Helen Zille and the rise of (white) liberal political hegemony under Ramaphosa's GNU: Isaac Mogotsi

Helen Zille and the rise of (white) liberal political hegemony under Ramaphosa's GNU: Isaac Mogotsi

Exploring Helen Zille’s rise and white liberalism’s dominance under Ramaphosa’s GNU amidst ANC’s sharp decline.
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Key topics:

  • Helen Zille’s DA gains dominance in Ramaphosa’s GNU government

  • ANC's electoral decline fuels rise of white liberal political hegemony

  • South Africa’s Left fragmented amid neoliberalism and rising inequality

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By Isaac Mpho Mogotsi

“People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.” Vladimir Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism.

“For whites seeking redemption, the ANC was a bucket of powerful detergent in which to dip their stained fabric. Quick immersion could remove the marks of an apartheid past.” Helen Zille, Not Without a Fight: A Biography, Penguin Random House, 2016, page 312.

INTRODUCTION.

For well over a century since 1924, when the white Afrikaners became a dominant political force in the Union of South Africa established in 1910, white liberalism played first a second and then a third fiddle following the crushing electoral defeat of Zach de Beer’s Democratic Party (DP), the forerunner of the Democratic Alliance (DA) of its real and effective – and not nominal – leader Helen Zille, in the founding 1994 election.

It is a measure of Helen Zille’s undeniable  (white) liberal political genius that she has been able, almost single-handedly, to propel the DA from being the successor to the DP which enjoyed a mere 1,7% electoral support after it was pulverised by the African National Congress (ANC) of Nelson Mandela in the first democratic and historic election of 1994 to being the co-architect of the chaotic, fractious, unwieldy, painfully divided and divisive 2024 Government of National Unity (GNU) running our beleaguered country today, and now having a respectable chance of outperforming the very same ANC in the coming 2029 election.

A recent opinion poll of about 800 South Africans by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), the former employer of Helen Zille, it should be stated in the interest of transparency and which should be taken with a glass of Dead Sea salt water, conducted between March and April this year put the DA’s voter support at 30,3% and the ANC’s at 29,7, with a 4% margin of error, basically meaning the DA and the ANC are for all intents and purposes statistically in dead heat.

The point is not about the reliability of this and similar polls, not even about the questionable methodologies used, but about the fact that in this day and age some credence can even be attached to such thumb-in-the –wind straw polls. This poll shows in graphic terms the appalling political and electoral decline of the ANC, but also the tremendous progress Helen Zille has registered in reforming and remaking the DA after her own highly confrontational image following its absorption of the white Afrikaner right wingers of the now defunct New Nationalist Party (NNP) of Martinus “Koertbroek” van Schalkwyk and the establishment of its now unchallenged dominant political hegemony over the Coloured vote in the Western Cape, where the ANC, wallowing in the electoral graveyard hours, is doing as badly as it is now doing in the provinces of Gauteng and Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN), as well as in all our major urban metropolitan regions.

In a nutshell, the ANC is now outperformed by the DA and the new MKP of former president Jacob Zuma in the three most populous, most important and most advanced provinces of our country, where 56% of South Africans live and work, meaning 35 million South Africans out of a population of 62 million, using the 2022 statistics. These figures alone tell a story of a very bleak electoral future staring back sternly at the ANC, unless something drastic happens urgently to renew and reposition the ANC.

Historically it has been Helen Zille’s DA which has benefited the most from the electoral rout of the ANC (and other Left parties like the EFF, it has to be said, counter-intuitively.)

In her autobiography, Zille writes about the “near annihilation” of the DP at the 1994 polls (page 120). 

Yet by 2023 Helen Zille could tell the DA Gauteng Congress that:

“Let me make a prediction because the ANC does not know what it stands for anymore and it cannot revert to principles because it does not have any. Believe me, in my lifetime, I will see that party die.”

Given that Helen Zille is 74 year old and biologically does not have much of her lifetime left before she meets her Maker, it is clear that she most likely meant that she will see the ANC die after the coming 2029 election.

A bold prediction if there was ever one, but not a wild one though in the circumstances of ongoing ANC electoral implosion.

And last year she told the Friedrick Naumann Foundation that:

“When a party is held together by patronage, it’s only a matter of time before it disintegrates.” 

