Behold the Messiahs who want to save SA!

To the outside world, SA’s problems seem as daunting as they come. But fortunately, there is no shortage of would-be, home-bred messiahs volunteering to rectify matters. All on their own, too, as independent presidential candidates.

Frustrated by the established political parties – in some cases, because they struggled to sublimate in a collective their egotistical assumptions that they, personally, had all the answers – they are starting their own, personal political movements.

One of the leading lights lining up to challenge for the 2024 presidency is Songezo Zibi, former Business Day editor and communications head of Absa Bank, who announced his 2024 candidacy with the words: “I am prepared to lead, for I know there will be no anointed messiah at any point in the future. This includes running for president.”

These new movements are not created from the bottom up, in the traditional way, by people of like minds meeting to jointly advance a set of political goals and principles. Instead, they are loosely organised and established from the top down.

ALSO READ: Former chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng SA’s next president? Not likely

Like celebrity fan clubs, they are headed by charismatic, but often narcissistic, leaders. These visions are generally emotionally stirring but lacking in detail.

Similarly, the strategies of the independents for wresting power from the governing ANC are only vaguely articulated. Their approach seems to amount to an as yet untested belief that they will be embraced by a grateful nation and be swept to power buoyed by charming personalities and good intentions.

There’s a constant flow of hopefuls throwing their hats into the ring. Earlier this month, it was former chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng. Although Mogoeng will be the presidential candidate of what is nominally an existing party, the All African Alliance Movement, this is, despite its ambitious name, something of a one-man band, that exists as a backdrop to the controversial former head of the Constitutional Court’s ambitions to mobilise the Christian fundamentalist vote.

Next came Makashule Gana, who resigned as a Democratic Alliance (DA) member of the Gauteng Legislature “to join an emerging generation of leaders and activists committed to mobilising and organising to return power to the people of SA”.

Gana joins several disaffected DA leaders – including the DA’s former parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko and party leader Mmusi Maimane – who believe that such sole-performer formations are the answer to voter disillusionment and, specifically, the large number of former ANC voters who have stopped voting for the government but have been unable to find a new political party that they feel at home in.

ALSO READ: Mogoeng Mogoeng can bring about change without entering into politics

The problem is the negative effect that all this free-floating vanity has on the political system. Aside from the danger of xenophobic or racist populism, independents lack the financial and organisational clout necessary to have any meaningful impact.

While only the gullible will see the independents as a solution to the failings of the major parties, they can nevertheless play an important role in unlocking the political logjam.

Several independent political groupings, operating as staging posts to an eventual coalition with an existing party, or to create a completely new party, could conceivably unlock these votes. This may be what Zibi has ultimately in mind.

His recent book, Manifesto, claims to distil the political thinking of the so-called Rivonia Circle of black intellectuals and may form the beginning of a coherent political movement that will be more than just an exercise in personal aggrandisement. In other words, a political party.

There’s not much time for playing vainglorious games, however. A general election is less than two years away.