Turning and Turning: Exploring the Complexities of South Africa's Democracy

By Judith February

South Africans often are deeply polarised in our perspectives of the present and the past. Our ‘ways of seeing’ are fraught with division, and we fail to understand the complexities when we do not see what lies beneath the surface.

There is no denying that the Jacob Zuma presidency took a significant toll on South Africa, exacerbating tensions and exposing the deep fractures that already exist in our society along the lines of race, class and even ethnicity. The Zuma years were marked by cases of corruption and state capture, unprecedented in their brazenness, and increased social protests – many of which were accompanied by violence – aggressive public discourse, lack of respect for reason and an often disturbing resistance to meaningful engagement.

Importantly, those years also placed enormous pressure on our democratic institutions, many of which still bear the scars, and challenged the sovereignty of the Constitution itself. As an analyst and governance specialist at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) for twelve years, February has had a unique perch. Turning and turning is a snapshot of her IDASA years and the issues tackled, which included work on the arms deal and its corrosive impact on democratic institutions, IDASA’s party-funding campaign, which February helped lead, as well as work on accountability and transparency.
Combining analytical insight with personal observations and experience, February highlights the complex process of building a strong democratic society, and the difficulties of living in a constitutional democracy marked by soaring levels of inequality. There is a need to reflect on and learn from the country’s democratic journey if citizens are to shape our democracy effectively and to fulfill the promise of the Constitution for all South Africans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Picador Africa
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770105744

Book preview

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For Mom and Dad – the first teachers

First published in 2018 by Picador Africa

an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19, Northlands

Johannesburg

2116

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN 9781770105737

e-ISBN 9781770105744

© Judith February 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Editing by Sharon Dell

Proofreading by Russell Martin

Research assistance by Terence Corrigan

Design and typesetting by Triple M Design, Johannesburg

Cover design by publicide

Author photograph by Leila Dougan

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

1. Transparency and accountability: The case of money and politics 30

2. Polokwane 81

3. Of protest, burning and public discourse 115

4. The arms deal 177

5. #ANC54 206

6. Can South Africa re-imagine itself? Looking back, looking forward 249

Appendix: Issues raised in the Public Protector’s report into state capture 282

Notes and references 285

Acknowledgements

There is always a raft of people to thank when embarking on a project like this.

My first thanks must go to my parents, to whom this book is dedicated. I am grateful to them for many things – that I grew up in a home which always had books, that I had books even before I was born and that they ensured that I received the very best education even during the years of apartheid. They also gave me the confidence to trust my own voice and to be sure of my place in the world.

Attending Springfield Convent School had a profound impact on all of us who had the privilege of being educated in such a beautiful place. It was the first school to open its doors to girls of all races in 1976 and the first to offer matric to young women. Subtly, it also encouraged our individual eccentricities and curiosity. There were teachers who had a great influence on me during those years and who instilled in us all a love for learning and a truth-seeking impulse. I am indebted to Melanie Bruce and Margie Corlett, my senior school English teachers, Bernie Keeson, my formidable Latin teacher who is, in great measure, responsible for my lifelong love for the Classics, and Sr Marcellus, my History teacher, who was a wise and gentle soul, always accompanied to class by her dog! It was also at Springfield that I made some of the most meaningful, lifelong friendships with women who are grounded, clever, funny and who unapologetically chart their own course.

But this journey would never have begun had it not been for my years of working at IDASA. I will be forever grateful for the twelve years I spent there and for all the people I met along the way. There are too many to mention but I will single out my ‘bosses’, during the time I headed up the Political Information and Monitoring Service (PIMS), Paul Graham and Ivor Jenkins. It was probably the journey of all our lives. My thanks also go especially to my former colleagues at IDASA whom I was privileged to work with when I headed up PIMS – Jonathan Faull, Shameela Seedat, Nonhlanhla Chanza, Perran Hahndiek, Ralph Mathekga, Kate Lefko-Everett, Justin Sylvester, Gary Pienaar, Collette Schulz-Herzenberg, Tanya Shanker and our late colleague Nathi Nomatiti, who will always be remembered for his courage. And, of course, thanks to my dear friend and then colleague, Ebrahim Fakir for his ‘democratic schooling’! They are colleagues and friends who are whip smart and committed to South Africa and they enriched my understanding of ­democracy immeasurably. All continue to do important democracy-building work. More recently, at the Institute for Security Studies, I have found a happy professional home and I am grateful to my colleagues Anton du Plessis, Jakkie Cilliers and Gareth Newham.

