Inside Songezo Zibi’s plan for Rise Mzansi to break old politics – can he pull it off?

It takes one call to set up an interview with Rise Mzansi head and presidential hopeful, Songezo Zibi. I arrive early at a café, and he’s there already. There are no bodyguards and no PR people. It is refreshing for a politician and a mark of difference for this party, one of several offshoots from civil society.

Rise Mzansi’s payoff line is “2024 is our 1994”, a pithy positioning statement for a young party against now-congealed liberation movement politics.  

“It’s a positive message. Another moment of big change,” says Zibi.

Zibi declined to join the Multi-Party Charter pact (MPC), a seven-party election pact led by the DA, Action SA, Inkatha and the FF Plus, which together won 31.97% in the previous local government elections.

The easy access to the leader and the enthusiasm for his plans remind me of 1994. Back then, the incoming ANC’s young leaders were accessible and filled with zeal and ideas. Now, you can’t get close to leaders in the governing party, for the phalanx of convoys, flunkies and bodyguards who have come to symbolise a performance of power often both anaemic and symbolic simultaneously.

Why do servants of the people need such social distance? I often wonder to myself.

Since he launched his campaign with the book “Manifesto” in 2022, Zibi has been on the move. The lab for Rise was the Rivonia Circle, a group of professionals who developed a thesis for a different method of politics in South Africa. It’s that test case that Zibi and his team will take to a convention this weekend as the party develops and finalises its manifesto.

“We rarely mention the ANC in meetings because we want to ensure a positive message,” says Zibi.

He declined to join the MPC because he says it is conservative and pivots on opposing the ANC, whereas his view is that people want more.

“People know how bad the ANC is; they don’t have to be told.”

Grassroots organising

Rise has registered nationally and in all provinces. One thousand paid organisers run it, which eschews the membership model that still animates the ANC, DA and most other significant parties. 

Each organiser develops a network of 100 members. By next year’s election, Rise plans to have 5,000 paid organisers to create a network effect it hopes will translate into netting several electable members of parliament and provincial legislators.

“A membership model doesn’t guarantee a vote,” says Zibi, but organising does, as President Barack Obama showed when he changed how elections are run in the US using a similar method.

Gauteng organisers have already “touched” 12,000 voters, says Zibi.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Rise Mzansi launches, but mixed views on the mushrooming of political parties ahead of 2024 polls

He is working with a global team led by the former DA strategist Jonathan Moakes because elections are both politics and science – it’s been found that a vote is likely once a party has “touched” a voter 12 times.

“It’s about constant presence. They just want to see you here, to see you trying.”

Moakes was on the team when Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema won the 2021 election – recognised, too, as a shift from old to new democratic outcomes.

Rise’s method breaks how party politics is organised around elections. The old way is to hold events and rallies during elections and build a brand using traditional means like advertising.

The new (but old) way is to organise where people are and around what their most heartfelt concerns are. Rise does door-to-doors, cocktail parties, events and dinners. You are also likely to find it at, for example, civics in Plett, Eastern Cape farmers’ market associations, hyper-local business associations, hostel dwellers’ associations and “Gogo Olympics” (exercise classes for older people).

This is how the UDF organised grassroots resistance to apartheid, by tapping into the system’s manifest and different impacts in different communities. The party’s focus will be Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape (where Zibi is from), the Western Cape, parts of the Free State and the Northern Cape.

Whereas old politics is often one set of messages in a campaign set nationally but fought locally, Zibi’s team is changing things up.

“We’re building social capital and organising. Ours is a listening politics. We encourage people to say what’s not working and how it should work. And then we ask people, ‘If you can change five things, what would they be?’

“For most people, it’s food. How much food they have access to, food for their families and the cost. Tjo! It’s about every family having food,” says Zibi, to emphasise the point. He says stunting is visible in their work in the poorest provinces. Food, he explains, is also a proxy issue for access to land.

Read more in Daily Maverick: The 2024 elections will be a watershed moment for all of us to reclaim SA from unaccountable and corrupt politicians

After listening for over a year, Rise’s manifesto convention is organised into themes of family, community, governance, nation-building, climate change and the economy. “Family” is an unusual policy plank in a political landscape more used to jobs as the fulcrum.

But Zibi says that jobs emerged as a determinant of how to ensure your family’s survival and wellbeing. Family issues arose repeatedly, mainly because the single woman-headed household in South Africa is the most common family form.

“Single moms say, ‘There’s nobody to look after my kids’.”

Community is often about community safety. People were not short of ideas for how to make their communities safer: 

“If we could have a taxi just for women; we feel unsafe on the bus,” says Zibi, sharing some ideas from supporters and explaining how the party will tackle safety and belonging.

Mental health and drug abuse policies are also high on Rise’s agenda. If he were to put it in a nutshell? “I want a better life for my family. It is about survival and aspiration.” In 1994, the ANC swept to victory on the slogan, “A Better Life for All”.

“There’s a profound disappointment with government and (also the view that) we want to do it ourselves. But we have to persuade people they can’t turn from the state. We explain that grants are your money; they can’t take it away.” (An ANC sub-narrative is that any other party will stop the social grants now paid to every second adult South African.)

A streetfighter?

At an event for the well-heeled, Zibi was surrounded after he spoke. Many were older ANC blue bloods who saw in him some of the zeal they once had. One person said he would be voting for Zibi, but asked a question on many lips: 

Is this sophisticated 47-year-old, beloved of elites, a streetfighter? Can he carve a space in an election likely to be dominated by populists like the EFF’s Julius Malema, the Patriotic Alliance’s Gayton McKenzie and the ANC’s Panyaza Lesufi?

“I’m super-comfortable in villages,” says Zibi, who hails from Mqanduli in the former Transkei, where he read for a B.Comm at the local university before taking on various roles in the C-Suites in mining and banking. He honed his public reputation as editor-in-chief of Business Day.

Rise works with traditional leaders’ associations, hostel-dwellers and shack-dweller organisations. A look at its images will show that while Rise is not mass-based in the way that the ANC, DA and EFF are, it is not a tiny bourgeois movement.

The other criticism levelled at Zibi is that he is “WMC” – white monopoly capital – in the lazy rhetoric of critics fearful of a shakeup in black politics.

Zibi says Rise’s economic frame is “social democratic”, supporting a mixed economic model.

“It centres on food,” he says again, highlighting the trade-offs necessary in a system of high social solidarity (higher taxes, for one). Capital, he says, must also take a sharp look at its practices.

“You release government from its obligations when the amount of money put into dividends is higher than in investment,” he says.

Rise won’t win the 2024 election, but it can take many MPs into Parliament if its strategists are right. 

It will contest the 2026 local government elections and target a majority in 2029.

President Cyril Ramaphosa says the ANC is aiming for a clear majority – the polls show this is unlikely now, but not impossible at the election. DM