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Dear Ghaleb
Congratulations on taking the big step to enter public life, rather than to carp from the sidelines, as many do.
Public and political life needs people like you: passionate, clever, contrarian and committed to a South Africa that can work for so many more of its people.
If we appreciate that South Africa’s democracy stems from our strong multiparty system, it is neither here nor there that you are moving from the ANC to the DA, although your new political home made much of this.
As a political journalist who has covered the ANC, before and after its unbanning, I’ve never seen you as an active party member. So, I think the DA is making a bit much of your political pedigree.
Of your family’s political pedigree, there is no doubt. From your mother, Amina, and your father, Yusuf, to your cousins and your sister, Coco, Cachalia is writ large in our annals. In that sense, your move to the DA is big, but is it big because of you or your family?
And if you were courted because of your name, are you comfortable with this? There is value in the propaganda, sure, and the DA has spent a lot of time on symbolic poaching of a Tshwete son, a Sisulu relative and an abaThembu royal, a clan historically aligned to the ANC.
Are moves like these ephemeral, a political moment of ultra-expedience, or do they mark the beginning of the end of ANC power? I think it’s the former.
We have discovered, in the course of the investigation into Duduzane Zuma’s business empire with the Gupta family, that he traded on his surname. Are you doing the same?
You are now the DA’s mayoral candidate for Ekurhuleni and I read with interest your family’s history in Actonville, Benoni.
But as a man about town of northern Joburg, I have to ask: When have you spent time in Ekurhuleni doing the hard, daily grind of councillors and community activists?
If you were serious about a political life, why not start as a bottom-up party activist where you live? That’s how your mum started.
The DA, in my bitter experience, parachutes in people to communities they do not know. Take Mayfair, Fordsburg and Fietas, where I spend more than half my life.
The area is a delight – multiclass, multigenerational, racially diverse and with thriving Somalian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian communities.
It is also a disaster of poor infrastructure provision and bylaw enforcement – a local government fail, but a social cohesion win.
The DA won the ward in 2011 and delivered an imported councillor who couldn’t give a damn. In a by-election, the party lost to the ANC, whose councillor does not meet a single standard set out in its manifesto last week.
Your family home still stands sentinel in Fordsburg and I wonder if, perhaps, it would not have been better for you to stand in that ward rather than go for the bling of being a mayoral candidate.
My lesson from the ANC and its allied United Democratic Front has always been to build from the bottom up. I wondered, as I listened to your brilliant speech announcing your candidature, is it a lesson you hold close?