My thanks must also go to Terence Corrigan for his research assistance on this book. Without his hard work and meticulous attention to detail, the book would not have seen the light of day. He worked under some trying personal circumstances and I am grateful for his commitment despite those. My former IDASA colleague Bronwen Muller read various versions of the manuscript along the way and was encouraging, supportive and helped me to keep my perspective throughout. Thanks Bron, for always believing there was a book to be written. And thanks to Natasha Pillay, who read the first version of this book and remained optimistic! To Paula Baldwin, one of the ‘first friends’, thank you for your insights on covers and colours. Our conversations on books, travel, art, food, politics and the state of the world, continue – 30 years on – and across continents. To Sue and John Pace for their encouragement and varied offers of help, thank you.

Ingrid de Kok is one of our country’s finest poets and a wise and treasured friend. She has graciously allowed me to use two of her poems in this book, as has Antjie Krog, another of South Africa’s finest poets and writers. I am grateful to them both.

Most of this book was written under the old oak trees of the La Belle Bistro at Alphen, Constantia. So a special thank you must go to ‘my’ waiters, Ashton Chidemo, Tinashe Chikwari and Anesu Muvirimi, who were very much part of this writing journey and continually asked me, ‘How’s the book going?’ They themselves are children of the Zimbabwean diaspora and their conversations and friendship have been enriching.

And finally, thank you to Andrea Nattrass of Pan Macmillan for her gentle, guiding hand and unending patience. Andrea first approached me to write this book in 2016 and assured me it would be a worthwhile project. She was right. Thanks also to Sharon Dell and Russell Martin, who edited and proofread this book and whose eagle eyes definitely made it better in the end. Its myriad shortcomings and limitations are mine alone.

South Africa is a complex and complicated place to live – a place of subtle and dramatic beauty, of deep inequality and political frustrations, yet equally a place of the second chance, of resilience, resourcefulness, deeply contested spaces and hope. That is the country I mean to reflect on in the pages that follow – the place of my heart.

Judith February

Cape Town

June 2018

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W.B. YEATS (1865–1939)

Introduction

It’s the height of summer. The Knysna Waterfront, with its plush Quays apartments, is home to the ‘haves’, many of whom are out cruising on the lagoon. ‘Messing about in boats,’ as Toad would say. On the Waterfront, shops hug the water, luring tourists and locals alike. A small kiosk does brisk business selling sweets, crisps, cigarettes and other consumables.

Outside the shop a glass-encased arcade game attracts children. It sells a dream and asks for only R2. In exchange you might, by pulling the lever, cause the mechanised hand to clutch not a booby prize but a digital watch.

Two young boys wait and obsessively watch the lever; no doubt they are dreaming big. Their faces encrusted with dirt and their ragged dress provide every clue of where they fit in this higgledy-piggledy unequal society. Shyly they approach customers asking for R2, maybe even R1, so they can piece together money to play the game.

The challenge is that the lever is only active for eighteen seconds. Only eighteen seconds to win the watch! They scrape together the money but, being amateurs, their dreams of owning the watch are quickly dashed. They approach another passerby and they are back in business. Another R2 into the slot. But again, the watch eludes them.

They walk off disappointed but perhaps also not. Theirs is a familiar lot amongst the poorest of South Africa’s children. Dreams are seldom realised and wishes mostly don’t come true.

Theirs is the face of inequality in South Africa and the scene is ever-poignant as the wealthy pass by en route to their champagne cruises. The Knysna Waterfront slogan is ‘Where the living is easy’. This encapsulates neatly the ambiguity of South Africa – its collective social schizophrenia.

