Even at his most impassioned Songezo Zibi’s pastoral etiquette speaks as much to his mien as it simultaneously raises a salient question: sure, he’s one of the educated ones with an impressive resume but is the man from Mqanduli’s skin calloused enough to weather the vicissitudes of the SA political climate?
At least insofar as survival in SA politics is often preceded by the ability to be seen to be taking the gloves off, or, at a minimum, flashing one’s teeth. Be it at white monopoly capital, foreign nationals, the judiciary, an indecisive president, a bloated cabinet, having a go – ideally in no uncertain terms – at somebody – anybody – is an indispensable quality to anybody who wishes to be taken seriously enough to be voted for in Mzansi.
Zibi, the low-keyed former editor of Business Day, appears to be slogging at a different script entirely. One that old-guard traditionalists would likely laugh off as some amateurish crack at politicking and which has scantily, pre-2024, been considered a viable means to the grassroots voter’s good graces. The man speaks of mental health, juvenile justice and wanting ‘to change the political culture in South Africa.’ Recruiting volunteers and organisers over establishing branches and signing up members (which he considers as nothing but an opportunistic scramble for positions). In fact, even though his organisation, RISE Mzansi, will contest the 2024 election, they come with a caveat: they aren’t really a political party but a ‘movement.’
Although his roots are sunk eyeball-deep in a traditional rural Eastern Cape, there is nothing of the casual aggression of, let’s say, a Julius Malema in him. Even his swipes at the ruling party are uttered in tones laced with propriety. “The ANC,” says Zibi at one point, “has anchored South African society for thirty years … with the ANC losing legitimacy, who’s playing that role now?” This is parliamentary stuff indeed but how far will it endure in a Parliament that often mimics the vulgar conduct of an inner city speakeasy?
Despite having been hammering the message of an alternative to the ANC, he has surprisingly declined to join the so-called Moonshot Pact (the multi-party septet that aims to rattle Khongolose to its foundation). His reason is probably the most scathing thing he’s said: that those voters who voted in the last election “already have pronounced that they don’t want them.”
His foray into politics as he launched his movement in April has, at least amongst ‘clever blacks’ (otherwise known as the black middle class), been met with some brouhaha. Not enough to cause a ripple in the broader national sense but just enough not to vanish into the abyss of the entirely forgotten either. Seen as a refuge for those blacks who can’t stomach the stifling, cadre-centric posture of the ruling ANC as well as the out-of-touch race denialism of the official opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), a few disgruntled somebodies have come to call the movement ‘home.’ Formerly a key figure in the DA’s elite structures, Makashule Gana nowadays does duty as RISE’s national organiser. In August, DA member of parliament, Nomsa Marchesi, also turned her back on the party to serve as RISE’s convenor in the Free State.
Styled as a non-racial party where merit, not one’s skin colour, is the yardstick to upward mobility, the DA has struggled to keep up appearances in the face of explosive fall-outs over the years. These have seen the party bleed several outstanding black leaders in their ranks which has been attributed to a DA that better prefers waxing lyrical about non-racialism than toeing it earnestly behind closed doors. Lindiwe Mazibuko, Mmusi Maimane and Herman Mashaba – the latter two now heading their own parties – have been the biggest losses to the DA and with them, have no doubt taken a chunk of the black support.
Following decades as a corporate high-flyer, Zibi is also clearly in the habit of flocking with acolytes of a similar plumage. His top brass teems with a business-minded and ideas-based motley than Marxist-Leninist revolutionary sorts. Between organisational obligations and television appearances, he is also a regular byline on the pages of the nation’s top publications.
If, however, history is a reliable guide, the South African political arena resembles less an auditorium for frumpy intellectualism than a canvas for pugilistic, even priestly oratory. A penchant for delivering Obama-esque speeches could not help former DA leader Mmusi Maimane – posterboy of the palatable, liberal ‘Dr King’ sort of black leader – up the party’s black support back in 2019. Yet formed in 2013, Julius Malema’s EFF would mount an impressive showing by bagging 6.4% of the national vote to become the country’s third biggest party just a year later. To foreign eyes this would no doubt seem ludicrous, but as eParkeni have long been thumping, the SA political game is a bewildering kettle of fish altogether. And just how many of these new parties, RISE notwithstanding, are attuned to this fact remains too early to say at this point.
