Written by:MarginPressAdmin
2/24/2009 7:20 PM

COPE on the rope

Do you ever get the feeling that none of the political parties available to you are actually worth voting for? I think that a lot of South Africans feel exactly that and that’s why turn-outs at elections have been so pathetic. We can’t really be blamed. From ignoring frequent calls to update your registration for up to ten years so that driving to a previous neighbourhood on polling day makes the whole exercise too much of an effort (mea culpa), to not caring at all, sixty percent of us just couldn’t care less.

If any political party were to latch onto the concept of single-issue voters and market directly to them, they’d make a huge change to our moribund political landscape. Look at the US for instance: the polarisation on the abortion issue drives large numbers of voters into our out of the camps of political candidates and gets them stuck there regardless of how incompetent, corrupt or inefficient the candidate might be revealed to be later. In South Africa, any serious political party (by this I mean the ANC, DA or COPE) that used the death penalty issue and promised a referendum on changing the Bill of Rights to reintroduce it (and it needn’t be hanging, I’m sure most of us by now couldn’t care less if child rapists and murderers were sentenced to a slow and unusually cruel death by having to listen to PJ Powers until their serotonin levels crashed to a fatal level) would do very well.

Who am I going to vote for? A bit of background first. My granny ran for parliament and the city council the PFP (Progressive Federal Party) frequently when I was growing up. She got bruised and battered but never despondent. For those that need initiating, the PFP were like the Tories. They propounded solid capitalist and laissez faire principles. Nobody really cared however, and because South Africa is South Africa, the only thing that stuck in voter’s minds was that they wanted to remove apartheid. In some circles this was like admitting to liking buggery in polite conversation. While the stance of the PFP would be seen as conservative anywhere else in the world, to white South Africa it was far left wing, if not inspired by communist homosexuals. Anyhow, the PFP values sort of stuck and if I was American I’d be a Republican and if I was British, a Tory. With the exception of supporting the reintroduction of the death penalty, my Prog (a derogatory term for PFP supporters) ideals remain intact.

One of my first memories of civil life in apartheid South Africa is of the segregated queues at the Mondeor Post Office. Whites got a choice of three counters that were always available. Blacks had to join a long line and be abused by the most junior white staff member as part of the process when they got to the front. I could never support the National Party as I subscribe fully to the belief that evil becomes petty in its harassment of the meek and the segregated post offices lines are proof of this. Later I’d learn about the not so petty aspects of grand apartheid like uprooting whole communities, denying people decent education based on their skin colour, apartheid death squads and the very warped religious ideals that were put forward as justifications for all of this. I became immunised from supporting the National Party.

Similarly, I could never support the ANC. For all of my life they have been allied to the SA Communist Party. I’m not convinced that as a Catholic I can vote for a party allied to commies (I make no secret of my abhorrence of everything communism stands for and absolute hatred of what it brings about) in terms of canon law without incurring an automatic excommunication. The ANC’s programme on BEE has been a mad grab for wealth that betrays every justification it has rolled out to defend it and is as bad as the ‘job reservation’ the National Party introduced to protect white employment. Thanks to sheer incompetence, everyone now queues at the post office. The ANC has replaced racial barriers to happiness with wealth barriers as it screws over the electorate. I’m not even going to mention the likes of Malema (who failed matric woodwork, probably while trying to weld two planks together) and that idiot former minister of health since they, fortunately, speak for themselves and help the opposition whenever they do so. Not to mention the tales of ANC brutality against its own members at camps like Quatro, etc, deep in the Angolan bush… or the Zim debacle, Aids, etc.

Am I voting for the Independent Democrats? No. Voting for them would be like voting for Ali G. I haven’t quite forgotten De Lille’s recommendation just before 1994 that all whities should leave. She strikes me as a clown and her support of the ANC mayoral candidate in Cape Town after the last municipal elections was a cynical act of betrayal of her constituency that should have seen her pay packet changed to thirty pieces of silver. Having been a member of the PAC (remember them? They’re like SA’s answer to the Monster Raving Looney Party) for so long, I’m sure De Lille will have no problem carrying on the ID long after it should have been quietly forgotten.

The African ‘Christian’ Democratic Party? Wrong again. Although they actually support banning abortion and reintroducing hanging, they have all of the sincerity of a bunch of Sunday school teachers and the naivety to match. Did they ever manage to quell those rumours that the Nats established them to try and divide the black vote?

Inkatha? I think their appeal is limited to guys who like to carry sticks.

The UDM? I might as well not vote. Who says political parties can't behanve like the walking dead?

The Freedom Front Plus are the guys who don’t like to be reminded that they helped introduced the segregated post office queues when they part of the National Party and then spent much of the eighties defending them when they became upset that even PW Botha couldn’t see any justification in them remaining.

The Democratic Alliance? As the successor to the PFP you’d think they’d get my vote. Uniting with the ‘New’ National Party a couple of year’s ago kind of ruined it though and was a betrayal of their legacy in order to get a smattering of support that would have gone their way anyway while it afforded the desperate leaders of the NNP a token of legitimacy they did not deserve. The DA is still a white party despite what Zille might say. In a democratic order, white politics should be as irrelevant as Indian politics was during the apartheid era. I know it isn’t scientific but have a look at the racial composition of the two parties’ support groups on facebook. Besides, I’m tired of the ‘told-you-so’ on repeat we hear from these guys and I really get irritated when former Nationalist use the party as a platform to complain about something they see as unfair! Listening to them makes the problems in this country sound insurmountable, which they aren’t.
I’m going to vote for COPE. I still can’t believe that I’ll probably be voting for the same party as Philip Dexter (arch-commie) and Ronald Suresh Roberts (questionable biographer and arch-twit when it comes to litigation - as he found out when he tried to sue the Sunday Times for describing him to himself). And yes, I do realise that many of the biggest ANC messes occurred when COPE leaders were very much part of the ANC. The emergence of a political party with appeal across all race groups, in opposition to the communists (I’m unsure how Dexter explains this to his comrades) and spanners like Malema, is an important occasion. It is so important that I can overlook it’s birth as a result of the removal of Mbeki (who thinks my granny was actually supporting apartheid by being a follower of Helen Suzman), an individual who is sometimes described as ‘intellectual’ and thus forces me to reacquaint myself with the meaning of the word from time-to-time just to check that I haven’t been wrong all along. If COPE would do something about the death penalty issue, I’d consider doing more than just supporting them by actually campaigning.

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