As the boys stroll off, I wonder what the upcoming school year will be like for them. What else did they dream of – aside from the cheap watch? What had brought them out to the Waterfront alone on a balmy evening in the summer holidays?

To live in South Africa we have to ‘see and unsee’. For how do we live a sane life in our oases of privilege amidst a sea of heartbreak and inequality? We know that our ‘ways of seeing’ are different; our disagreements about our future path are often vehement and laced with bigotry, and our understanding or misunderstanding of our past is mixed and imperfect. Yet somehow we stumble along.

To live in South Africa is either to see or to look the other way.

The poem ‘I am the face’ was written by Vernon February in exile in 1986 and was first read at an anti-apartheid gathering at the Mozes en Aäronkerk in Amsterdam and then later all around Europe. It could, of course, be true of South Africa today and reflects much of the inequality and systemic racism that are still experienced by many.

I am the face

I am the Solomon Mahlangu you won’t recognise

When you emerge from the KLM plane

And walk down the stairs

Onto the tarmac at Jan Smuts

Dreaming – perhaps of your safari holiday

So gorgeously described in the brochures

Which you found in Amsterdam

You won’t see me as you put on

Your safari suit, ready for

The ‘trip of your lifetime’

In sunny South Africa

Yet I am the boy in the blue overalls

Walking next to you in the hall

I shall be picking up the cigarette stubs

Strewn on the floor by the likes of you.

And, when you use the toilet,

Know it was my hands who washed it clean.

I am the black man

You won’t recognise

As you are whisked off

To your Holiday Inn

Somewhere in e-Gawutini

I am the Solomon Mahlangu

You don’t know.

I am the Benjamin Moloise

Who dangled at the end of their rope

At the crack of dawn.

Now safely with the Izinyanya,

You won’t notice me when you step off

Your KLM plane ready for your ‘Bushveld’ holiday.

I am the man who filled your newspapers

Only a few months ago,

When you made your first enquiries

About this holiday in the sun.

I am the Benjamin Moloise

You won’t recognise.

I am the man called Ahmed Timol

Who they said jumped from John Vorster Square

You won’t see me as you shop around

In this city of gold

Built by the sweat

Of my black brothers

I am the man whose blood was shed on this very spot

Where your wife now poses for her picture

In this land of death.

I am the Ahmed Timol

Whose shadow you’ll never feel.

I am the Hector Pieterson

Whose life was cut short by a bullet

When he was only twelve years of age.

You won’t hear my child’s voice

As you watch the Zulu

And the gum-boot dances

Arranged specially for tourists like you,

‘Primitive Africa’ as part of sunny South Africa,

Better than the brochures in your land.

I am the boy whose limp body

Was seen in every picture in the world.

We are the ghosts

Who will accompany you

On your trip

Through the majestic Drakensberg

The scenic Garden route

The Kruger National Park.

I am the man

Who was at the Cape

When you came in your three ships

‘De Reiger’, ‘De Dromedaris’ and ‘De Goede Hoop’.

I am the corpse

The mutilated body

The Imbongi

The Izinyanya

The angry mob

The freedom fighter

Whose face you’ll never find

In the brochures luring you

To sunny South Africa.

I am the face

You can never ignore.

In his review of Keorapetse ‘Willie’ Kgositsile’s posthumously published anthology, Homesoil in the Blood: A Trilogy, author Mandla Langa describes South Africa’s then poet laureate as follows: ‘It is an unwritten, though widely respected principle that countries with adverse social conditions tend to produce artists gifted with sensitivity and acuity of vision that mark them as undisputable chroniclers of their times. It was James Baldwin who made the observation that the poets, meaning all artists, are finally the only people who know the truth about us.’¹

Langa goes on to say, ‘There is an inverse correlation between the criminality of a regime and the enforced silence of the denizens. It is to this silence that the poet gives language and voice. It is a voice that the powerful of the land do not want to hear and strive to suppress at every turn.’²

And so it was during apartheid. ‘I am the face’ was only ever read in exile and banned in South Africa. If it was read in South Africa, it was done so clandestinely. ‘Reading Bra Willie is the closest thing to being in touch with the soul of this country,’ says Langa.

