Michael Trapido takes an optimistic view of Pieter Mulder’s accession to the Zuma cabinet in this post:

During the Zuma presidency land redistribution as well as the plight of farmers in general are likely to become, among others, items requiring top priority. Accordingly, in practical terms, there can be no doubting that Mulder will and should be able to play a significant role in the cabinet in respect thereof.

Land redistribution has to be dealt with urgently because 15 years post-apartheid the black community has not, in real terms, even begun to see ownership that represents the demographics of this country. If we have a repeat of the same pace as we’ve seen in the past 15 years then I will be asking questions of the government.

Therefore it is important to this exercise that a very important stakeholder in this exercise be represented at the highest levels of government.

In order to achieve the goal of effective land redistribution without making the same mistakes as Zimbabwe it is important that the Afrikaans community, and particularly the farmers, be able to add their guidance and experience to that of the government’s appointed officials.

I would certainly like this to be true. Pieter Mulder is hardly my favourite South African politician, but he’s a relative moderate compared to the majority of his own party, and there’s definitely value to be gained from having a diverse set of views represented in the cabinet. But Trapido’s analysis misses something important. He treats the ANC’s rapprochement with the Freedom Front as a new phenomenon driven entirely by Jacob Zuma. But while Zuma’s efforts to reach out to white Afrikaners are unprecedented, the ANC’s relationship with the FF+ has been ambiguous for years now. In private, many ANC politicians admit to feelings of ambivalence or even sympathy for the FF+, in contrast to their heated animosity for the DA. Certainly, the FF+ has never been subjected to the sort of white-hot rhetoric that is regularly directed at the DA, even though it lies much further away from the ANC on the policy spectrum.

The reason for this, I suspect, is that the ANC believes in a governing model of pluralism. The ANC views South African society as a collection of competing interest groups, each with their own representatives, and itself as the arbiter that balances out them out. According to this model, the FF+ poses no threat to the ANC - on the contrary, the ANC actually needs a group like the FF+ to enunciate the views of its Afrikaner constituency. By contrast, the DA is not content to be merely an interest group in an ANC-dominated system; it views itself as a government-in-waiting and harbours ambitions (whether realistic or not) to supplant the ANC as arbiter.

This, rather any disagreement on policy, is why the ANC prefers the company of the Freedom Front to that of the DA, and why Mulder’s cabinet appointment should not really come as a surprise. (There is also the strategic fact that the FF+, by competing for votes on the DA’s right flank, makes it more difficult for the DA to move to the centre. This indirectly benefits the ANC in elections; not that it really needs the help.) But while co-opting Mulder makes sense for both Zuma and Mulder (in the latter’s case, a cabinet position is pretty much the apex of any political career, and it’s clear that he wasn’t going to get one in any non-ANC government), it’s less evident that this benefits the Freedom Front itself, given that the party’s very identity is bound up in being a purer and more distinctly right-wing alternative to the DA. Unless Mulder can prove that he’s had some actual impact on policy before the next election - and as a mere deputy-minister, this is highly unlikely - there is every reason to expect that the FF+ will go the way of the NNP, a party that once occupied a similar position on the South African political spectrum.