TOPIC: HELEN ZILLE, LINDIWE MAZIBUKO AND THE DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE DA.
In my Politicsweb article of 04 January 2012, which was written in reaction to the unfortunate and offensive use of the term “professional blacks” by Helen Zille, the current leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Premier of the Western Cape, I called upon her to resign from her position as the DA leader and to hand the leadership of the party over to Patricia de Lille, the DA Mayor of Cape Town. I further predicted that were she to fail to so resign, she would in the near future preside over an internally warring DA party, lose the Western Cape in the 2014 national elections, and lose her party’s municipal gains in the 2016 local elections.
I predicted that all these would happen, instead of the rosy picture her DA was painting at the time in terms of its intention to win the 2019 national elections and to depose the ruling ANC from national power.
I did state in the article that I was aware that Helen Zille would not heed my advice. And of course she did not. But I confess that even I have been completely shocked and utterly surprised by the very vicious and ferocious internecine, no-holds-barred warfare that has broken out within the DA, a factional fight to the finish. It certainly is one to easily rival, and even surpass, some of the ANC’s very worst factionalist excesses since the ANC Stellenbosch Conference of 2002.
The DA is clearly not the party of white angels anymore, if the unintended pun can be excused. The only surprise is that this mighty DA factional fight has not inspired SA’s columnists, cartoonists, satirists, comedians, overwrought TV puppets and two-pence political clowns the way the ANC’s now legendary factional fights do.
Yet there can be no doubt that today the DA is undergoing its most profound crisis ever, under the leadership of Helen Zille. Had Zille heeded my advice of 04 January 2012 to resign from the DA leadership then, she would have spared the official opposition party the insurmountable and mortal internal crisis it is facing today, few months before South Africa’s historic 2014 national elections, which will coincide with the 20th anniversary of our teenage democracy.
The sad truth is that as long as the DA is led by Helen Zille, it will continue to fumble and to lack the capacity, as well as the leadership capability, to pull itself out of its worsening internal morass. Even worse, as I predicted in my 04 January 2012 article on Helen Zille, the DA is and will continue to face inevitable implosion, because no political party can survive for long when it lacks internal ideological coherence and a unifying vision.
The hour of Helen Zille’s reckoning has finally arrived. She is now facing her own, self-made Rubicon.
In my Politicsweb article entitled “Lindiwe Mazibuko: An Assessment”, which appeared on 23 December 2011, I indicated that unless Lindiwe Mazibuko was able to decisively confront and deal with the racist white male patriarchy pulling the strings in the DA, she would fail miserably in her role as the fetching black face of the DA meant to win the DA the elusive black vote. I characterized this powerful but unreconstructed, racist white male patriarchy within the DA as Mazibuko’s biggest leadership obstacle, on par with the challenge of the reactionary and backward black patriarchy within the ruling ANC.
Now the daggers are drawn against her DA parliamentary leadership.
The current crisis of the DA around the Employment Equity Amendment Bill (EEAB) has been deliberately and intentionally precipitated, in the main, by the well-orchestrated and well-choreographed media attacks on the position of the DA’s parliamentary caucus on the EEAB, which attacks originate, largely, from middle- to old-aged white male DA members and supporters, or the DA’s white male grandees, if you like, who have used this piece of draft legislation to expose both Helen Zille and Lindiwe Mazibuko as merely their female puppets.
There is a powerful passage in Leo Tolstoy’s phenomenal novel, War and Peace, where, in mocking Napoleon Bonaparte, he states:
“The act is performed. The last part is played. The actor is bidden to undress, and wash off his powder and paint; he will be needed no more…The stage manager, when the drama was over, and the puppet stripped, showed him to us. ‘Look what you believed in! Here he is! Do you see now that it was not he but I that moved you.’ But blinded by the force of the movement men for long could not perceive that.” (Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, page 1228, 1972, Pan Books Limited).
The DA’s Zille-Mazibuko leadership act has been performed. The last part is being played now. The DA’s white male patriarchy is now asking Zille and Mazibuko to be “undressed” on account of the draft EEAB, their fake leadership powder and paint is being removed from their masks. They evidently are no more needed. The DA’s real stage manager, which is the dominant and powerful white male patriarchy, is showing Zille and Mazibuko’s intellectual and parliamentary poverty to us, tearing apart their shallow arguments for and against the EEAB. They want to make clear to the SA public that it is they, and not the Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership duo, who have been moving us. But blinded by the force of post-apartheid rainbow politics, many men and women within and outside the DA for long could not perceive that it is, in the final analysis, the deeply reactionary and backward-looking middle- and old-aged white males in the DA who are the real power behind the Zille-Mazibuko leadership throne.
