It’s been at least a decade since Tony Leon and Thabo Mbeki have been on the campaign trail, but times have changed. With about two weeks to an election riddled with some new uncertainties in both their parties, the former leaders are back in politics, if only for a few days.

Not that they’ve really been away. Leon has been writing columns for the Business Day and coining it from doing PR for Cape Town’s “day zero”, while Mbeki has the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and he’s been doing work as an elder on the continent. Occasionally he broke his silence to criticise the ANC of Jacob Zuma.

On Tuesday night, after addressing a small meeting at Leriba Lodge in Centurion, Leon said it was an interesting coincidence that both he and Mbeki hit the campaign trail on the same day, right after the Easter long weekend.

“It’s what they call, I think, a correlation not a causation. I did this (campaigning) a long time ago and he certainly didn’t pop up because I was there… quite interesting.

“I suppose we are figures from a different age, the politics was very different and the economy was better then. I don’t know about the politics, but the economy certainly was. Now we seem to have the worst of both worlds with bad economics and very bad politics.”

At the meeting Leon went on a trip down memory lane to the 1989 elections, when he first became an MP for the Democratic Party, saying that then-president FW de Klerk had to make a choice about taking the party down the right political path — either by opening it up by unbanning the ANC and releasing Nelson Mandela, or by going the other way. He chose the former.

Leon likened the kruispad, or the watershed, to the current economic situation.

“Here’s the thing. Economically we are in as much trouble today as we were politically 30 years ago when FW took that decision to say ‘change’.” While he reckoned President Cyril Ramaphosa could similarly be a game-changer for South Africa’s ailing economy, Leon said he hadn’t seen any evidence of Ramaphosa’s reform agenda among the ANC’s election promises.

So, what has changed? The ANC has been running a ferocious campaign in Gauteng where the party’s support in recent elections came perilously close to breaking through the 50% mark to the wrong side for the first time.

ANC supporters here are less dependent on party patronage than in some of the rural provinces, and more sensitive to bad decisions by the governing party that have knock-on effects on the economy. This makes them a fickle audience. Mbeki is a reminder of an era where economic growth was at least on some kind of a positive track.

As for the DA, while it was busy growing its support base to include black voters, its traditional voters (read: whites) for the first time find themselves willing to stray.

The DA’s support for black economic empowerment and a perceived silence on issues such as farm murders, have seen voters deserting it for the Freedom Front Plus in a by-election in Krugersdorp in 2018. In the Western Cape, the ACDP also made strong gains in a DA ward in Bonteheuwel during a by-election earlier in 2019. Both by-elections came as a wake-up call for the DA, and the trends were borne out in its polling too.

On top of this, a lot of the DA’s English voters “are listening to the siren call of ‘Cyril is such a nice man let’s vote for him’,” said the party’s former chief whip Douglas Gibson, who flanked Leon at the Centurion meeting. “We all know the ANC lists are packed with rogues and worse,” he told the audience.

One DA leader told Daily Maverick white people in the past “outsourced” their politics to the DA, and the party could always rely on them to vote for it by default.

“This time we are not so sure,” he said.

These voters do, however, take well to the more personal contact with DA campaigners, house meetings and one-on-one conversations, and the Afrikaans voters like being spoken to in Afrikaans. This is perhaps why Leon tortured a small audience in Leriba Lodge in Centurion with some choice Afrikaans in what he self-deprecatingly called his “Sandton aksent” — a heavy one at that.

Western Cape Premier Helen Zille did much of the same thing at a meeting in the Kempton Park Gereformeerde Kerk hall earlier in April, in her first campaign venture outside her province since being sanctioned by the party over her tweets on colonialism’s benefits. She was flanked by the party’s pointsman on crime, chief whip John Steenhuisen, who has also been speaking a lot of Afrikaans of late.

Seeing the old leaders hauled out and dusted off in a bid to regain some former glory for the ANC and the DA was a reminder of how uneasy the intrigues of the past sometimes sit with the politics of the present. Mbeki in 2001 accused Ramaphosa, with businessmen Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa, of trying to overthrow him. All three were already politically sidelined at the time. This week Mbeki was in effect endorsing him by saying he could again tell people to vote for the ANC now that it was on the mend.

As for the DA, let’s just conclude by quoting Gibson’s praising DA leader Mmusi Maimane at the Centurion meeting. The patronising tone is reminiscent of a former era in opposition politics:

“One of the reasons why I’m here tonight is that I’m a Mmusi Maimane man. I had breakfast with our leader a few months ago and when he came into the breakfast room, I had such a feeling of quiet confidence that this is a person who still plays a large role in our country.

“He looked so young, vigorous and strong and he is so fresh and untainted by corruption. He’s also highly intelligent, speaks beautifully in Parliament and on the campaign trail, and I believe that we’re fortunate indeed to be led by someone of his calibre who’s dedicated to the Constitution and the values of the Constitution.

“He uses every opportunity to bring South Africans together instead of dividing them on the grounds of race, as so many other politicians, right from Mr Ramaphosa down, do.” DM