Fri, Mar 05, 2004 page7

• South Africa's opposition struggles in ANC's shadow

  DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT Oppositionists say reducing the dominance of the African National Congress is important for democracy, but voters pay little heed to their call

  • REUTERS
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  Opposition leader Tony Leon has travelled the length and breadth of South Africa, extolling voters in any language he can muster to embrace change and usher in a new government.

  His Democratic Alliance (DA) launched its campaign in Cape Town for the April 14 parliamentary elections with a blistering attack on the ruling African National Congress (ANC) for what Leon said was its failure to deliver on South Africa's young democracy.

  To the cheers of hundreds of bussed-in supporters, Leon lambasted the ANC's policies on the country's devastating AIDS epidemic, high crime rate and grinding poverty.

  But the DA, while expected to remain the main opposition party, is unlikely to score much above the 10 percent it won in the 1999 election -- a reflection, political analysts say, of the dead end that is opposition politics in modern South Africa.

  President Thabo Mbeki's ANC is tipped to score another resounding victory, allowing him to be inaugurated for a second five-year term on April 27 -- the 10th anniversary of the country's first historic democratic election.

  Polls show the former liberation movement that vanquished apartheid white rule and brought international icon Nelson Mandela to power in 1994 may even better its current two-thirds majority.

  Traditionally seen as the champion of South Africa's black majority, the ANC can virtually ignore arguments over policy and appeal directly to voters who remain grateful for its leading role in the struggle against white rule, analysts say.

  It dismissed a request from Leon for a public debate, saying the president "had better tasks to attend to".

  "The state of the opposition is fragmented...there is a lack of strategy, they just seem obsessed with trying to trip up the ANC monolith," said Judith February, a political analyst with the independent pressure group, the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa).

  Opposition parties are embroiled in coalitions and defections.

  Of the four largest opposition groups which fought the 1999 election, the New National Party has since formed an alliance with the ANC, and United Democratic Movement members of parliament have flocked to the ANC in droves.

  Leon hopes April will be a watershed election, and a move to a "normal" multi-party democracy with a strong alternative challenge for government.

  "If we don't do it in this election ... then without in any way being ultra-pessimistic or anything, you have to ask yourself what is the state of multi-party democracy in South Africa 10 years after apartheid," Leon told Reuters.

  Opposition parties were being "swallowed up by a gargantuan ANC," he said.

  The prospects of change seem dim as the DA continues -- despite an effort to increase colored and black candidates for the election -- to draw the bulk of its support from white voters who account for less than 10 percent of the 45 million population.

  There is also a perception that it remains a white party, led by Leon -- a feisty white lawyer who wastes no chance to savage Mbeki and his government.

  The ANC now holds 268 of the 400 parliamentary seats up for grabs, thanks to defections from the opposition, and controls all provinces, except KwaZulu-Natal.

  The NNP, which won seven percent of national vote in 1999, linked up with the DA with great fanfare in 2000.

  The union did not last long, though, and the NNP -- the successor to the former apartheid government nationalists -- shifted to the ANC camp.

  The move handed the ANC power in the Western Cape, but Mbeki's party now wants to win the country's second richest province on its own in the coming poll -- leaving doubt as to where its junior partner will fit in after April.

  The UDM has been a shell of its former self since it lost more than half of its 14 parliamentary seats to the ANC.

  Political tensions are highest between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which has effectively abandoned its cooperation pact with the ruling party to work in a "coalition of change" with the DA.

  The relationship between the Zulu-dominated IFP and ANC withered when legislation in 2003 helped the ANC come within a whisker of ousting the IFP from its main political power base of KwaZulu-Natal.

  IFP head Mangosuthu Buthelezi says he is not likely to continue to serve as Home Affairs minister, or in any other capacity, in Mbeki's new cabinet.

  The rift has raised fears of possible violence in the province which was at the centre of fighting between ANC and IFP supporters that killed some 20,000 people there and elsewhere in the decade before the 1994 poll.

  The IFP, which won 34 seats in the 1999 election, is seen increasingly as a regional force and presents no threat to the ANC nationally.

  Professor Hennie Kotze of the University of Stellenbosch's Centre for International and Comparative Politics said if voter turnout is high the ANC should win at least a two-thirds majority -- retaining the right to amend the constitution.

  "Overall, it is not a very optimistic picture for opposition politics."

  He said traditional ANC voters did not like western-style "confrontational" politics, preferring consensus, which left the DA with little hope of considerably expanding its support.
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