Now the curtain is falling on their fake leadership duo act. Finally, we know who the real puppet-masters in the DA are.
Lindiwe Mazibuko seems to be genuinely shocked and befuddled by the unbridled and hate-filled attacks on her parliamentary leadership unleashed by these DA white male Neanderthals, who are using her handling of the EEAB in the parliamentary committee to “undress” her, to borrow Leo Tolstoy’s lucid, if not lurid, term.
Had she paid attention to my article of 23 December 2011, the current attacks on her leadership by the DA’s white male patriarchy, the real power base in the DA, would not have caught her by surprise.
Lindiwe Mazibuko’s failure is not how she handled the Employment Equity Amendment Bill. I in fact think that, as an attempt to ensure the continued survival of the DA as a potent national opposition force, and a governing authority in the Western Cape, she handled the EEAB brilliantly.
However, Mazibuko’s single, biggest failure as the leader of the DA’s parliamentary caucus was to fail to confront and defeat the DA’s fossilized and ossified white male patriarchy within her own party, whilst she constantly seemed to be more aggrieved and offended by the equally obnoxious black male, tribalistic patriarchy within the ANC leadership structures, both at national and provincial levels. Had she openly confronted this dangerous, conservative and politically backward white male force within the DA, even by way of taking her fight out on appeal to the broader SA political public, she would have triumphed over it, undoubtedly. For starters, many black South Africans, even though they deeply loath the DA’s ideology and highly deceptive politics, would have sympathized with her, just to break the back, once and for all time, of the powerful white male patriarchy within our national politics, which has found its last refuge, like real scoundrels of male patriarchy, within the DA.
Breaking the dominant white male patriarchy within the DA, and the hegemonic, tribalistic, black male patriarchy with the ruling ANC, is a sine qua non for South Africa’s overall progressive transformation and sustained progress, now and in the future.
Unfortunately, now it is too late for Lindiwe Mazibuko, because of the ham-handed way she handled white male patriarchy within the DA. The game is up for her. The white male patriarchs within the DA are going to lick her up for breakfast haggis. She may still retain her current position in the medium term, but it will become just a dummy toy devoid of any real parliamentary power and influence. In a word, Lindiwe Mazibuko is finished – kaput – as an influential political force within the DA. What is left is just to use her to mop up the DA’s parliamentary floor.
But as a black “sista”, to use a rap-music lingua franca, I still have the last advice for Lindiwe Mazibuko: Tender your resignation from the hate-filled DA today and join Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Maybe there, they will not question your skin color or gender, and maybe there they may just use your “fake American accent” (credit to Julius Malema, formerly leader of ANCYL, for the expression) to good effect. And they may just appreciate your physical looks more.
Nothing best projects the failure of the DA’s fake, thin-skinned and artificial racial accommodation, of its manufactured racial consensus, like the EEAB. This piece of draft legislation exposes, in all their glory, the shortcomings, contradictions and constraints of the DA’s “double-consciousness”, as embodied by the superficial leadership marriage between what I once termed the DA’s PowerPuff Girls’ team of Helen Zille, Lindiwe Mazibuko and Patricia de Lille (see my Politicsweb article “Lindiwe Mazibuko: An Assessment.”).
In this important sense alone, EEAB has been the ANC’s most inspired stroke of legislative genius under the leadership of President Jacob Zuma. In one draft legislative fell swoop, the ANC has irrevocably splintered the DA down the racial middle, delivering a coup de grace on the confused and insipid DA leadership of the Zille-Mazibuko duo, with an impeccable strategic-electioneering timing perfection that has left me in absolute awe.
The root of and explanation for the DA’s current crisis of existence and ideological legitimacy can be found in what the great African American intellectual titan, W.E.B. Du Bois, in his classic, The Souls of Black Folk, described as “double-consciousness.”
Du Bois memorably wrote:
“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels that his two-ness, – an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals, in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” (W.E.B. Du Bois, 1989, Bantam Classic edition, Introduction, page xxii-xxiii).
