COPE leader Mosiuoa Lekota during President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) 2019 debate reply at the National Assembly on February 14, 2019 in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images / Jeffrey Abrahams) Right: President Cyril Ramaphosa delivers his State of the Nation Address, 7 February 2019. Photo: Leila Dougan

Last week, the nation was shocked to find that up to 40% of Eskom’s power producing capability was offline. Stage Four load shedding was presented to the unsuspecting and unwelcoming nation. If the most serious governance problem we currently face is not solved, the entire economy, and with it, the country, may sink into the pre-industrial age. Yet, instead of concentrating on this clear and present danger, much of the nation’s energy was spent fighting battles from the past, real or fictional.

For some, it seemed the past is much more important to debate than our present, and our future. There are important political reasons for this apparent irrationality, perhaps directed by the difficulties of the present. They may also be explained away by the great differences in what various constituencies in our democracy actually want, guiding politicians in their efforts to gather votes from a broad enough section of our society.

Cope leader Mosioua Lekota’s claim in Parliament on Wednesday that President Cyril Ramaphosa had “sold out” his comrades in the 1970s led to a great amount of political activity. EFF leader, Julius Malema, who had previously condemned Lekota for his refusal to back expropriation without compensation, offered him his own speaking time in Parliament. The ANC people criticised Lekota fiercely. Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi made the point in the National Assembly, and again outside of it, that it was Lekota who had led efforts to have Ramaphosa elected ANC secretary-general in 1991.

Meanwhile, the SACP’s second deputy general secretary, Solly Mapaila, had claimed that the apartheid government had treated the PAC’s former leader, Robert Smangiliso Sobukwe, differently from ANC leaders on Robben Island. Mapaila appeared to infer that this was because he was favoured by the regime. Later in the week, he offered a full apology for his comments.

Even in a country where the past lives with us as strongly as this one, these are intriguing developments. Normally, the arguments about South Africa’s past tend to deepen a division along the lines of those who benefited from apartheid, and those who were oppressed by it. But both of these recent cases revolved around people who were on the same side fighting apartheid. Coming, as they did, in a week in which load shedding concentrated some minds about the future, they strike a strong contrast to our current problems.

It has long been the case that some in the ANC have felt much more comfortable in the past than in the present. It is, of course, right and proper that those who contributed to the Struggle should be remembered and commemorated fully. But these commemorations could also be used for political reasons, and not just to thank, or remember, those who played important roles.

It was relatively easy to get parts of the liberation movement to agree on what tactics to use against apartheid: sanctions, boycotts, protests, demonstrations, and sometimes violence. While all were difficult to actually do, and protesters risked their lives in doing it, there may not have been the difficult arguments that seem to wrack the liberation movements today. The arguments of today revolve around economic stewardship of the country, too many of them a much more difficult battle.

North West University Politics Professor Andre Duvenhage perhaps put it best last week, during an interview on the SABC News channel. He suggested that “the more we are into change, the more people are reverting back into history. And in a sense, political parties are looking for their identities in these times of change, and that is why we are getting this reference to history…”

There may, in fact, be strong evidence to back up his view. For the ANC, it is clear that fixing some of the governance issues of the moment, and Eskom in particular leads to huge divisions. The President wants to break it up, some in the party disagree with him, the unions want to keep the status quo, etc. A cynic might suggest it is much easier to remember the “glorious” past than to fix Eskom.

However, at the same time, there is a much bigger issue. It is becoming more and more clear that South Africa is changing fast. It might be that fewer and fewer people identify strongly with a political party and keep that identity for their entire lives. The parties don’t know how to land their messages properly in a way that will win them votes.

It could also be that there may now be two groups of people who politicians now have to contend with that they have not had to worry about in the past. These are the “floating voter” and the “disinterested voter”. The first one will vote, but could change their mind. These voters need to be campaigned to properly. They need an incentive to vote for a particular party. The other group, those that don’t feel inclined to vote at all, could be equally as important for these parties. In some provinces, turnout is crucially important (as the 2016 local elections showed). This means that when parties need to encourage turnout in any which way they can, an appeal to the glorious joint history may be powerful in this effort.

While this has happened in other countries, there may be more powerful reasons for the strength of this dynamic. Political parties would ideally want to appeal to broad swathes of society but they are struggling to modulate their message properly. Some, such as the EFF, don’t have this problem. Malema is able to speak so strongly on issues because he doesn’t care about white middle-class votes. The DA does, and yet at the same time is trying to attract votes from poor, unemployed black people. The ANC has the same problem, it wants votes from the middle ground and is trying to make that middle ground as wide as possible.

This makes campaigning incredibly hard. It may be that there are some rich taxpayers who flirt with the idea of a tax boycott. But that message is damaging to attempts to get votes from people who have no choice but to rely on social grants. (This is what leads to Twitter fights between Western Cape Premier Helen Zille and DA MP Phumzile van Damme.) The same problem leads to the oft-reported divisions in the ANC. In these circumstances, it is very difficult for political leaders to craft a vision of the future that will attract these broad swathes of society.

At the same time, the problems of governance that face us are actually very difficult. There no easy solutions to Eskom, or unemployment, or inequality. All of the solutions that could be put on the table will cause pain to many constituencies, rendering them electorally unpalatable.

It is just so much easier for some of the parties to define themselves by the glorious, etc, past.

Of course, it is up to voters to decide whether this strategy attracts their support or not. For some, a refusal to give a proper vision for the future might be enough to punish a party, for others they may feel that the role of a party in the past is enough to support it now. But, the more that parties focus on the past and not the present and future, the more it may be an indication that they lack the tools to deal with the very real problems we have in undoing our past, and thus improving our present. DM