In a sense, like all good poetry, ‘I am the face’ is ‘in touch with the soul of the country’ at the time, as Langa put it. Vernon February wrote this poem at a time when South Africans were undergoing a strange alchemy of shifts in the political landscape with the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983. The UDF incorporated a broad spectrum of anti-apartheid organisations and included faith-based organisations, trade unions, civic associations, sports and student bodies.

The immediate reason for the formation of the UDF was to mobilise against the setting up of a tricameral parliament. We know that the UDF came to represent the intensifying struggle against apartheid, not only within South Africa but also outside the country.³ Apartheid was still firmly entrenched with its death squads and P.W. Botha as prime minister. Within the African National Congress (ANC) there were conflicting viewpoints on precisely how the mutually damaging stalemate would end.

While the politics of resistance continued unabated, so did the oppression. The poem is as much a reflection and indictment of the political situation then as it was of the conditioning that black people experienced during apartheid. They were the nameless, faceless ones whose labours were used to prop up an illegitimate system and support the lifestyle the minority white population enjoyed. The times were steeped in blood and February recognises the activists whose names you would have been forbidden at the time to mention.

Ahmed Timol, a schoolteacher and South African Communist Party (SACP) activist, was the first political detainee to die at the hands of the South African security police at the John Vorster Square police station in Johannesburg in October 1971. At the time, the inquest into his death found that Timol had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. It was widely believed then that Timol was in fact tortured to death.⁴ After all those years, during a fresh inquest into the causes of Timol’s death, the Pretoria High Court ruled in October 2017 that Timol had been murdered. A piece of unfinished business was completed after all.⁵

Benjamin Moloise was a poet and upholsterer who was hanged in 1985 for allegedly murdering a black policeman. The ANC claimed responsibility for the murder, denying Moloise’s involvement.⁶

The strains of colonialism are there in references to the ships that brought Dutch colonists, including Jan van Riebeeck, to South Africa in 1652 – De Reiger, De Dromedaris and De Goede Hoop – and provide a stark reminder that people were already living here. The poem presents a fascinating reference point even in 2018 as arguments about colonialism and its effects continue to be controversially discussed.⁷

While the poem’s message is overtly political, its symbolism remains devastatingly simple and evocative. ‘The face’ is that of millions of oppressed; even the ‘imbongi’ or the ‘praise singer’ is ironically named alongside the voiceless and nameless. ‘The face’ is everywhere as the privileged go about their lives oblivious both to the blood being shed and the sweat of the faceless labour.

It seems a sad indictment that the poem resonates even more poignantly today. Bar one or two of the references, such as Jan Smuts Airport, ‘I am the face’ speaks powerfully for the dispossessed in South Africa in 2018. Despite our homegrown Constitution with its language of rights and participation, in a country with deep and ever-deepening levels of inequality, citizen voices are often diminished. The country’s poor (mostly black) are marginalised by their own poverty as those who have the resources often control the public debate, whether in the media or elsewhere – and even within the very ANC many have voted for.

Recent debates about ‘white privilege’, race and ‘blackness’ seek to shine a light on these post-apartheid depravities. As inequality deepens in South Africa it is becoming increasingly hard to ‘unsee’ the faceless ones. The violence perpetrated by the state against the faceless has perhaps been the most difficult to fathom. The violence of Marikana in 2012 was a turning point in the degree of brutality the state was prepared to use against workers demanding a living wage.⁸ Needless to say, corporate South Africa has been equally complicit in the Marikana tragedy given the exploitative wages miners are earning and the appalling conditions many still live in around the mine six or so years later.⁹

South Africa is undoubtedly a complicated and at times brutal place in which to live with a complicated and violent past, but as this book highlights, the years of the Jacob Zuma presidency exacted a further toll on South Africa’s post-apartheid project – on its social fabric, economy and the body politic. We are still busy calculating the damage inflicted on democratic institutions during those long years.

