The political anomaly that is the disruptive Gayton McKenzie

By: Arthur J. Van Nel

I saw an excerpt of an address that the PA leader delivered at a recent BizNews gathering. Inter alia, he ventured into the role of business as a driver of illegal immigration, by being complicit in employing these immigrants for a pittance and because they can’t be unionised. He illuminated the hypocrisy that a South African with a criminal record can’t find employment though an illegal immigrant can’t even be vetted, simply because no fingerprints or records exist.

To what appeared from his remarks as a largely white audience, the PA leader didn’t mince his words as he opined that the composition of the audience mirrors that of the JSE. Yes, he said there, to the very people who invited him.

The last point I wish to reference, was him drawing the curtain back on the role of Helen Zille – in my view, the DA’s de facto leader, advisor, strategist, think tank, communicator, fundraiser, whitener, gatekeeper, and executor – in the fraught and precarious coalitions we’ve experienced. He exposed her lies and racism and juxtaposed her debilitating undermining of John Steenhuisen against the pragmatism, maturity, gravitas, and patriotism of Herman Mashaba and Dr. Corné Mulder, respectively leader of ActionSA and chairperson of the FF Plus, who work tirelessly for the preservation and functioning of coalition governments, even those the DA just lost in Gauteng and the WC.

No white person could ever understand how refreshingly inspiring it is to hear a politician from the ranks of the oppressed speaking in such a tone on a stage where he’s not addressing his own supporters. The man has courage and boldness and the backbone to articulate uncomfortable truths in spaces where truth is near-extinct.

All these tenets – courage, boldness, a backbone, and the willingness to speak uncomfortable truth – are such scarce attributes that we may very well have subconsciously accepted to not expect from black political, business, and newsroom leaders anymore.

They are generally so captured by the white masters to whom they sold their pigmentation in return for career advancement, share options, and favourable media coverage by the media outlets owned by the very masters whose patronage has made them. Part of the black middle-class experience in this country is to mostly ponder about what country the person is living in who acts as if racism, economic exclusion, blocking access to credit, refusal to transform supply chains, and deepening white privilege are things of the past. They pretend so merely because someone opened a door to them that’s still manifestly inaccessible to everyone else of their own kind. Essentially, the new SA works only for the empowered few and their trajectory sponsors.

Imagine Trevor Manuel articulating a decolonised assessment of the true state of affairs of a rapidly collapsing SA. His metamorphosis from the UDF revolutionary to becoming Old Mutual’s instrument to frustrate black talent is complete. He will never rock the boat like this and disturb the false peace that CODESA brokered for white and black elites to share the spoils of the proceeds of Apartheid.

He’s not alone. Thuli Madonsela, Reuel Khosa, Solly Msimanga, Saki Macozoma, Sipho Pityana, and a litany of black editors, ANC, trade union, civil and business leaders have adopted a narrative so skewed and a tone so perverted, that you can no longer distinguish them from the system they purport to be fighting. Many of them have emerged into powerful positions of wealth and prestige, the virtue of their preparedness to tone down on the correct diagnosis of what bedevils our transformation project. They have nothing to say about the original sin of land theft, or that the new constitution was adopted without reparations being paid, or that Mzansi continues to be two nations in one, distinctly divided between a mostly poor and black and mostly rich and white populace. So, Stellenbosch University works for Madonsela, the promoted media darling who couldn’t deliver a clean audit as Public Protector but is an undeserving associate professor on a very serious salary scale. Stellenbosch still doesn’t work for its black teaching and support staff, or it’s black students who get urinated on, or black businesses who continue to struggle to access the university’s supply chain. This is the dichotomy that frustrates the majority. Standard Bank works for Sim Tshabalala. Nedbank worked for Khosa. Bidvest works for CEO Mpumi Madisa. But don’t for a moment imagine it works for the majority of black staff and suppliers.

Yet, at the BizNews conference, this week stood a son of this soil, whose content and tone stood in stark opposition to that adopted by the oppressed upper strata who made it. To tell a white audience of entrepreneurs that their darling Helen Zille is intentionally diluting the opposition bloc requires a freedom that only being uncaptured can provide. You have to need nothing from the audience, no favours and no BEE deals, and no promotion at their universities or companies to articulate such truths with such conviction. It’s refreshing.

