LETTER: Mpofu should rethink move

In your report, “It is not personal, Dali Mpofu says as he leaves EFF for MK party,” (November 8), former EFF chair advocate Mpofu is quoted as saying that the MK party “is the vehicle to achieve the much-needed black and progressive unity”.

The party has an electoral presence and some support only where Zulu speakers live in SA and virtually no footprint elsewhere.

Mpofu has surely observed that the leader of the MK party, former president Jacob Zuma, is one of the most divisive figures in the SA political landscape; if he hasn’t, he is deluding himself and ignoring the Nkandla debacle (in which he acted against Zuma), the state capture fiasco and Zuma’s proven contempt for the Zondo commission.

The former president once carefully (and revealingly) explained to a gobsmacked parliament that in a democracy the majority has more rights than the minority. He favours parliamentary sovereignty, the restriction of the powers of the judiciary and a greater role for traditional leaders than that accorded them in the SA constitutional dispensation.

The fact that only some in the ANC have rejected Zuma, leading to its misfortune at the polls, simply underscores this point, as does Zuma’s attention-seeking appeal to remain a member of the ANC after his deserved expulsion from the party. The ANC strives to be nonracial and accepts the supremacy of the constitution under the rule of law. Zuma does not.

Indeed, in a country in which nonracial and nonsexist values are constitutionally fundamental to the post-1994 era, it is hard to divine anything progressive in black unity. The country, according to the preamble to the constitution, should strive for “unity in diversity”, rather than the “black unity” to which Mpofu refers. Picking one’s political bedfellows according to their race is, quite frankly, racist.

The parliamentary leader of the MK party, John Hlophe, before he entered politics, was and remains the undisputed champion of sowing division in the judiciary. Unlike any other party represented in parliament in SA, the MK party actively promotes the idea of abandoning the constitution in favour of traditionalist ethnocentric ideas that will accompany the parliamentary sovereignty preferred by its leadership. These are not progressive ideas; on the contrary, they are regressive. Parliamentary sovereignty mercifully ended in SA in 1994.

The track record of too many MK party MPs is far from squeaky clean; some are facing charges and others should be in the same boat. That the MK party does not hold leadership elections is a far from progressive feature of its worldview.

Before he gets in too far, Mpofu should reconsider.

Paul Hoffman SC 
Director, Institute for Accountability in Southern Africa, campaigning as Accountability Now

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