She went on to predict at the same event that the ANC, (without Ramaphosa leading it, which will be the case obviously after the 2027 ANC national conference), will get 25% of the vote in the 2029 election.

It must be added that it is now quite common on social media platforms to come across predictions by individual accounts, including accounts of self-declared ANC members, of the ANC struggling to gain anything above 20% of the vote in the 2029 election, a sort of anecdotal evidence of how dire the electoral situation the ANC of Ramaphosa finds itself in nowadays.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the success of Helen Zille’s strategic political genius in the service of (white) liberalism, waged principally against the ANC, has been that she has conducted it transparently and openly, yet the ANC has failed to develop a viable and coherent political strategy to counter it and continues to massively haemorrhage voter support, to the extent that now the ANC of Ramaphosa has made Helen Zille’s DA indispensable to the ANC’s tenuous hold on power through the highly unpopular, ill-advised and rightwing GNU formed last year.

In her autobiography Zille waffles on ad nauseam about how the ANC’s “patronage network” is its undoing and is that which differentiates it from the DA she leads. 

She even quotes the ANC’s former deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe approvingly as stating thus about the ANC cadres under the leadership of former president Jacob Zuma:

“Almost every project is conceived because it offers opportunities for certain people to make money. A great deal of the ANC’s problems are occasioned by this. There are people who want to take it over so that they can arrange for the appointments of those who will allow them possibilities for future accumulation.” (Page 500)

What is it which has allowed Helen Zille to achieve in the political arena what no other white (English-speaking) liberal leader in South Africa has been able to since Cecil John Rhodes served as Britain’s colonial Governor and Prime Minster of the Cape Colony between 1890 -1896?

(White) Liberalism? What (White) Liberralism?

In all seriousness, can it really be said that Helen Zille is the genuine standard bearer of the historical white liberalism of the former Liberal Party of Alan Paton, or of the former Progressive Federal Party (PFP) of Helen Suzman and Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, or even of the Democratic Party of Zach de Beer and Tony Leon?

Of course not, I think. 

In her autobiography Zille reveals the fierce ideological fights she used to have even with Tony Leon, the second DA leader and her predecessor regarding the future trajectory of liberalism in post-apartheid South Africa.

She writes:

“What started as the battle between the NNP and the DA within the DA eventually ended in a deep rift between Tony Leon and me, which took years to heal.” (Page 154) 

There are two powerful things which set apart the current DA of Helen Zille from any of its preceding variants.

The first is that Zille usurped white liberalism of yore and then pumped lots of political testosterones into it, making it to look more muscular and similar to the looks of the body of a refined, smooth, alluring and perfect World Champion female body builder.

That is how today (white) liberalism under Helen Zille looks like, all puffed up with political pride and adrenaline-suffused.

I believe there is a sense in which one can argue that Zille-ism is a microscopic forerunner of the race-baiting and immigrant-hating politics of USA President Donald J. Trump.

Long before Trump announced his run to be the USA president, first time around, at the Trump Tower on 16 June 2015, Helen Zille had:

*Inveighed against what she described in 2012 as “education refugees” from the Eastern Cape, a province bordering the Western Cape within South Africa.

*Come under fierce political fire for appointing in 2009 what was described at the time as an all-male and predominantly white Western Cape provincial government, in a province in which Africans and Coloureds constitute an overwhelming majority. Many viewed the composition of her provincial Cabinet as a frontal assault on the founding creed of democratic South Africa about the necessity of recognising diversity, equity and inclusivity (DEI), which is today USA President Donald Trump’s pet hate. 

*Been propelled into power by the black vote but did not give the black vote due recognition when she composed her first provincial Western Cape Cabinet, just as Trump likes to boast that he got the biggest black vote of any Republican presidential candidate whilst his Executive is predominantly all-white in a country where the white majority constitutes no more than 55% of the population.

*Attacked in her autobiography the politics behind #FeesMustFall and what she defined as “wokeness.” In her autobiography she devotes a whole chapter she titled provocatively as The Problem With Race Politics which is full of innuendos and political canards against the Critical Race Theory (CRT), something the second term Trump administration is hell bent on doing. Like Trump, she views any questioning of white privilege as “the problem of race politics.”

