Future Tense

Reflections on My Troubled Land

Tony Leon

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781776190744
• eBook ISBN:
  9781776190751
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'From the vantage point of years in active politics, Tony Leon provides a lucid analytical balance sheet of SA Ltd 2021. Eschewing political correctness, Leon tells it as he sees it.' – Judge Dennis Davis 'Anyone who wants to understand South Africa today – a country so beautiful, yet so broken – simply has to read this book.' - Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money In his riveting new book, Future Tense, Tony Leon captures and analyses recent South African history, with a focus on the squandered and corrupted years of the past decade. With unique access and penetrating insight, Leon presents a portrait of today's South Africa and prospects for its future,based on his political involvement over thirty years with the key power players: Cyril Ramaphosa, Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk. His close-up and personal view of these presidents and their history-making, and many encounters in the wider world, adds vivid colour of a country and planet in upheaval. Written during the first coronavirus lockdown, Future Tense examines the surge of the disease and the response, both of which have crashed the economy and its future prospects. As the founding leader of the Democratic Alliance, Leon also provides an insider view for the first time of the power struggles within that party, which saw the exit of its first black leader in 2019. There is every reason to fear for the future of South Africa but, as Leon argues, 'the hope for a better country remains an improbable, but not an impossible, dream'.

FUTURE TENSE

Reflections on my Troubled Land

Tony Leon

Jonathan Ball Publishers

Johannesburg · Cape Town · London

PRAISE FOR FUTURE TENSE

‘Tony Leon is not only an experienced politician but also a talented writer, and this book is the highly readable result of that combination. His analysis of the last two decades in South Africa is honest and penetrating and his views on the handling of the Covid pandemic are persuasive. He demonstrates very clearly that change will be needed for widespread prosperity, freedom from corruption and reliably good governing to be achieved. This will be an important book for South Africans who want to ensure their country succeeds in the 2020s, and for so many in the rest of the world who are urging them on to reach their true potential.’

– Lord William Hague, former British Foreign Secretary and Conservative Party leader

‘From the vantage point of years in active politics, Tony Leon provides a lucid analytical balance sheet of SA Ltd 2021. Eschewing political correctness Leon tells it as he sees it. The consequence is a book that will promote much needed rational debate about the direction that the country needs to take.’

– Judge Dennis Davis

‘Future Tense unflinchingly anatomises what has gone wrong in South Africa since the heady days when Tony Leon entered politics. As the former leader of the country’s main opposition party, he was never going to pull his punches when describing the dismal decline of the African National Congress. But he is just as critical of his own party’s failure to translate popular dissatisfaction into votes and political change. Anyone who wants to understand South Africa today – a country so beautiful, yet so broken – simply has to read this book.’

– Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow, the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and author of Civilization: The West and the Rest

‘Tony Leon’s passionate and informed account of South Africa’s decline from the world’s new democratic hope two decades back to its capture by corrupt big men who rode roughshod over its constitutional promises is essential reading. Not just for South Africans, but for people everywhere who need to heed the warning on what happens when the ruling party trumps the state and when populism fuels economic decline. In the midst of many current crises, Leon also points the way for a more hopeful future for a country which needs to succeed to prove that democracy and the rule of law can still flourish in a multi-ethnic, historically conflicted and potentially rich nation.’

– Bill Browder, author of Red Notice

‘Even his political opponents must confront Tony Leon’s jarring questions about whether South Africa can be rescued from corruption, cronyism and continued economic decline.’

– Peter Hain, former anti-apartheid activist and senior Labour Party cabinet minister

Previous books by Tony Leon

Hope and Fear: Reflections of a Democrat (1998)

On the Contrary: Leading the Opposition in a Democratic South Africa (2008)

The Accidental Ambassador: From Parliament to Patagonia (2013)

Opposite Mandela: Encounters with South Africa’s Icon (2014)

Table of Contents

Title page

Praise Future Tense

Previous books by Tony Leon

Dedication

Motto

Preface

PART I PRESENT TENSE

Chapter 1 Long fuses, damp squibs: The false new dawn

Chapter 2 Opposition blues: What happened in the DA

Chapter 3 The DA pile-up … and the panelbeating

Chapter 4 The Constitution of Big Men: Joining the dots

Chapter 5 Unpopular populists: A red warning

Chapter 6 Myths and legends: The price of free speech

Chapter 7 Real money: Why the ANC is bad for business

PART II PAST TENSE

Chapter 8 The two roads: Jews asking questions

Chapter 9 The vexed question of race: A zero-sum game

Chapter 10 Last visit to the New Dawn: The problem of cadre deployment

Chapter 11 Men of zeal: How state control has shuttered the state

Chapter 12 How to steal a country: Hoodlums at the helm

Chapter 13 Rewriting history: Truth and lies

PART III FUTURE TENSE

Chapter 14 Revenge economics: A recipe for failure

Chapter 15 The league of losers: Friends without benefits

Chapter 16 Nine signposts: The road ahead

Abbreviations

Notes

About the book

About the author

Imprint page

To Michal

‘Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling.’

JULIAN BARNES, The Only Story, 2018.

Preface

‘I know how dangerous it is to make personal experience your main basis for authority.’1 So says Yuval Noah Harari, author of bestselling blockbusters Sapiens and Homo Deus.

Danger acknowledged, the book in your hands, Future Tense: Reflections on my Troubled Land, is very much my own singular take on select themes and events, and some of the personalities – some outsize, some obscure – who shaped the core happenings that led South Africa to the place it finds itself in in 2021, and how these may impact our future.

It has been my great good fortune to have been present at key moments when the door to the future swung on the hinges of history, and I encountered some of the more remarkable characters in our national story, and some of the players in the wider world, who shaped us and who offer useful pointers for the future.

I had the privilege of serving the longest period to date as leader of the official opposition in democratic South Africa, from 1999 to 2007. And after leaving Parliament in 2009 I was engaged in international diplomacy as South Africa’s ambassador in South America, to Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, and more recently as chairman of a local communications company and advisor to overseas consultancies. These postings provided distance from and lent perspective to the rough and tumble of public life in which I’d been engaged for over twenty-five years.

Dozens of books have appeared on local shelves chronicling what went right in the brave and inspiring new dawn of democracy in South Africa in 1994. Even more volumes have been published on what’s gone wrong since – the vertiginous slide from Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s Rainbow Nation to the Republic of Resentment and Decline. This book is, I hope, different and also more refreshing than depressing.

Neither of these destinations, utopia or dystopia, was inevitable or even, before their occurrence, likely. Both of them, and the stumbles between the two roads open to South Africa twenty-five years ago, were navigated by men and women of zeal. Some were zealous in a good sense – selfless, committed and singular in purpose – while others were greedy, c...

Table of contents

• 9781776190751