Review: Vivien Horler
Being There – Back stories from the political front, by Tony Leon (Jonathan Ball)
Former DA leader Tony Leon left active politics in 2009, but was hauled briskly on to the front line once again in June 2024 for talks with the ANC about setting up some form of shared government.
As a 30-something MP he was part of the Codesa talks, the details of which he remembers imperfectly. This time he decided to keep a detailed diary, the edited version which appears in this book. It makes for fascinating, illuminating and often waspish reading. It’s a delight.
Four days after the general election in May 2024, in which the ANC disastrously lost its parliamentary majority, current DA leader John Steenhuisen asked him to be part of a negotiation team in Johannesburg which could lead to the DA entering government.
Steenhuisen’s team consisted of Leon, strategist Ryan Coetzee (“quite one of the smartest and most opinionated people I know…”), and Western Cape premier Alan Winde.
But the DA’s federal executive had other ideas. Fedex chair Helen Zille WhapsApped that she and party chairman Ivan Meyer would also be on the team, and she would lead the group.
“As events move on, it is clear that Helen holds considerable sway over the fedex she chairs (and amazing enough, also simultaneously takes the minutes in shorthand and offers an interpretation of them)…”
Leon admits there is much to be admired about Zille’s energy, her “piercing intelligence” and her courage. But, quoting Wordsworth, he says she has the defects of her qualities – “an adamantine obstinacy, a zeal of righteous conviction and total belief in the potency of her own analysis… I doubt the party brand is enhanced by her continued presence at the top of the organisation.”
A view many frustrated DA voters might agree with.
Commenting on his decision to step down from active politics in 2009, he quotes former Springbok captain More du Plessis who said, when he retired: “I would rather people ask why I was no longer on the field than ask why I was still on it.”
Leon adds: “Good advice for today’s political class.”
Last year’s GNU discussions are the centrepiece of the book, but there is a great deal more here that is informative, insightful and readable. The vastly well-read Leon is also a master of collecting pithy quotes from a variety of sources, which is a pleasure.
For example, while hesitating to weigh into the situation in Israel and Gaza, one thing that irritates me enormously is the conflation of Israelis and Jews, which seems to suggest if you’re opposed to what Israel is doing in Gaza and on the West Bank, you’re anti-semitic.
But the British-Jewish comedian and commentator David Baddiel, interviewed by Leon, had a view on this. “Israelis aren’t very Jewish anyway… They’re too macho, too ripped and aggressive and confident. [Israelis are] Jews without angst, without guilt. So not really Jews at all.”
Eish!
Tony Leon has been an interested and committed South African for a long time, having earned a living as an attorney, an academic, a diplomat, a politicians and most recently a businessman. So he is able to bring a breadth of view to the situation in this country.
One day, sitting on the beach at Da Nang in Vietnam, Leon mused about that country’s economic success story after 50 years of conflict.
“I had another revelation that day: how do certain countries overcome the burden of their history while others do not?”
In his introduction, he says the idea of this book – his sixth – is to tell the backstories and provide some background colour on recent events “beyond the sepia-tinged mythology that encrusts many of them now”.
In this regard and with the advantage of hindsight there are three chapters on the main protagonists who moved South Africa over the line from an apartheid to democracy: FW de Klerk, Nelson Mandela and Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
Referring to De Klerk, he quotes the late PFP leader Colin Eglin: “He might not be a great leader, but he did a great thing.”
He refers to his sometimes rocky relationship with Mandela, quoting Richard Stengel, ghost writer of Long Walk to Freedom, on Mandela’s approach to the people around him and those less close: “His charm is in inverse proportion to how well he knows you. He is warm with strangers and cool with intimates.”
As for Buthelezi, the summary seems to be that his childhood left him with a neediness that required constant affirmation.
There is also a chapter on Ronnie Kasrils from which the veteran activist does not emerge at all well.
He has plenty to say about current and former cabinet ministers, and his remarks are forthright. He is not a fan of health minister Aaron Motsoaledi. Talking about SA’s extremely narrow tax base, he says “the system is currently unsustainable and will become unsupportable if the swinging tax increases for NHI are levied”.
And he adds: “In the event, most of the 1.4% who pay the lion’s share of the taxes, the most skilled and the most mobile people and corporates in the net, will leave the country.”
There is a lot more in this book from this opinionated and yet thoughtful man. You might not agree with all his opinions, but they’re always interesting.