*Besmirched and devalued in her autobiography the USA’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) by regurgitating the #AllLivesMatter provocation popularised by the USA’s hard white altright.

*In her autobiography Zille taken great and undisguised offense at any legitimate criticism of what is commonly referred in academic, intellectual and political circles as “whiteness.”

*Had written on and used Twitter (now X) account as the premier battleground against her political critics, enemies and her internal DA foes, as her biggest hailer and public square to shout out her controversial and often offensive political ideas, even before Trump started to do so in 2012 and now on his Truth Social.

*Defended the colonial legacy in South Africa and stated that (black) people should be grateful of colonialism because it imparted to South Africa things like the laws, piped water etc. 

She tweeted at the time that:

“For those claiming the legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water etc.”

*Launched an all-out and frontal attack against Black Economic Empowerment BEE) laws and the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), for a long time a key policy platform for the ANC. When some of us point this political reality out and that GNU’s founding Statement of Intent bears no reference to NDR, Ramaphosa calls it “noise,” thus wittingly or unwittingly giving cover to the long-standing political agenda on the part of Helen Zille’s DA to destroy NDR. Trump also is now prone to, at the slightest provocation, inveigh against what he calls “leftist lunatics.”

*Implied that load shedding phenomenon (electricity blackouts) under ANC governments represented “decolonisation” as it was dismantling the electricity generation built under colonialism and apartheid.

*Just as Donald Trump was once a Democrat in the USA before becoming a hard altright, Zille was once an anti-apartheid activist, of course in the broadest and most elastic sense of the term, who has now tilted firmly towards testosterone—driven and adrenalin-pumped form of (white) liberalism.

*In her autobiography she approvingly quoted Francis Fukuyama stating in his two part book The Origin of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay  that “it takes  a couple of hours to fly from Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’s capital, to Cairns or Brisbane in Australia, but one is in some sense traversing several thousand years of political development.” 

Basically by this statement Fukuyama implied that developing country Papau New Guinea, part of the Global South, is several thousand years behind white Australia in political development. 

This is a rather surprising and deeply insulting comment about “political development” because Papua New Guineans have never carried out a single genocide against any group or class of people in their history, which thing cannot be said about white Australians, a point recently made abundantly clear by no other than the conservative political commentator Andrew Kenny in a recent BizNews article.

In response to this appalling statement of Francis Fukuyama, Helen Zille doubled down in her support and appreciation of Fukuyama and provocatively wrote thus in her autobiography, as if to rub salt into a gaping, unhealed black South African wound:

“In South Africa, we are trying to span millennia within the confines of a single country in the space of a few decades. Should we even be trying?” (Page 504). 

In a word, Zille was questioning the efforts of our democratic and constitutional dispensation to close the gap between white South Africa and black South Africa, which she seemingly believes is divided by millennia timespan, to address the legacies of colonialism and apartheid and was also casting doubt on the call contained in the Preamble of our Constitution for redress to address these deeply ruinous legacies of our past.

Likewise President Donald Trump has gone full throttle against any attempt to address the historical legacy of slave ownership in the USA, recently slamming those he alleges say that slave ownership was all bad.

Of course there is also the small matter of Helen Zille being a family friend to Joel Pollak, a South Africa altright who is an editor of the far right Beitbrat publication. Pollak, Tony Leon’s former chief speechwriter, is one of the right wing South African emigres in America wielding tremendous influence over America’s altright MAGA adherents orbiting around Trump’s White House and influencing it to adopt hard line, and often highly misguided, foreign policy postures towards democratic South Africa. Helen Zille’s hosted the wedding of Pollak to the late Rhoda Kadalie’s daughter at her official Western Cape Premier residence. 

How did it come about that a former white progressive journalist who masterly chronicled to the world how Steve Biko, the highly revered founder and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), which spearheaded the political aspirations of black South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, was brutally murdered by the apartheid regime, could be the same person who today believes that millennia separate white South Africa from black South Africa in terms of “political development” and questioning whether closing such a “political development” gap, if it exists at all, was worth the effort? 