The economic consequences of those years have been dire. By the third quarter of 2017, according to the latest available Quarterly Labour Force Survey, some 6.2 million South Africans were unemployed. This represented an increase of around 337 000 people on the unemployment roll since the third quarter of 2016. The unemployment rate in late 2017 was 27.7%, the highest level since September 2003. By the so-called expanded definition – a measurement that includes those wanting to work but who had not taken any active steps to find work¹⁰ – some 9.4 million South Africans were unemployed in late 2017. This represented an increase of over 400 000 over the preceding twelve months. So the expanded unemployment rate had crept up from 36.3% to 36.8%,¹¹ which is a crisis by any definition.

Since 2008, South Africa became increasingly unmoored given Zuma’s preoccupation with the capture of the state for personal gain. While the genesis of corruption within the ANC obviously has deep roots, the Zuma era saw the venality reach a more brazen level.

As a result of worsening economic conditions, much of our social compact has become frayed. Whether between citizens or between government, business and labour, rifts have deepened. During the Zuma years we saw the breakdown of the tripartite alliance (the ANC, the Congress of South African Trade Unions [COSATU] and the South African Communist Party [SACP]), which was the traditional ‘sponge’, absorbing much of the tension within our society around issues of employment and inequality.

But probably most dangerous of all was that the lack of leadership during the Zuma years left a vacuum filled by all-comers, not least Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), who sought to capitalise on the ANC’s weakened position under Zuma and its poor performance in the 2016 local government elections.

The lack of leadership has led to an inability to deal with complexity as one, often opportunistic, voice has shouted over and past the other. Cyril Ramaphosa, Zuma’s successor, is trying to address the vacuum and steer South Africa on a different course. He has made jobs and fixing the economy his rallying call. That is no surprise given the crisis of unemployment. But whether Ramaphosa can ensure that South Africa turns a corner remains to be seen. There are different ways of filling the vacuum and that probably requires far more than creating jobs, but also needs a distinct focus on building citizenship and deep levels of social cohesion. Ramaphosa has promised to usher in a ‘new dawn’ for a South Africa that remains cautiously optimistic about the future and how to fix what is broken. Democracy and the building of democratic institutions is hard and deliberate work.

Living in South Africa continues to be every inch as contradictory as it was during apartheid.

Why this book?

They say everyone has a book ‘in’ them. While I cannot really be sure of that, you have this publication in your hand and so that must be prima facie proof of the same! While discussing the idea of this project with a friend, he asked: ‘Why this book? What is it about?’

Without hesitation I answered, ‘Well, John, after eighteen years I think I have something to say about democracy!’

John, being John, replied, ‘Well, there’s the title for your book.’

The title turned out differently but the light-hearted exchange confirmed my desire to write a book about democracy – considering I have been consumed by the complex and multi-faceted endeavour in South Africa for nearly two decades.

That realisation still feels odd since I arrived ‘here’ in a rather roundabout fashion. I am trained as a lawyer. To be a lawyer was what I wanted to do ever since I was old enough to be asked. Perhaps it was a result of my stubbornness and constant desire (for better or worse) to ‘make the case’. Arguing either for or against an issue was a habit I developed at a young age. And so, my sojourn as a law student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) was the right one. I arrived there in 1989, aged 17, and completed my Bachelor of Arts (Law) degree, majoring in Law and Latin in 1991. I graduated with an LLB in 1993. I still feel more than a tinge of regret at not continuing to the Latin honours programme but there seemed to be no time for that, what with the LLB waiting. Being somewhat idealistic and believing that through the law one could verily save the world, I was set to become a ‘Rosie O’Neill’ character,¹² setting the world to rights, rather than a corporate lawyer creating arcane legal structures.

