South African Odyssey Howard Wayne List of honorees Louis Rose Society Jewishsightseeing home
Tony Leon, Jewish successor to Helen Suzman, leads
Democratic Alliance, South Africa's opposition party
By Howard Wayne (c) 2006
jewishsightseeing.com, May 17, 2006
PRETORIA, South Africa— The ANC is the dominant party in South Africa, with
more than two-thirds of the membership of Parliament.
There are numerous opposition parties, with the Democratic Alliance (DA)
being the largest. On Tuesday, May 9, I attended a talk by DA leader Tony Leon
at the University of Pretoria as part of its African Dialogue Lecture Series.
Tony Leon is Jewish.
The DA is an amalgam that includes the former Democratic Party, which, in turn,
is the successor to the Progressive Party.
The Progressive Party’s sole representative in the apartheid-era
parliament was Helen Suzman, also Jewish. The
Progressive Party attracted the majority of Jewish voters during the 1980s.
Tony Leon was born in 1956 in Durban into a secular but Jewish-identifying
family, and trained as a lawyer. He
entered politics in 1986 when he won a seat on the Johannesburg City Council by
a margin of 39 votes. Upon
Suzman’s retirement in 1989, Leon won her parliamentary seat over her
preferred successor, Irene Menell. After
the Democratic Party’s received an anemic 1.7% share of the vote in the first
multi-racial election of 1994, Leon became its leader.
Five years later the Democratic Party increased its vote to 9.5% and replaced
the National Party – the Afrikaner party of apartheid – as the leading
opposition party. Subsequently the
National Party briefly merged into the Democratic Party to form the Democratic
Alliance. It was no small irony
that a Jew headed the remnants of a party that in the 1930s sponsored
legislation to ban Jewish immigration to South Africa, adopted an anti-Semitic
platform, and whose leading provincial branch, during World War II, barred Jews
from party membership.
Leon has become the embodiment of “muscular liberalism,” which, so far,
appeals to a mainly white and coloured (i.e., mixed race) electorate.
The University of Pretoria talk was held the day following the tenth anniversary
of the adoption of the South African Constitution. Leon noted that opposition leaders had been excluded by the
ANC from participating in the parliamentary celebration of the anniversary.
Summarizing the ten years under the Constitution, Leon said that on the
positive side South Africa has free and fair elections and a bill of rights.
On the negative side, he said that all branches of the government are
dominated by ANC, there is a lack of balance between the rights of criminals and
of victims, and there is a fundamental problem growing out of the ambition of
ANC leaders.
Transformation is espoused as the political philosophy of the country.
Leon said he agrees with that goal if transformation means the righting
of past wrongs and the opening of opportunity to those who were denied it.
However, he argued that in practice transformation has meant something
different “from what the ANC once described in 1994 as a building a
people-centered society. In fact it
is a program of building a party- centered society where the ANC is omnipresent
and omnipotent.” He alluded
to an article written by an ANC leader who defined transformation as extending
the power of the liberation movement (i.e., the ANC) over the state and beyond
it. He said such a practice is
“hegemonic” and is hostile to the constitution.
Leon went on to call attention to flaws in the political system.
He said that public confidence in government is undermined by
“floor-crossing,” whereby parliamentary members of one party are enticed to
join the dominant party (thus “cross the floor”) through publicly financed
incentives – what Americans call pork barrel projects.
Second, he is concerned by challenges to judicial independence such as
the recently proposed fourteenth amendment to the South African constitution,
which would place administrative controls of the courts in the executive branch.
The South African constitution is far easier to amend than the American one,
requiring only a two-thirds vote of Parliament which the ANC currently
possesses. South Africa is considering its fourteenth constitutional
amendment in ten years while the United States did not enact its fourteenth
amendment until 80 years after adoption of the Constitution.
Third, Leon expressed concern that independent institutions which are supposed
to exercise authority without favor or prejudice are failing to do this.
He referred specifically to the Office of the Public Prosecutor, held by
a senior member of the ANC that has failed to investigate allegations of
government corruption. Finally Leon said there was an effort by the ANC to impose
intellectual conformity. He
referenced a recent newspaper article in which some Black leaders were attacked
as “cocoanut intellectuals” (identical to the meaning of “Oreo” in the
U.S.), which he said was crude racial labeling.
Leon and the DA are in a difficult strategic position because the party has not
been able to expand out of its white and coloured base of voters in a country
where the population is 75% Black African. As
a consequence the ANC not only dominates parliament, but also all nine
provincial governments and all but one major city.
In March the DA won a brokered control of Cape Town, but since then the
DA mayor has been under constant attack.
Questions from the audience at the University were of the “gotcha”
variety. Leon conducted himself
with aplomb and spoke in Afrikaans as well as English.
I talked with Leon after the presentation.
He was curious what a former California legislator was doing in South
Africa (“term limits,” I responded). I
asked if he thought the proportional representation system used in South Africa
was responsible for central party domination of both the executive and the
legislative branches, since party leaders and not the constituency determine who
is a member. He agreed that it was,
but believed proportional representation was needed in a multi-national state
such as South Africa. He thought
proportional representation in multi-member districts might solve the problem.
Tony Leon is controversial and has a reputation of being strident. He and President Thabo Mbeki have a personality clash and, in
response to a question, Leon said Mbeki does not meet with him.
According to a story appearing in the Mail and Guardian, in February of
this year Leon spoke at King David Linksfield High School in Johannesburg. He gave a short history of the DA and what it meant to be a
Jew in South African politics. An
ANC leader, scheduled to address the school the following week, requested a
summary of Leon’s points from Yehuda Kay, the national director of the Jewish
Board of Deputies. Kay’s e-mail
set out that Leon attacked former, and disgraced, Deputy President Jacob Zuma,
an ANC leader. Leon allegedly said
that “Zuma could never really run the country as he only has a Standard Two
level education.” The e-mail concluded “if you are bored and need some
toilet reading material ill (sic) send you more details of the ‘Tony
Rhetoric.’”
The e-mail was subsequently distributed by someone who had access to the e-mail
account, under the subject line “look what the jewz think of leon.” The typeface of that e-mail was different from Kay’s
computer and the police are investigating a charge of forgery. However there were only slight variations from Kay’s e-mail
and the one that was distributed.
Kay resigned from his position under pressure.
The Board’s acting director stated: “The Jewish Board of Deputies is
a non-partisan apolitical body. Unfortunately
by sending that e-mail Mr. Kay has compromised that position of the board and
decided to resign.” Leon said he
had accepted an apology from the chairperson of the Board
Wayne, who represented a San Diego district for three terms in the California
State Assembly, accompanied his wife, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Lundberg to
South Africa, where she has been consulting on laws dealing with the forfeit of
assets from criminals. See
story on them.