You also have to know how hostile their media would be to you once you adopt these narratives that lay the country’s complete collapse at the hands of the ANC alone as if its white monopoly interlocutors are not active drivers of the malaise.

And still, Gayton McKenzie is being reconciled to the reality that he’ll never get the type of media coverage that, say, Songezo Zibi gets for his measured – dare I say approved – socioeconomic diagnosis and remedial thought process that informs his presidential ambitions. Zibi sits on the board of the Centre for Development and Enterprise, a subtly right-wing think tank, with Laurie Dippenaar as a patron. Connect the ideological dots and understand why no less than Daily Maverick waxed lyrical about a black man in their coverage of his book launch. Please do yourself the favour and have a look at who funds the research they produce.

The PA leader is a deeply complex political operator, not least because of the accidental nature of his political involvement and ambitions. He’s at times difficult to read, I suspect this dynamic plays his collaborators, supporters, foes, and commentators offside many times.

When McKenzie shared his vision for the Central Karoo district, I wondered critically if the avalanche of hysteria, disbelief, and paranoia that characterised the public response, was as a result of the vision being unrealistic or have we had been so starved of hearing any mayor being visionary that it was difficult to listen with an open mind?

Where have we heard a mayor casting a bold vision for his city that we could keep him too, except, perhaps, when Mashaba took control of the City of Johannesburg? I’m not venturing into the merits of the vision, I’m interrogating whether the people of Mzansi are honest enough to admit that we are not exposed to visionary political leadership and that it impedes our rational engagement with anyone who bucks that trend.

One of the headlines according to his speech at the BizNews gathering screamed “SA’s wannabe dictator Gayton McKenzie rants about Zille, illegals, the death penalty, and more”. That’s the price you pay for not allowing Stellenbosch to fund your party and inform your ideological orientation and policy agenda. They didn’t even leave it to Zille herself to rebut the statements that McKenzie made about her. Note the personalised nature of the rebuttal, laying bare the dearth of intellectual rigour in Mzansi. It’s impossible to have a robust engagement that centres around merit and not a lazy issuing of derogatory epithets.

Be that as it may, the headline impugns the character of the speaker without defeating the truthfulness of the speech.

This is not to say that McKenzie doesn’t have multiple blindspots that require urgent and intentional fixing. For starters, his party skates on razor-thin policy ice. I don’t know the PA’s policy position on land reform, economic growth, education, primary healthcare, the commercialisation of parastatals, and job creation. These are pertinent matters, not just for the next election, but for the next generation.

Secondly, just like Malema, McKenzie can do much better in profiling both his national and next layers of leadership. This critique is especially incisive because he mainly articulates PA positions all by himself and inadvertently leads a leadership team who operates mainly in obscurity. One of the requirements of a healthy party is that its brand has to be stronger than that of its leader, even when its leader is its founder and funder. We are keen as commentators, sympathizers, and voters to observe the PA’s internal life, its provincial and regional dynamics, and how it matures across its structural layers.

I’m not sure, for instance, to what degree a local branch or region informs the coalition partnering preferences that the party ultimately adopts or enters into. That’s a very important aspect of our body politic and we are deprived of following and commenting on those developments. We know, an example is given, that the ANC’s Johannesburg region and the province drove the coalition reconfiguration despite the national echelons expressing reservations about working with the EFF.

These shortcomings are arming his detractors and may sow discord in his own ranks, as both the recent WC councillor resignations attested to.

I’m raising this because McKenzie is a national asset and his country’s oppressed masses need his uncompromising voice, his inspiring courage, and his devotion to change on a grander scale. He has a true revelation about what’s wrong with the country and his being not from politics is not a constraint, it’s his strength.

He practices a disruptive brand of politics, which hurts the establishment and makes old money extremely nervous. It’s a sorely needed politics for what is officially a failing country.

It’s his freshness that makes him appealing and a critical player in the party’s political matrix.

His party must protect that freshness by surrounding its leader with structure and embodying his vision with a policy basis.

Arthur J. Van Nel