The lawyering experience was somewhat sobering and sometimes even a little intellectually dull. But there were some light moments and I learnt a great deal in those early years, especially during my time as an articled clerk at a small law firm in my birth town of Somerset West, and subsequently at UCT’s School for Legal Practice where I started at the beginning of 1994. The school, a crash course of sorts for the side bar (the dreaded attorneys’ admission) exam, was run by the inimitable Eric Liefeldt (now sadly deceased) and his loyal assistant, the gracious Lorna Reeves. It was a fruitful six months spent with law graduates from UCT, the University of Stellenbosch and the University of the Western Cape. The diversity of students made for fulfilling interactions and many good friendships were forged during that time.

That was followed by an exchange fellowship at the University of Bonn in Germany in late 1994. It was a welcome break from law and I spent eight months learning German and getting to grips with the German ‘ordnung’, which can be quite intimidating. Living along the Rhine was a post-law-school antidote of sorts, yet I missed South Africa, which was then in its heady days of post-democratic fervour. I longed for all its complexity and the things of home. In due course, I returned to South Africa. My six months at the School for Legal Practice mercifully counted as a year of ­articles and I was admitted as an attorney of the Supreme Court in Cape Town (as it was then known) in late 1996. It was a happy day and the culmination of many years of (at times) painful study.

My subsequent legal practice was a bit of a ‘mixed bag’. Legal practice sometimes requires a level of ruthlessness that I was not sure I possessed. I was also not sure whether I had complete commitment to the practice element and the single-minded focus it required. The experience was useful but my interests were multiple and how to indulge or exercise those within the constraints of a law firm was a challenge I came up against pretty early on.

I had interests in language, politics, culture and writing and I was entirely unsure how to channel them in a way that would also help me ‘fit in’ at a law firm and provide me with a fulfilling career. It was an uncomfortable fit, needless to say. I enjoyed the law inasmuch as it was a tool for advocacy and for solving the problems people had. And, admittedly, I enjoyed drafting pleadings; that was where I felt I could apply the law to a particular matter and test my ability to do so. Of that I learnt a great deal during my period as an articled clerk.

Predictably, it was during this time that I encountered most of the racial and gender stereotypes present in South Africa in the late 1990s and which persist in many boardrooms today.

I recall being involved in briefing senior counsel¹³ on a never-ending construction matter together with the senior partner of the commercial law firm I was working for at the time. It was a Friday afternoon and the senior counsel poured himself a whiskey (par for the Friday course, I guess) while the other two men, but not me, ordered a more pedestrian cup of tea. After the tea arrived, our senior partner gestured to me with a ‘Are you not going to pour?’ Well, there was a first lesson in resistance for me, if ever there was one. I politely declined, to which the senior partner responded, ‘Well, then I will do it.’ And so he did. That probably didn’t endear me to the law firm’s powers that be.

It was 1999 at the time and our law firm did not subscribe to the Constitutional Law Reports, mostly because constitutional law was seen as ‘soft law’ and our firm was, after all, a commercial law firm. I am sure (I hope) that by now this has changed but it was instructive at the time and provided some indication of how this firm was positioning itself as a purely commercial practice. That to me seemed short-sighted and also plainly wrong. We have seen over the past 22 years since the final Constitution was signed into law that no law, even and perhaps especially commercial law, can be practised without due regard for the constitutional framework. But this was 1999 and many law firms had not yet made the transition to seeing themselves as part of a new constitutional democracy. For them it was business as usual. With hindsight it is interesting to reflect on how narrow-minded this approach was given what we know about the richness of Constitutional Court (ConCourt) precedent and the role that the ConCourt has played in giving meaning and substance to rights.

As an indication of how confused I was about whether or not I wanted to practise law, and in what form, in 1999 I signed up to do a master’s degree in commercial law at UCT and graduated in 2000. I thought perhaps I would end up being a tax adviser, given that my major was tax law. How could I have known how far from reality that would be?

The extra qualification did not answer my need for a focus that was interesting or fulfilling. I was at odds with the culture of law firms and felt I was being put into a straitjacket with the routine hours and regimens that simply did not suit my personality or my need to feel I was contributing to ‘something bigger’. I needed to find an arena that spoke to my more wayward and, perhaps, more eccentric side.