For instance, the nation watched as Zibi’s experimentalist ‘movement’ gambit seemed to confuse even Newzroom Afrika anchor Thembekile Mrototo during an earlier interview this year. In a country where bread and butter canvassing tends to attract supporters by the busloads, can the candidate who places emphasis on seemingly vague pursuits hope to get very far? Perhaps Zibi, like his counterparts in ARISE South Africa and Xiluva’s unconventional campaigns have their sites primed on the youth who are more likely to be amenable to new ways of doing than older generations.
Or maybe he has torn a page from the late Steve Biko’s BC movement, hoping to resurrect a spirit of vukuzenzele – proud self-reliance – in marginalised black communities. The crux of his messaging seems to be aimed at getting people to get up and do things for themselves rather than look to a government that has consistently let them down. It has become a norm rather than an aberration that political affiliation in these spaces goes cheek by jowl with self-enrichment. The days of the moral, incorruptible cadre who is in his conduct a ‘servant of the people’ is mostly an urban legend – gradually eroded in the early years of the post-democratic project when it dawned on the powers that be how easy it was to cook the books and get away with it – and eventually put out of its misery in the state capture years.
For Zibi and many of the new groupings, the ANC is beyond redemption. Fingered by its own president Cyril Ramaphosa as ‘accused number one’ on corruption and an admission on his part before the Zondo Commission that the party ‘should have done more to prevent the abuse of power and the misappropriation of resources that defined the era of state capture,’ the ship to self-correction has long sailed. Zibi and Co. hope to step up and man the rudder but the questions persists ever so: 1) are their campaigns effective enough to penetrate the enduring fealty the ANC enjoys as the ‘liberator of the masses;’ 2) if the majority of the population has been reduced to a ‘welfare populace,’ would they find any incentive in the concept of self- rather than state-aided empowerment and; 3) what is RISE bringing to the table to ensure that they will deal decisively with inarguably SA’s glaring Achilles heel – namely corruption?
Zibi himself was at pains on an SABC interview in a clunky effort not to disclose who his party’s donors are. For those who are abreast of these things, there has been general apprehension as to who might be funding these new players, in particular the signatories to the Moonshot Pact. As a result, those of a Pan-Africanist bent are having a field day accusing the black leaders of these parties of being stooges to faceless, post-colonial puppet masters pulling the strings from the comforts of ill-gotten privilege.
So when the last sentence has been written on the election that saw political rivals put aside their differences to confront what they considered to be the singular threat – the ANC – to the country’s well-being, what will be made of the man from Mqanduli? He hasn’t resorted to the sure-footed means to the people’s favour; painting himself as the genuine Struggle stalwart who’d looked down the cesspit of white oppression. Nothing about him as a gun-toting teenager, hurling stones at apartheid’s menacing apparatus of subjugation. Or trying to have himself smuggled across the borders for military training in Lusaka or Moscow. Nothing about packing a Makarov in his coat, or brewing Molotov cocktails from inside unassuming church buildings or debating Marxist-Leninist theory in the company of beret-clad Che Guevara types in the village.
Instead there is something of the exemplary, well-off and successful black hack in him. Articulate, clearly ‘booked,’ (that’s ‘educated’ to you, Dear Reader) who is quite at ease around the dinner tables of the cultured and affluent. He writes well, is a demur figure on television screens and hardly ever speaks in high, emotive octaves. Not the characteristic politician, then is Zibi. Certainly not the sort who packs out stadiums and mobilise the masses. Yes, both the black and middle class might easily warm up to him, but will the majority of the blue collar population have even read Business Day let alone heard of him?