COPE, born of despair not vision, faces political death

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=83424

ONCE upon a time there was a political party called the Congress of the People (COPE). It was born of some comrades’ frustration with the direction in which a post-Polokwane African National Congress (ANC) was headed. But, despite some electoral goodwill (7,42% of the national vote went to the COPE), it seems to be exiting the political stage more quickly than former president Thabo Mbeki .

Perhaps COPE’s trajectory is the inevitable result of a birth that resulted less from a political pregnancy filled with ideological and policy vision, than with despair at the shenanigans of the ANC.

It is tempting, given COPE’s failure to overcome its birth pangs, to start writing a political obituary. Yet voters' yearning for a credible, black-led alternative to the ANC demand that we give it a final chance.

Perhaps. But doing so requires a blunt interrogation of what COPE needs to do to avoid justifiably being written off in the 2011 local government elections.
If COPE does not fix its in-house problems immediately, political death may well become a prudent eventuality. A provincial strategy meeting by some of the COPE leadership in Gauteng attempted to do exactly that last weekend.

First, it is shocking that the process of establishing, and building, branches has gone nowhere. Branches are the building blocks of a party. They enable effective activism and electioneering. Yet in Gauteng, for example, there are only four official COPE branches.

Given that there are 540 municipal wards in Gauteng, it is difficult to foresee how an effective groundswell of support will be garnered over the next two years unless drastically urgent administrative attention is paid to the laborious but critical task of branch building. Mosiuoa Lekota was supposedly responsible for this task, but is evidently failing. COPE needs a plan B immediately.

Some COPE leaders are convinced that while branches are useful, they are not critical. Professionals and other usually apolitical types who supported COPE during the elections are supposedly not interested in ANC- like concepts such as branches.

This assumption is doubly flawed. First, no credible political audit of the profile of supporters of COPE has been done. Surely the handful of prominent COPE members who are young professionals scribbling on a Facebook page near you do not constitute a statistically significant slice of the more than 1,3-million voters who voted for COPE in this year’s national elections.
Second, one does not ignore a political opponent’s tactics simply to avoid the label of copycat, even when these tactics are sensible.

While millions of voters did, indeed, vote for the ANC even though they are not active branch members or even registered members, ANC branches remain politically important nodes of on-the-ground political lobbying. COPE will only ever become a threat to the ANC by fishing from the same electoral pond as the ANC does. That requires the immediate development of branches across the country that can serve as alternative homes to existing ANC members.
Third, COPE must start developing something of an internal party policy think-tank or brains trust. Strategy meetings, including last weekend’s, acknowledge this, but nothing seems to get done about it the morning after.

It is not necessary, perhaps, for COPE to develop a substantively new ideology. We are all pretty much content with being liberal democrats, are we not?

Equally, the label “progressive” is about as useful as saying you prefer the good to the bad. It is simply not illuminating enough as an ideological tag.

The reality, however, is the ANC picked the most appropriate ideological outlook for our country at this juncture in its history: broadly liberal on social policy and questions of lifestyle and identity; and, on the economic front, crafting an awkward but necessary balance between neoliberal macroeconomic fundamentals, while committing to some form of welfare state and labour protection.

COPE should not be contrarian for the sake of politics. Instead, its strategy should focus on critiquing ANC policy mistakes. Not all ANC policies, or their implementation, dovetail with the ideological foundations with which most of us might otherwise agree.

COPE should enter debate at that level, rather than within the higher ideological stratosphere. Unfortunately, COPE is not featuring on the policy debate front at all. It thoughtlessly took a position on an issue such as labour brokers with little hint of well- researched evidence and argument behind the press performance.

Instead, it came across as dangerously reactive, ad hoc and politically clumsy. It topped off its political mistakes by sharing a platform with the Democratic Alliance (DA) on an issue that is not politically critical enough to risk the convenient retort from the ANC that it is a black version of the DA.

COPE made two mistakes on this occasion. First, it betrayed the fact it lacks a policy headquarters, or even an informal brains trust. Second, it demonstrated an inability to think strategically about how to liaise with the media, and so the public at large. COPE must work harder to raise the capital that will enable some of its more intellectually inclined leaders to think full time about issues of policy and communication strategy.

This, third, highlights the communication strategy problems that COPE continues to suffer from. It was initially given a honeymoon by the media. We had all desperately hoped for multiparty democracy to be given a new lease on life with COPE’s arrival.

But the party has gone from being media darling to being a nonstory at best. Just scanning party documents on media strategy show why this is not surprising.

COPE does not have a clear team of communication experts who think about the content of their website, carefully read and reread media statements before they are released or, most importantly, thinking proactively about how, where and when, to generate good news stories about the party’s development, including the performance of spokesmen when interviewed, or party leaders’ speeches when they have the public platform, both in and outside Parliament.
Instead, spokesmen such as Philip Dexter fumble through press conferences on those occasions when they are forced to interact with the media, with little enthusiasm or eloquence. This is not surprising.

A guide for spokesmen discussed at the recent regional strategy conference encouraged them to stay “on message”, suggesting winning platitudes such as “we believe in a winning SA” and “we believe SA belongs to all who believe in it”.
These truisms that all South Africans believe in were given as descriptions of COPE’s supposedly unique identity.

The sooner COPE finds an identity, any identity, the better. COPE’s future remains uncertain. Without even dipping into the more well-rehearsed internal factional and leadership squabbles, it is clear that it needs to deal with various other issues in the areas of administration, ideology, policy, finance and communications.

Nevertheless, given that the ANC’s chronic dependence on voter loyalty tied to historical memory about its role in the liberation struggle cannot last forever, it would be premature to write COPE off. But an awful lot will have to go right for COPE, and soon, if it is to avoid political death.

McKaiser is a contributing editor.