The artificial, superficial, mock-reality marriage of DA leadership between Helen Zille and Lindiwe Mazibuko has created post-apartheid’s most glaring political “double-consciousness.” The Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership is looked upon by many blacks and now clearly not by a few whites in South Africa with “amused contempt and pity.” This leadership duo in turn seeks to measure itself by the tape of the South African world which is itself deeply divided along race and class lines.
So the Zille-Mazibuko leadership duo is for ever unable to enjoy the universal admiration the way say Nelson Mandela was and is able to. The obviousness of the “two-ness” of the Zille and Mazibuko act, the shouting absence of their DA leadership’s unified “self-consciousness”, is too glaring to hide. It is an Irish coffee “two-ness”, and so stacked (Zille at the top, Mazibuko below her), unfortunately, – white South African and black South African; Zille, white, at the top, and Mazibuko, black, below her.
It is also a DA leadership duo carrying two souls – one white suburban/South African Jewish soul of Zille, and the other black township/Zulu soul of Mazibuko. Their party’s fan base thus easily splinters along racial and class lines in support of either of their racial kind. It is not sustainable.
But what is clear to many black South Africans is that the DA cannot trust its black leaders with its supreme party power, say the kind that the Democratic Party’s former leader, Tony Leon, once enjoyed. The DA’s white male grandees will never trust Lindiwe Mazibuko, or Patricia de Lille or its Gauteng rising star, Mmusi Maimane, with such unencumbered party power discretion. The Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership duo’s marriage of convenience at the top is seen by many black South Africans as merely a replica of the old, colonial-era “white partenalism” of Helen Zille over a rising, competent and self-assertive young black female leader (Lindiwe Mazibuko). That Zille has joined, after doing a miserable, pathetic, opportunistic and undoubtedly unprincipled U-turn, the DA white male chorus calling out Lindiwe Mazibuko and Mmusi Maimane on their EEAB position, only underscores this wide-spread perception of DA white paternalism over DA black leaders, in the minds of many black South Africans.
This negative perception will cost the DA dearly in next year’s national elections. There should be no doubt about that.
The EEAB draft legislation reveals that the Zille-Mazibuko leadership duo also embodies two warring thoughts – Zille’s striving to appease the formidable and powerful white male patriarchy within the DA, on the one hand, and Mazibuko-Maimane’s striving to appeal to the black voters who have been, and remain, disadvantaged by the race policies that were supported by apartheid architects and by many current white members of the DA of Zille. Two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, and in one DA political body with double consciousness, as Du Bois would have put it.
Very unfortunately for Helen Zille and Lindiwe Mazibuko, their own, personal “dogged strength” is unable to keep the DA “from being torn asunder.” Not even their warm, personal and mutual admiration, respect and high regard for each other, which are so obvious to the SA public, can substitute for the shaky and wobbly foundation on which their leadership duo of the DA is based. Because, like Helen Zille’s own plastic surgery, their DA leadership duo is not organic, but artificially implanted; it is not meant to reveal the true nature of the ugly, deep ravages of DA’s policies, but to pepper over and hide them.
Like Helen Zille’s plastic surgery, the Zille-Mazibuko artificial leadership duo is meant to sweep under the carpet that which is unpleasant and unsightly, and to instead project and inject a more appealing, youngish, and attractive side. It is all an optical, ephemeral illusion. Like Zille’s botox work, their leadership duo cannot withstand the intensity of the DA’s internal political heat and the ravages of parliamentary time. Their patchwork leadership duo instead melts and withers when confronted with the rough and tumble of the DA’s own vicious tensions, contradictions and parliamentary leadership ambitions of DA’s senior members.
This is not how South Africa should nurture national political leadership. This is not how the standard-bearer of the South African liberalism should behave. It is demeaning. It is craven.
EEAB has revealed that the DA still has to ponderously and ploddingly work through its policy platform to transform its “double consciousness” into a unified, undivided “self-consciousness” of the DA’s national leadership, which should be much bigger than the sum total of the individual strengths of Helen Zille, Lindiwe Mazibuko, and Patricia de Lille – the DA’s PowerPuff Girls.
Unless the Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership duo does this before the national elections next year, the DA will go the way of the formerly formidable National Party, namely into political oblivion.
Possibly, South African politics will be the richer for it.
6th Cediablog.
By:
Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
Isaac@cedia.co.za
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12 November 2013.
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