IMRAAN BUCCUS: Songezo Zibi is no Lula, but he could just spark the change we need

SA has often teetered on the brink, but at critical moments inspired leadership brought us back. And in periods of national crisis ordinary people have taken to the streets to hold the line against flawed leaders.

We are not just the country that produced the likes of Nelson Mandela. We also produced the United Democratic Front (UDF), the Treatment Action Campaign and the national outrage that drove Jacob Zuma from office.

Yet here we are in a crisis so deep it sometimes seems as absurd as it is tragic. The ANC has wrecked the economy, leaving millions without work, and destroyed pretty much every state institution that has come under its control, including SAA, the Post Office and Eskom.

Crime is an ever-present threat and even the middle classes are sinking into serious financial trouble as they pay for private security, education and health care while food prices escalate and unconscionable amounts are demanded for rates and electricity.

Incompetence, corruption and a general contempt for ordinary people are pervasive. Pessimism is rampant. The hour of our crisis has come, but the men or women to tackle the crisis have not emerged, nor do we see a new popular movement on the streets.

Electoral politics is a mixture of reckless populists such as Julius Malema, Gayton McKenzie and Herman Mashaba — along with mediocrities such as John Steenhuisen and Mmusi Maimane. The only truly popular movement we have is the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, which has taken brave, even heroic positions on issues such as corruption and xenophobia. Yet while it is bitterly opposed to the ANC and has paid the price for that, it is not a player in national politics. With 120,000 paid-up members, it is far from being able to operate on the scale the UDF did in the 1980s.

Now former Business Day editor Songezo Zibi has stepped forward to offer a political alternative, and we need to assess the potential of his contribution. In the morass of corruption and incompetence into which the ANC has degenerated it is immediately striking that Zibi is plainly a man of personal integrity, and that he is clearly the most intelligent of all the party leaders in the field of electoral contestation. He has also had valuable professional experience. 

In a successful democracy one would assume that a candidate for high office is intelligent, and has integrity and experience. The real political question would be what the candidate stands for: are they left or right, do they have fresh ideas?

But SA is a failing society which, like Italy or India, throws all kinds of rogues into positions of power. Here the competence and integrity of a candidate is no small thing, and Zibi is a huge relief. We are all exhausted by the incompetents, clowns, scoundrels and thugs who have come to dominate electoral politics since Zuma and his followers — including Blade Nzimande, Zwelinzima Vavi and Malema — took an axe to political decency.

Zibi is a centrist, with no real ideas beyond making liberal democracy work with a mixture of reforms and credible leadership. He is not like Brazil’s Lula da Silva, an entrant with the ideas and support to shift society in the interest of the working class and poor majority. He is more of a Barack Obama, a man who will work within the broad constraints of the liberal centre.

Ideally SA needs its own Lula, someone who can mount a real challenge to poverty and exclusion. But there is no Lula. All we have is the absolute and crushing mediocrity of Cyril Ramaphosa, some lesser mediocrities and a group of really corrupt leaders, some of whom are alarmingly authoritarian.

Under these circumstances many people would, given access to information about all the candidates, vote for Zibi out of a deep and increasingly desperate longing for basic decency. But he has real problems too.

One is that he is a late entrant and does not have much time to build a public profile. Another is that the intimation that his Rivonia Circle would transition into some sort of movement came to naught. A third problem is that much of our media, mainstream and otherwise, are weak and unserious, sometimes even toxic, and tend to chase sensation. An outrageous statement from Malema will garner vastly more attention than a rational explanation of our problems by Zibi. 

Without a movement behind him it seems unlikely that Zibi will win the regular access to the media required to make a dent at the polls. We still run the real risk of being governed by the ANC in alliance with crude opportunists such as Malema and McKenzie. But Zibi’s entry into electoral politics is a welcome development and may, at a minimum, enable some more rational conversations. 

This is no small thing. If the likes of Malema, McKenzie and Mashaba are able to dominate our political conversation with their cheap populism we’ll never get to grips with our crisis, let alone viable solutions to resolve it.

Zibi could also spark a more rational realignment of our electoral politics. The left, bitterly divided between the forces in and out of the ANC, is a nonstarter. None of the xenophobic outfits have made the transition from street thuggery to electoral politics, so the far right is, aside from Mashaba and the IFP, also out of the game.

But, disturbingly, the kleptocrats, populists and opportunists in the EFF, ATM and ANC are well on their way to establish a working alliance. The centrists in the ANC and DA, who share considerable overlap in terms of key policy issues, have no working relationship. Steenhuisen’s “moonshot” at uniting the centrists and right seems unlikely to get off the ground, let alone reach the moon, given the hold the divisive figure of Helen Zille still has over the party. 

Perhaps Zibi could spark some sort of toenadering among the centrists. We shall see.

• Dr Buccus is a political analyst and senior research associate at the Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute.