC has a huge following among the vast population of the poor, and most South Africans do not have Internet access.
"What COPE needs to do is go out there and identify every big township, every informal settlement, every rural area," said William Gumede, author of a book on Mbeki and the ANC. "They have to get beyond preaching to the converted."
The new party's leaders say they are doing so, and the point did not go unmentioned at a recent COPE gathering of young professionals in suburban Johannesburg. One speaker reminded the participants, many of whom were preparing to head to their provincial homelands for the holidays, that South Africa is "about the people you left at home that you know that ask you for money."
Khaya Dlanga, 30, an advertising copywriter who was at the meeting, said he thought all South Africans were thirsting for choice. For too long, he said, they have felt that not voting for the ANC amounted to betrayal of the party that delivered liberation. That has given the ANC a dangerous blank check, he said.
"Our young democracy needs this," he said. "We don't owe anybody anything. What we owe, we owe to the country."
By Karin Brulliard - Washington Post Foreign Service - Sunday, December 14, 2008; Page A16
JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 13 -- The South African city of Bloemfontein was the birthplace nearly a century ago of the African National Congress, the iconic liberation movement that toppled apartheid and dominates government.
Now the city is playing host to a splinter party that may herald an end to the ANC's supremacy and a new era in South Africa's young democracy.
Thousands of ANC dissidents are descending on Bloemfontein for the Tuesday launch of a political organization that they promote as an alternative to a ruling party that has abandoned its ideals for corruption, intolerance and factionalism after 14 years at the helm.
The breakaway party, called Congress of the People, is led by liberation struggle luminaries making promises of hope and change ahead of general elections next year.
"We are indeed a progressive organization that is charting a new way in our country," one of its leaders, ANC veteran Smuts Ngonyama, said at a recent news conference.
The breakup, triggered by the ANC's ouster of President Thabo Mbeki in September, has riveted South Africans. Newspapers regularly speculate about the next high-ranking ANC defectors. COPE, as the new party is known, said this week that it had more than 400,000 paid members, about two-thirds as many as the ANC.
Just how much support the new party can garner in a few short months is unclear. The ANC, which won nearly 70 percent of the vote in 2004, is a formidable brand with a deep legacy, and polls indicate it is unlikely to lose.
But surveys also show that public confidence in the ANC is waning as worries grow about the future of South Africa, where crime and poverty rates remain stubbornly high, and schools produce few skilled workers.
So COPE could wipe away the ANC's two-thirds majority, analysts say, and by allying with other small parties -- which profess delight about the split -- it could provide the first real opposition to the ANC.
"There is no doubt that COPE is not just another opposition party that can be easily dismissed," said Prince Mashele, an analyst at the Institute for Security Studies.
The effort has produced more political theater than substance. The parties have called each other names and demanded apologies. They have gone to court over the phrase Congress of the People, which the ANC claimed ownership of because it was the name of a 1955 event that spawned the party's historic Freedom Charter, which outlined the ANC's core principles. The court disagreed.
But the new party has offered little in the way of policies beyond a pledge to push for elections that let voters, not Parliament, decide who is president. The ANC says the fuzzy platform is evidence that COPE is just a group of bitter outcasts.
"I don't believe for one minute that the ANC is going to be challenged," said ANC spokesman Carl Niehaus. "That is, for lack of a better word, poppycock."
No matter how it turns out, the split was inevitable, historians and analysts say. Throughout its history, the ANC has been a political hodgepodge of communists, unionists, intellectuals and capitalists who allied in the fight against apartheid, which ended in 1994. Once in government, their goals often diverged.
In recent years, fissures within the party leadership began to form.
At their simplest, they boiled down to a split between those loyal to Mbeki, an aloof economist, and Jacob Zuma, a charismatic populist who has been battling corruption charges for years.
The tensions came to a fore at an ANC conference last year, when Zuma ousted Mbeki as party president and many Mbeki allies lost plum party posts. In September, the party forced Mbeki to step down as South Africa's president after a court ruling suggested that he had pressured prosecutors to charge Zuma with graft.
The sudden ouster unsettled many South Africans and enraged Mbeki allies, two of whom have led the split. One, former defense minister Mosiuoa Lekota -- commonly called "Terror" for his charging style on the soccer field, lambastes the ANC for supporting Zuma despite the lingering criminal charges and for condoning tribalism by playing up Zuma's roots as a Zulu, South Africa's largest ethnic group.
Mbeki has stayed out of the rift, though there are whispers that he orchestrated the breakup.
COPE supporters say the well-known former ANC figures have given the new organization a credibility that other opposition parties lack.
Zuma acknowledged as much in a speech last month, telling his audience that "voting is serious" this time.
"Someone who knows every corner of the house is now outside the house," Zuma said, according to the South African Press Association.
Others are not so sure.
"These really are yesterday's people," said Robert Schrire, head of the political science department at the University of Cape Town. COPE, he said, needs "leaders with a future, not leaders with a past."
A bigger challenge for COPE may be that it appears elitist. The party has used Facebook to rally support, and many of its followers are black professionals. The object of much of their disaffection is Zuma, who stirs up crowds with a liberation anthem about a machine gun and lacks the formal schooling that critics say is necessary to lead South Africa through tough economic times.
But the ANC has a huge following among the vast population of the poor, and most South Africans do not have Internet access.
"What COPE needs to do is go out there and identify every big township, every informal settlement, every rural area," said William Gumede, author of a book on Mbeki and the ANC. "They have to get beyond preaching to the converted."
The new party's leaders say they are doing so, and the point did not go unmentioned at a recent COPE gathering of young professionals in suburban Johannesburg. One speaker reminded the participants, many of whom were preparing to head to their provincial homelands for the holidays, that South Africa is "about the people you left at home that you know that ask you for money."
Khaya Dlanga, 30, an advertising copywriter who was at the meeting, said he thought all South Africans were thirsting for choice. For too long, he said, they have felt that not voting for the ANC amounted to betrayal of the party that delivered liberation. That has given the ANC a dangerous blank check, he said.
"Our young democracy needs this," he said. "We don't owe anybody anything. What we owe, we owe to the country."