Was it not the black struggle in South Africa against colonialism, apartheid and white rule from which Helen Zille benefited structurally which resulted in the establishment of democracy, constitutional order, media freedoms, freedom of assembly and movement, civil liberties for all, the rule of law for all, a market economy for all, racial equality, etc?

Is that not the highest form of political development ever introduced on our sacred African land in the last 350 years?

What does all this say about Helen Zille’s determined political push to and growing success in positioning the DA she leads, the second biggest political party in the country, as the government in waiting, if she still holds such retrograde and deeply offensive political views? 

What do these statements hold for South Africa’s future led by the DA under Helen Zille? How are they infused in and influencing the GNU government the DA co-leads with the ANC of Ramaphosa?

On the debris of the implosion of white Afrikaner and black nationalism.

Secondly, political commentator Moeletsi Mbeki was right to point out in his book The Architects of Poverty that post-1910 Union of South Africa’s political developments have been driven by two mighty competing political forces of white Afrikaner nationalism and black or African nationalism that was led by the ANC and, briefly, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania and that these two antagonistic political forces have run out of steam.

What then replaces these forces?

The genius of Helen Zille’s political strategy for (white) liberalism in the post-apartheid and post-Mandela era has been to tame these two erstwhile powerful but now spent political forces through co-option into the ranks of the DA (absorbing the right wing of the old NNP, cornering what passes for Coloured nationalism in the Western Cape and now co-authoring GNU with the ANC of Ramaphosa, whilst also indirectly capturing the PAC of Nyontso, which in her autobiography she vividly described as “moribund.”)

She has also positioned the DA and (white) liberalism as the rightful inheritors of the political largesse of a dying ANC of Ramaphosa.

I believe that Helen Zille’s DA has chosen to stick with GNU, despite its misgivings about Ramaphosa’s National Dialogue and his firing of a DA deputy minister because firstly, and in spite of the call issued by former president Thabo Mbeki in a letter to the DA’s nominal – not real and effective – leader John Steenhuisen to do so, because, as Zille made clear in her autobiography, the DA continues to see the ANC as “a bucket of powerful detergent in which to dip its stained fabric to remove any marks of the apartheid past” and to seek “redemption” through close association with and “immersion” in the ANC’s outward, formal politics for its past association with the apartheid era. 

Secondly, to make the DA she leads more appealing and familiar  to the rightwing faction of Ramaphosa within the current ANC, so that in the event Ramaphosa may in the future decide to follow the example set by his former boss and predecessor Jacob Zuma and form his own breakaway party which Ramaphosa may choose to call Phala Phala Mayibuye iGwaze Consultative  People’s Movement, Ramaphosa’s currently hegemonic ANC faction would then join forces with the DA of Helen Zille to form a post-2029 election GNU in order to frustrate the possibility of a progressive agenda, what the DA calls “a doomsday scenario,” ever becoming a national agenda for development in democratic South Africa, even though GNU established by the ANC of Ramaphosa and DA of Helen Zille is nothing but a moon surface governance chaos.

CONCLUSION: What accounts for (white) liberalism's popularity in the polls at the current political juncture?

At the heart of the political earthquake rocking democratic South Africa following the 2024 election is the collapse of the post-1994 CODESA neoliberal economic elite pact.

There was never a snowball chance in hell that the ANC would be able to satisfy the political demands and fulfil its election-time promises to its voters on the basis of a neoliberal economic project that has held sway in South Africa since at least the inception of the GEAR economic policy of 1996.

Nor was it ever possible for the ANC to fashion a capable, ethical and highly capable democratic State, as dreamt of in the National Development Plan, to serve the needs of the majority, especially the poor, on the basis of a neoliberal economic project.

Neither was it ever possible that in conditions of a rigorous and non-deviant implementation of neoliberalism by successive ANC governments that the ANC would be able to retain a clear electoral majority and mass popularity for more than three decades.

That was always a pipe dream not very dissimilar to the pipe the younger Thabo Mbeki used to carry with and smoke during his younger and more radical days in exile.

The same fate would befall Helen Zille’s DA were it also to enjoy majority voter support and implement a neoliberal economic framework.

This is so because neoliberalism objectively advantages and re-empowers those already advantaged by our colonial and apartheid history and re-empowers those who have at their ready disposal and can thus wield enormous resources accumulated inter-generationally in our country over the course of more than 340 years on the back of black slavery, cheap labour and through the expropriation without compensation of their land, livestock and other means necessary to sustain human life.

