Entrepreneur and analyst Moeletsi Mbeki addresses students at Stellenbosch University on 11 May 2012. (Photo: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Denzil Maregele) 
When Moeletsi Mbeki speaks, it is with the measured certainty of someone who has seen the cycles of South African politics repeat themselves. In my recent interview with him, Mbeki wasted no time tracing the roots of the country’s political malaise back to 1994.
“The African middle class took power,” he began, “and their biggest mistake was to focus on developing the middle class instead of the black masses.” African, coloured, Indian, poor and working class – they had decided to focus on developing the welfare of the African middle class through two policies: Black Economic Empowerment in the private sector and affirmative action in the public sector. Initially the ANC had sold this strategy as aiming for the advancement of all the black people, but the coloureds and the Indians soon realised that they had been left out. That is why they joined the DA, he said.
The result was an ANC that “has alienated, first the coloured population, the Indian population, the white population, and now they have alienated the mass of the African population. So that is why they lost power, and that is why they can never get power back.”
He described the former governing party as “petering out”, noting that “most of the new parties... have ANC roots. So the ANC is dying and it is splintering.”
When I turned the question to the DA’s future, Mbeki replied: “That is really the big question in South Africa today. Now, I have no crystal ball – maybe John Steenhuisen has one or even Helen Zille – but I have not got one.” Then came his unflinching assessment: “Liberalism in South Africa is a white, English-speaking people’s ideology. It is not an African ideology; it is not a coloured ideology.” The DA, he argued, “has to learn that liberalism in South Africa is not core, it is a marginal ideology. This means if the DA wants a big vote from South Africans, it has to move away from liberalism.”
He extended his observations to the West which, he said, is moving away from liberalism. Donald Trump was no liberal, he had moved away from liberalism. So the DA’s role models, including the US and the UK, were moving away from liberalism. Even in Germany, the second-biggest party, Alternative for Germany, is not liberal.
So, this was the challenge the DA faced: the mindset of the people of South Africa, across races, was not liberal.
Only the white, English-speaking South Africans embrace liberalism because they have never been colonised, Mbeki said. They were the only people in this country who had not been colonised, so they had the coloniser’s ideology, which was liberalism. However, this only applied in England, not in the colonies. They had inherited the liberalism of the British colonialists from England, but nobody in South Africa was a liberal.
Pressed on what might replace liberalism, Mbeki was pragmatic rather than doctrinaire: “They have to jettison liberalism and replace it with some form of developmentalism, because we have 40% unemployment... If you want their vote, you have to have a developmental philosophy and policies that incorporate them into jobs, into the economy, instead of them being marginalised.”
That developmentalism would mean “suppressing the consumption of the middle class, especially of the African middle class who today are the majority of the middle class. That is how Asia developed, by suppressing the consumption of the elite, and growing investment.”
Could the DA really do that? He offered no manual for reform. “The leaders of the DA have to find the solution to that question if they want to be the rulers of South Africa or to be the dominant party.”
The Zille factor
When the discussion turned to Zille’s Johannesburg mayoral campaign, Mbeki believes she has a good chance of winning. He said ANC voters in the townships are disillusioned with the ANC, and for very good reasons. The middle class of all races in the suburbs too were disillusioned with the party, except perhaps for the civil servants, although these were a minority. A large part of the middle class and the elite in Gauteng were in the private sector. In just those two equations, Zille had a good chance to win.
But victory demanded tough trade-offs: “If she wins, in order to be able to make a difference, she has to transfer the budget of Johannesburg from salaries of the upper class or the upper elite within the employment of Johannesburg, to investment in infrastructure and all those issues. This means she has to start to implement cutting of African middle class salaries who are the majority of the public servants in the municipality of Johannesburg. Now, that is her challenge. I hope she understands that her first challenge is to cut the salaries of this group and transfer those resources not to consumption by the poor, but to improving the environment for investment, which will then provide jobs for the poor”.
By the end of our interview Mbeki’s argument had hardened into something close to a verdict.
The ANC, he said, was “the past”, its factions splintering into smaller versions of itself. For the DA, survival would depend on more than new leadership or better messaging; it would require a break with its own philosophical core. If it wanted to become a majority party “it has to shed liberalism”.
He paused, weighing the difficulty of what he was proposing. “I do not know if they are willing to, or if they even understand that first.” Liberalism, he concluded, “is a marginal idea in the body politics of South Africa. That is what they have to learn.”
Leaving the room, I was struck by the severity of that message. Mbeki’s diagnosis was not sentimental but structural: a party that speaks about markets but fails to generate production will always govern on borrowed time. His warning still rings – that unless the DA can transform liberal ideals into developmental outcomes, it will remain a minority voice in a country that finds its philosophy so alien. DM
Gabriel Makin is the director of research at the Social Research Foundation and executive producer of The Common Sense newspaper.
Makin conducted the interview with Mbeki for The Common Sense Newspaper’s podcast. Listen to the full podcast here.