My rather chequered five-year career as a practising lawyer included a very short stint at the Cape Law Society’s disciplinary division. This was an eye-opener. It exposed me to the way some of our ‘learned friends’ abused the very law they were meant to uphold. Along with my colleague Yasmin Jadwat, I faced the daily grind of dealing with complaints against lawyers. Thankfully, Yasmin had a wicked sense of humour that made it more bearable. There were serial complainants who seemed to spend most of their days in our reception area waiting for progress on their specific complaint. Little did they know how very slowly the wheels of the law society turned; the backlog of complaints was so great that the task of working through them was virtually impossible, not to mention mind-numbing! After four months I had had enough. I packed a small box of my ‘office supplies’ and announced I would be resigning. I had an uncomfortable conversation with the director of the law society at the time who asked, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Where to next?’

I had absolutely no idea.

Around this time – it was early 2000 – I remember listening to a radio interview with an ‘analyst’ on the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa while driving home. The analysis was from a governance as opposed to a health-care perspective – both of which are important. Listening to the interviewee unpack the issues, I thought, ‘I could do that’. But ‘black letter lawyers’ didn’t do that sort of thing – well, not the ones I knew. They took on cases, briefed advocates, wrote letters of demand and filed pleadings articulating the law as clearly as possible. That’s what I was meant to do. Or not.

IDASA opens its doors

At the same time, fortuitously, I happened upon an advertisement in the Mail & Guardian newspaper. The then Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) was seeking a ‘legislation monitor’. I wondered what on earth that could be. The advertisement said the institute’s Political Information and Monitoring Service (PIMS) was looking for someone with a legal background to monitor parliament and its committees and to make submissions to parliament on legislation. In addition, it had a few ‘clients’ who needed legislative updates and the incumbent would be responsible for a product with the rather dull moniker of The PIMS Monitor, which enabled people to track legislation. Finally, the advert said a small column called ‘This week in parliament’ would need to be written for the Business Day and filed weekly.

I was not at all certain I could do that work. Five years of legal practice had not prepared me for the detailed workings of parliament or for any kind of advocacy work, which I knew was at the core of IDASA’s activities. But I was intrigued at the possibility and I sent my CV anyway, hoping for the best. After several months, during which I heard nothing and it emerged that my CV had been ‘lost’, I finally secured an interview.

IDASA was located in a beautiful heritage building, one of the oldest Sir Herbert Baker buildings in the country, at 6 Spin Street, Cape Town. The building, donated to IDASA by the Norwegian government in 1997, had an aura about it that I could feel as soon as I entered. It was old, full of character and it had ‘pulse’.

That ‘pulse’, I would later discover, emanated from the array of interesting and committed IDASA researchers, working across disciplines to deepen South Africa’s democracy. Downstairs was a rather moribund-looking coffee shop but its historic counter lent it an olde-worlde air, enhanced by the original black-and-white marble floors, high ceilings and fitted wood panelling. Without knowing much more at that stage about PIMS, I knew I wanted to work there. The place seemed to have substance and depth about it.

I was interviewed by three people who would later become colleagues within PIMS: Richard Calland, Samantha Fleming and Thabani Masuku. The interview was a mixed bag of questions about myself, why I wanted to work at IDASA, and detailed questions about parliament and how laws were made.

No, I said repeatedly, I knew nothing about parliament, but I learn very quickly. That was my ‘line’. I was very keen to be upfront lest I raise expectations about my parliamentary knowledge. Thabani seemed rather sceptical and I was sure I stood no chance over other candidates who had worked in civil society and probably had extensive advocacy experience.

Late one Friday evening, however, I received a call from IDASA informing me that I had been successful in my interview and asking me when I could start.

My first day, 1 June 2000, was a curious one. I arrived at 6 Spin Street’s third floor at 8.30 a.m. sharp, just as I had been conditioned to do at the law firm. As a young attorney I was once chastised by a firm partner for glancing over the front page of a newspaper in reception before heading up to my office. I was apparently ‘setting a poor example for clients’. After that barbed comment, I always arrived early, went downstairs to the coffee shop at 2 Long Street in Cape Town where the law firm was