Neoliberalism is by definition an economic policy which entrenches existing unequal economic power relations founded on inequality and unequal access to economic resources.

True political democracy we are enjoying and economic neoliberalism that continues to favour a small, powerful, privileged, unelected, often faceless and wealthy elite are incompatible and cannot co-exist for long.

Soon one acts as a tether on the other’s development, thus creating an acute contradiction which must soon find its own resolution.

In a recent interview with the Sunday Times Kgalema Motlanthe, commenting on Ramaphosa’s National Convention idea, was quoted as saying that “some questions can only be resolved through a referendum”. 

I understood Motlanthe to have meant that there is another choice of how to settle our national disputes other than the National Dialogue convened by Ramaphosa.

He forgot to add that the whole history of modern Europe teaches that some other national questions can be resolved only through a Revolution from below, such as Cromwell’s Republican Revolution in England, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 or the numerous Eastern European Revolutions which brought down the Communist bloc and the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which Revolutions were vigorously applauded by white South Africa under apartheid.

Hence one can deduce that white South Africa does not fear a Revolution. It only dreads a black Revolution from below directed against it

But the right to a Revolution cannot be a right preserved for and exercised exclusively only by Europeans in faraway Europe!

What is worst is that neoliberal economics has been a direct antithesis to the development of a powerful and patriotic mass black bourgeois or a black capitalist class in democratic South Africa, the only class which would be capable of accumulating the means and resources to address the huge developmental challenges democratic South Africa faces, simply on the basis of its numerical superiority and concentrated massification, just as England was once known as “the nation of shopkeepers,”  and as the East Asia economies and now the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Vietnam were able to do through their national bourgeoisies in recent history.

To faithfully implement neoliberal economic policies in the most unequal society on the face of the Earth whilst rhetorically mouthing off endlessly yet ineffectively about the need for the creation of a black capitalist class or the democratic State funding a Black Billionaire Programme or a Black Empowerment Fund benefiting only a few politically connected black individuals is a contradiction in terms which fuels and results in the creation of a compradore, parasitic, very greedy, acquisitive but highly unproductive grouping (not a class “for its own and in its own”) of overnight wealthy black individuals created by and wholly dependent on the very same big white capitalists created mostly under colonialism and apartheid, or as is sometimes put, dependent on old, legacy white capital and on brokering State tenders without ever creating any visible agricultural, manufacturing, industrial and technology base for the country.

It is no wonder that this compradore and compromised black grouping, which is fundamentally a lackey of local and international big capital, has never been able to solve a single of the national economic challenges confronting the poor black majority since the dawn of our democracy. 

Not one.

And it never will. 

This is also why the DA of Helen Zille has never committed to the creation and advancement of a national and mass black capitalist class, other than some lukewarm and perfunctory rhetorical support to black small business operators, whilst it publicly boasts that it was instructed by big white capital to join GNU and to support Ramaphosa and confirming that in the final analysis it is nothing but a willing and diligent political agent of big white capital.

In the context of national liberation movements dying electorally in South Africa (black nationalism and black consciousness movements combined now unable to muster a clear governing majority at the polls in a country where the black majority constitutes over 90% of the population) and in the context of the absence of what the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Solly Mapaila’s SACP, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) and other progressive forces call the formation of a Popular Front of the Left (PFL), the (white) liberalism of Helen Zille’s DA stands out as the only surviving, growing, shining, alluring and attractive object of political desire in the political and electoral arena that is democratic South Africa, because the flames of white Afrikaner and black African nationalisms have all dimmed and the collective Left is at its weakest in our modern history as a Nation State.

Just as competing nationalisms in the USA no more act as the most powerful agents of political contestation over and alignment for political power, so has become the case in democratic South Africa.

It has been the unique insightfulness of (white) liberalism of Helen Zille’s DA to be the first to recognise and embrace this reality in the post-apartheid and post-Mandela era, as Zille makes abundantly clear in her autobiography. 

It is no wonder the DA is best positioned to own and take advantage of this unique and unprecedented political moment of rapture in the political development of our country, whilst the Left has hardly taken the first baby steps to eventuate into practice the concept of PFL.

