Two politicians, one a former prime minister of Britain and the other a South African cabinet minister, made important statements recently. Tony Blair and Dr Blade Nzimande were contrasts in opposites. If the ANC chooses Blair’s advice, we will follow a modern, progressive path towards a reasonable future. If Nzimande’s advice is accepted, South Africa will try to create a better past.
In a brilliant speech, Mr Tony Blair gave the Labour Party some useful advice about the contest for leadership of the party. He dismissed the most left-wing candidate, Jeremy Corbyn, as the man the Conservative Party would choose for Labour leader, implying that if Corbyn led Labour, the Conservatives could look forward to many years in office.
“The traditional leftist position is not the way to win a general election.” He went on to say that “perennially, at times congenitally, we confuse values with the manner of their application in a changing world. This gives us a weakness when it comes to policy which perpetually disorients us and makes us mistake defending outdated policy with defending timeless values.”
While Blair was talking about winning and losing British elections, it struck me that our government could learn from his advice. The ANC has been good at winning elections but that record may be under threat, mostly because it persists in choosing outdated policies not in tune with the modern world.
It has compounded the situation for a whole generation by cadre deployment, placing many inadequate and some incompetent people in powerful positions, especially in state owned enterprises. It views business with suspicion if not outright hostility and has a knee-jerk antipathy to the United States of America and Europe, while cherishing misty-eyed and romantic ideas about Cuba and China, among other one-party states.
The ANC is not a liberal democratic party; that would be too much to expect. But if it consciously strove to become a modern social democratic party with answers to today’s problems South Africa could leap forward. The ANC would undercut the pseudo-leftist policyless EFF; counter the threat of a trade union-sponsored labour party pursuing policies not relevant in 2015; it would make even more irrelevant the South African Communist Party (SACP) and it might counter the policies proposed by the rapidly-growing DA.
Tony Blair expresses the view that the values of our age are largely those fashioned by social democracy. He says that society has largely left behind deference; believes that merit not background should determine success; is inclined to equality of opportunity and treatment across gender and race; and believes in the notion of the welfare state.
One might argue with Blair’s ascribing all this to social democracy because many of these values come directly from the liberal democratic world view embodied in our constitution, but his conclusion is incontestable: The world is changing. “And 2015 is not 2007 or 1997. So yes, move on. But don’t move back!”
One might add in South Africa: It’s also not 1917, 1955 or even 1994. But South Africa has a legacy of a dark past not yet escaped or dealt with fully or satisfactorily. For this reason our constitution provides for additional action aimed at moving us towards a point where we can all simply compete on an equal basis. That would be an equal society. But we are not there yet. That is why we have to take steps that are unnecessary in Britain but vital here in promoting freedom, fairness and opportunity so that in time people will be able to compete on an equal basis.
And what of the advice of Dr Blade Nzimande? In an article in Umsebenzi Online, official SACP journal, he proposes a much closer relationship with China. Remarkably, he believes that China is still a Marxist- Leninist country and seems unaware that the term was coined by Stalin to justify his ideological distortion of what Marx and Lenin said. Stranger still is that he sees closer ties with China as “an opportunity to delink South Africa from Western imperialist economic centres, thus creating real possibilities for radical economic transformation in our country.”
It beggars the mind that a cabinet minister could be so irresponsible in dismissing South African allies and trading partners like this. The USA gives us tariff- free access, especially for motor vehicles manufactured here as well as a whole range of other important exports, creating jobs for hundreds of thousands of our workers. Europe is an incredibly important trade partner for us and many EU countries have trade agreements with us. Insulting these countries by smearing them on ideological grounds is not clever.
Of course China is a hugely important trade partner of South Africa and trade is growing between our countries mainly, it must be said, to the benefit of China which enjoys a large trade balance in its favour. Surely the appropriate stance is to welcome and promote trade with China, with the USA, with Europe and with any other friendly country, maintaining cordial relations with them all on a pragmatic basis? If we can do good business then they are our friends, not our enemies, because they create jobs for our people.
Tony Blair referred to the hard left in the British Labour Party. Our hard left, the SACP, is really only a pressure group that undermines South Africa’s best interests as well as the policies of the ANC. It is never the people who count; what counts is the ideology. Even where that ideology is sixty years out of date and demonstrably a failure wherever it has been applied, the SACP clings to it and ignores the fact that it is totally out of touch with the world in which we live. There is not a single Marxist-Leninist country where the people are or ever have been free, prosperous and protected by the Rule of Law
The ANC needs to choose between Blair or Blade.
Douglas Gibson, a former Opposition chief Whip and former ambassador to Thailand is a writer, analyst and public speaker.
This article first appeared in The Star.
