Build One South Africa (BOSA) leader, Mmusi Maimane, dropped into The Common Sense offices this week, sitting down with staff to reflect on the future of opposition politics in South Africa.

Maimane believes that the true test of South Africa’s democracy lies not in the fate of its largest parties, but in the capacity of new entrants to hold the balance of power.

As Maimane described the Build One South Africa campaign, the process was both liberating and fraught. “The good is that I think you’ve got the freedom to shape ideas. You’ve got an opportunity to engage a new audience. We fought for a job in every home, and I think we did try new things, new ways and some ways of campaigning. Some succeeded, some didn’t. We met and we worked with new people. It wasn’t this routine kind of campaign,” he explained.

Yet building a new political brand is an uphill battle. “It’s expensive. Electioneering is a very expensive game. You are up against fairly big parties and so brand recognition is hard. So for me, one of the tough things was that people would keep coming to me and say, ‘Yeah, you are from the DA.’ Undoing that brand association and then trying to redo and work on a new brand association is hard work,” Maimane said.

Describing the “ugly,” Maimane pointed to the rise of the MK Party and the shock of seeing the ANC’s support plummet. “We didn’t see that coming to the extent that it is. I mean, there were some polls that suggested 5%, 6%, but for them to be where they were and for the ANC to be where it ended up was, for me, some of the more difficult bits. Obviously, that summed up in some ways the election outcomes.”

Pressed on the role of money in campaigns, Maimane argued that trust in a leader is central to attracting new donors. “There’s no one who raises more money in an organization than the leader of the organization. If the leader can’t do that, the organization suffers because no one just backs a brand, they back someone. Most donors have a particular interest, they want to see particular outcomes.”

Not wasted votes

For Maimane, small parties are not wasted votes but essential actors in South Africa’s coalition future. “South Africans must never underplay the idea that when elephants sit in one room, you need somebody to not only metaphorically keep the thing together. Secondly, be able to cast that vote that decides the stability and the future of the country,” he said. “People are always thinking, ‘Don’t vote for this party because it’s too small.’ I think you need to think about it differently. You need to say, ‘Vote for this party because it’s effective, and it is effective because it holds the deciding votes.’”

He rejected the argument that new or small parties simply split the vote, pointing to the proportional system. “Even if you have 5%, it’s a 5% that represents somebody that could hold the balance of power,” he said, adding that coalition governance will require “people who are sensible, who may not have 51% entirely. No one is going to have that. So give a vote to someone who can hold the balance of power in a sensible manner.”

Expanding on the performance of MK, Maimane said, “There’s a clear dissatisfaction with the way they run the country. In KZN… how disliked President Ramaphosa is there as a candidate. Keeping in mind, candidates lift parties or can bring them down depending on where the candidate is good or bad. President Ramaphosa polls, I would imagine, well in other parts of the country. But horribly in KZN. And horribly amongst traditional leaders. And horribly against those who are sympathetic to President Zuma because those who were thought to themselves, ‘Here’s a president who’s been persecuted.’” He argued that MK built its campaign on “money, message, and a mobilization machine,” drawing on ANC structures and a politics of grievance.

Maimane warned that “if we fragment our politics to tribalism and identity alone, we will lose ideas. We will become a patronage state, and then we’ll become a failed state.”

Short on results

Asked about the Government of National Unity, he described it as a project big on intent but short on results. “I read the statement of intent and I left it at that. It was intent. Didn’t mean it was going to be delivered. And South Africa’s big challenge is that it lives with intent. It intends to deal with corruption. It intends to do many other things, but it doesn’t quite have a plan around those things.”

He criticised the ANC’s grip on coalition bargaining, saying, “The DA went into negotiating, saying we have no other option but you. That’s the worst position you can do because it painted the alternative as doomsday. So when it went in, it was easy pickings for the ANC. The only debate then became what positions do you want? Because that’s the only language the ANC understands. It doesn’t understand the language of, ‘What policies do you want to advance?’”

For Maimane, the way forward lies in real local partnerships and a new political conversation that moves beyond old frames. “What if we begin to think about our economy, you know… with I feel like sometimes we’ve stopped even debating. The world is talking about AI. It talks about the world of work differently. And yet you and I are still trying to figure out how many heads will get into spaces of work. Some of the debates are old.”

Future

Looking ahead, he described the mission of Build One South Africa as “improving educational outcomes so that we have the brightest kids competing in the world,” demanding ethical leadership, and using infrastructure as a catalyst for growth. “Let’s just take one idea. What if we were to build rail between Gauteng, North West, Bloemfontein, and Mpumalanga, build high-speed rail? That could almost immediately, were you to execute on that project with enough blended finance, you could see a million jobs come through.”

South Africa, he concluded, needs “not only an alternative of parties, it needs an alternative of thinking, and if we can form a coalition with a number of parties that think differently, go seek a mandate from the people about how to think about the world differently, what policies would be different, what new ideas we’ll put on the table…”

For Maimane, the crisis of South African politics is an opportunity for voters to demand new answers, and to expect more than intent. He insists the country is “tired, it’s boring, it’s old,” and that the time has come for “a new future, a new way of thinking.”