The DA of Helen Zille is already running the race whilst the Left is still baulking at the idea of whether to train for the race.

Unless and until the Left of our national politics is able to set aside its egos, petty jealousies, personal vainglory and rivalries, lust for power, individualism, Me-Boss mentality, corruption, rank opportunism, voluntarism and subjectivism, ideological ill-discipline, beggar thy Left neighbour rowdiness, destructive impulse to outshine one another, pull him/her down syndrome (PhDs), ideological infantile disorders, crass ideological purity, nauseating verbal indiscretions, rampant material accumulation at the expense of poor constituencies and unethical political behaviour, the DA’s (white) liberalism will increasingly look attractive, ethical, much more organised, more robust, more caring, more serious, more disciplined, more effective, more future-oriented and more purposeful to the majority of South African voters than the Left does.

This really is the deeper story the outcome of the 2024 election is telling.

Failure to address these glaring weaknesses of the Left in democratic South Africa will result in the electoral triumph of mutant Trumpism with African characteristics in our country, with Helen Zille’s emboldened DA acting as a vessel for such Mini-Me Trumpism on our soil.

That South Africa’s political Left is so impotent under conditions of catastrophic inequality, poverty, unemployment, economic stagnation, social anomie and ideological incoherence of former liberation and black consciousness movements in our country is the greatest political paradox of our age.

It is really hard to think of another country in the world readier for a radical and revolutionary political rapture than democratic South Africa, where its highly laudable democratic form is so patently and  directly in contradiction to its neoliberal economic substance and praxis benefiting a few.

Yet it is also harder to think of another country in the world where the political Left is weaker, more fractured, more purposeless, more adrift, more disorganised, more self-serving and more self-destructive.

The ascendancy and growing political hegemony of Helen Zille’s (muscular and adrenalin-pumped white) liberalism stands in an inverse relationship to the decline in influence and growing impotence, if not atrophy, of former national liberation and trade union movements in our country.

The Right in democratic South Africa is cohering and invigorated whilst the Left splinters into innumerable breakaways and competing small political tents. 

The reason we say the outcome of the 2024 election has been a pivotal political earthquake for democratic South Africa is because it was the first time that the mass social and moral consciousness of the voting majority telegraphed onto the heavens that nationalisms have run their course and can no longer function as the vector of political inspiration and the glue holding our country together and that neoliberal economics no longer serves our country as a basis to construct and renew all of our much-needed political, social, moral and community superstructures which serve all of our people well and no longer serves as the basis to construct a just and more egalitarian post-apartheid society for all we dreamt of for so long.

A radical and clean break with neoliberalism in our country is not only urgently needed. Without it our fragile democratic and constitutional project may be overwhelmed by darker political impulses we have no control over.

The electoral contest in the 2029 needs to be between the vision espoused by the (white) liberalism of Helen Zille’s DA and a new one to be offered by a hopefully soon-to-emerge Popular Front of the Left, as proposed by NUM, SACP, AMCU and others, meaning that two ideologies – not two nationalisms – in opposition to each for political hegemony.

If the 20th century in South Africa was politically defined in the majority of cases by the fierce competition for political power and hegemony between white Afrikaner and black African nationalisms, this competition in the 21st century is destined to be defined increasingly by a similar fierce political and ideological antagonism between two ideologies of (white) liberalism and the Left’s progressivism.

Sadly Helen Zille’s DA, meaning (white) liberalism, is readier for this competition and ideological battles ahead than the neutered Left, which is being left behind by the fast changing political dynamics of our country.

That is the seminal political tragedy of our pivotal and unprecedented moment of political rapture occasioned by the outcome of our 2024 election.

Because all things being equal today, the 2029 election is for the Left to lose.

*Isaac Mpho Mogotsi: Historian, Businessman, former Freedom Fighter, former Teacher, former Diplomat, Economic Diplomat, Award-winning author of the novel The Alexandra Tales (Ravan Press, 1995) and the self-published book Whispering against the Wind: Democratic South Africa’s Search for National Identity, 2011 – 2022 (CEDIA Publications, 2024).

Founder & Executive Chairman

Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)

https://centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com

isaacmogotsi@centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com

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