Dear DM168 readers,

Way back in 1997, when we were in our kumbaya, Ebony and Ivory living together in perfect harmony democratic honeymoon phase, Pieter-Dirk Uys and his alter ego Tannie Evita Bezuidenhout staged a satirical show titled You ANC Nothing Yet. A play on the joke hit song You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet by the Seventies Canadian band, Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

I vaguely remember this phrase, “You ANC nothing yet”, from even further back in the Eighties as a line of surreptitiously sprayed graffiti on city walls. As a colourful dab of delicious defiance against a stifling, bald PW Botha-esque-index-finger-wagging dystopia.

The ANC was a banned organisation then. Verboten. Driven underground and into exile by swart and rooigevaar. Its leaders and members were behind bars, under house arrest or had escaped to neighbouring states to undergo military training in Eastern Europe and the USSR.

Others went off to the US and Western Europe to corral a global anti-apartheid movement. Underground and in exile, ordinary men and women became mythologised into saints and superheroes who stood up for the majority of us against the violent racist despots voted in by a white minority.

It is a generational memory of more than 300 years of dispossession and dehumanisation and that all-too-familiar and more recent three-decade old reminder of what happened when only whites ruled, which will scupper any dream any white political leader, however competent or anti-racist, might possibly have of leading our country in whatever form of coalition in the making.

The heavy weight of these three centuries of brutality that led to and will still lead to many more generations of advantage and white wealth and privilege makes the possibility of South Africa ever having another white national leader very, very, very remote.

[Next year] is a watershed election which will depend on us voters interrogating the hell out of every promise, every song-and-dance act, every statistic, every poll, every T-shirt, food parcel or cash popped into a pocket for a vote.

To many of you Daily Maverick readers who support the DA and its successes in Cape Town and the Western Cape, don’t get me wrong. I am not taking cheap sideways shots at John Steenhuisen, or the DA which is a nonracial party and which does good work as an opposition keeping check on the governing party in Parliament and as a government in the Western Cape and Cape Town, where it is creating a conducive environment for jobs, delivering services, fixing infrastructure, unlike the rot happening everywhere else in the rest of the country.

But (there is always a “but” with politics, isn’t there?) this track record in the Western Cape is not evident where I live as a resident of Tshwane.  Since 2016 we have endured one DA-led coalition disaster after another, the latest being the tragic result of delays in fixing the Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant which has led to the deaths of Hammanskraal residents from a cholera outbreak.

We can only live in hope, but right now, if a DA-led coalition is anything like the multiple disasters of Tshwane, then that DA national coalition is a bit of a hallucinatory SpaceX Andromeda shot, let alone a moonshot. Clearly political parties need to get some coalition ground rules in place before we can think of a stable national, coalition-led government.

These thoughts have been percolating in my head ever since Tuesday when a team of us at Daily Maverick in Gauteng met a delegation from the DA, including leader John Steenhuisen, DA chief whip Siviwe Gwarube, DA deputy federal chair and spokesperson Solly Malatsi and MP Leon Schreiber. We had an open and candid discussion about the DA’s moonshot pact of a possible national coalition as all polls are showing that the ANC will dip below 50% for the first time since 1994.

The DA approached us for the meeting, but we would love to have the same sort of candid meeting with all political parties in the run-up to next year’s election. Yes, Honourable Member of Parliament Malema (I know you probably don’t read Daily Maverick because you see us as the devil incarnate, but) we would love the opportunity to meet you too.

And President Ramaphosa (even though your dancing predecessor and you give me crazy-baldhead PW Botha PTSD), you are welcome to step down from the dizzy heights of playing global peacemaker, into our very humble shared office spaces in Cape Town or Johannesburg to tell us about your plans to get us out of the dwang. 

Watershed

Next year is around the corner and if the pollsters are right, this is a watershed election which will depend on us voters interrogating the hell out of every promise, every song-and-dance act, every statistic, every poll, every T-shirt, food parcel or cash popped into a pocket for a vote.

As a country we are hungry for hope. Meeting the DA delegation made me realise that a moment like next year is our time. The time of the voter. The time for us to make politicians truly shine, to put aside their rhetoric and work for us. The people. All the people they are meant to serve.

Our work as journalists holding all political parties to account is going to be cut out for us. Day and night. Because the stakes are high. Our very future depends on it.

Which brings me back to that other funny baldhead, Pieter-Dirk Uys (admittedly he doesn’t give me PTSD, comedians are all an antidote to PTSD). In Dirk Uys’s satire You ANC nothing Yet, the apartheid-era torturer of a Jewish communist recently returned from exile to South Africa has amnesty for life for his politically motivated crimes. And now works as a security agent for the ANC. “Maybe the new government wants to learn from an old master,” he tells the man he tortured.

This bizarre case of reality imitating art or maybe Dirk Uys’s sangoma crystal ball talents occurred to me when I read political analyst Moeletsi Mbeki’s fascinating edited address to the 49th synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in The Sunday Times last week.

Mbeki wrote that South Africa’s potential for economic growth has been stymied by 100 years of nationalist rule which serves nationalist elites and this constrains the ability of our country to develop its full potential.

The ANC baas learnt from the NP baas. Both the National Party, through disastrous Bantu education and black exclusion from the economy, and the ANC through messing up public education and creating multiple barriers to entrepreneurship, undermined what Mbeki terms “the development of the country’s human capital”.

What has happened now over the past three decades, according to Mbeki, is that the African elite continued to hobble the country’s economic development by diverting much of the economic surplus through the tax system from investment to consumption “in an attempt to equalise their private consumption with that of the white middle and upper middle classes”.

The hope, dear readers, according to Mbeki, is not to sell our crown jewels to Vlad Putin but to follow the trail of success blazed by our  Indian Ocean neighbour Mauritius. He suggests we should modernise and industrialise our economy and reform our electoral system.

For him the future lies in a post-nationalist coalition that must include the underclass who stand to benefit the most from the increased industrialisation of the economy, and the owners of capital, whose best interest would be served by growing the economy and creating more jobs.

Why have I taken you on this journey from our troubled past to our troubling present, and offered you a possible glimpse of light at the end of this blacked-out tunnel? Because today’s lead story in DM168 by our Scorpio investigative journalist Jessica Bezuidenhout is a shocker.

In our version of You ANC Nothing Yet, it turns out that Regiments Capital, that financial advisory firm embroiled in State Capture, actually funded the ANCs 2016 election campaign to the tune of R50-million.

Read. Get Angry. Then think about what kind of a different future you as a South African voter really want. Then read again. And grill every political party and independent who will appear on the ballot paper. Your country needs you. Now. Be prepared for next year.

Tell us what you can do as a voter by writing to me at [email protected] . DM