PETER BRUCE: Tiny new parties likely to stir up ethnic mobilisation

Political prediction is dangerous, and predicting the ANC will lose its overall parliamentary majority in the 2024 elections even more so. But we can be absolutely sure of one thing because it has just become law — a not inconsiderable number of independent candidates are going to run.

The big parties hate it. They have to fund big machines, pay salaries, account to their members. And here comes Thabo Smith with loads of charisma, not a care in the world but a plausible line on migrants, electricity and jobs, and before you know it he gets 80,000 votes, perhaps 100,000, and knocks one of the MPs on your party list out of a seat.

Multiply that by, say, 20, and you get a lot of established parties wincing with pain. The independents will come from all over. Some will be just rich and entitled and able to afford the quite steep fees required to get them on the ballot. Others will be well-known faces. They’ll have a small constituency, and while it is going to cost up to R80,000 as a deposit to stand and get on the ballot, the rand isn’t what it used to be.

Some of the independent candidates will actually be interesting. Activist Zackie Achmat is going to stand. Bongani Baloyi, former DA mayor of Midvaal and lately of ActionSA, has formed a party and is going to stand. They will easily find the money and, more important, the 12,000 or so verifiable signatures from registered voters that the Electoral Commission of SA requires to register you.

Those signatures are a big ask. As far as I can tell there is nothing to prevent a registered voter signing for more than one independent candidate, so what might happen is that candidates go “signature farming”, using essentially the same 12,000 people over and over again. Perhaps the signatories can make themselves some money.

The recent Electoral Amendment Act, like so much of what President Cyril Ramaphosa has done since taking office, is half-baked. It is manifestly unfair to independent candidates and their voters. But its vulnerability to legal challenge on dozens of fronts carries a real threat — any successful challenge to the act now would make it impossible to organise an election by May next year.

As the Eskom emergency grows and it becomes clearer that Eskom is not being entirely honest about the scale of the problem, it is going to be hard for the ANC to hold the line and keep its parliamentary majority. And as it fragments, and the thousands of people in the party who have lived off political money as direct beneficiaries for 30 years appreciate what is about to happen to them, I think the unravelling will get worse.

Certainly there is no indication that the government knows how to respond to the power crisis. It is able to describe what should be done but it cannot actualise its own advice. Out of this, the arrival of independent candidates on the scene may herald the end of the African nationalism implicit in the “A” in ANC, and the possible rise of a new ethnic politics. It is certainly not going to give way to a happy, tolerant and liberal new order. We are too far gone for that now.

I’m drawn to the name Xiluva, Baloyi’s new party. He said at its launch in March that “Xiluva was born out of the sense of political hopelessness, homelessness and desperation. Xiluva is founded on the values of family, ubuntu, community and, most importantly, multiracialism...”

That’s super, but I’ll wager that until you read this you didn’t know that Xiluva is Xitsonga for “flower”. Why have a party founded on all of the above if only a tiny portion of the people you target know what your name means?

In apartheid Johannesburg back in the day there was, I’m told by colleagues, an unspoken hierarchy in the townships, and the Xitsonga-speaking Shangaans were not, shall we say, at the top of it. They’re betting Baloyi will focus his battle among Shangaan voters in Mpumalanga and around Johannesburg.

It’s fair to assume that Baloyi, an experienced young politician, does not have building an ethnic base at the top of his to-do list. But it may just be what happens anyway. People like people who look like them and speak like them. There’s an instant trust, say what you like. It is possibly why Inkatha is doing so well now, as the ANC fades among Zulu voters. It is an ethnic party but with an arguably unique history. But who is going to vote for a party called “Intyatyambo”, or “Sethunya” or “Palesa”?

They’re the Xhosa, Sepedi (North Sotho) or Sotho words for “Flower”, and if you’re going to campaign under those names then voters who speak those languages are going to assume you’re speaking to them. It’ll make raising money and getting signatures so much easier.

People are frightened of ethnic politics and probably rightly so. But in SA ethnicity has been our politics forever. The nationalists, liberals and conservatives of the past 200 years or so have been absorbing, but they may merely mask the raw ethnicity of our politics the 200 years before that. It may be time to lower the bar yet again.

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.