Peter Marais and the Freedom Front Plus: A match made in opportunists’ heaven

Peter Marais has found his seventh political home in democratic South Africa.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Groenewald announced that Marais would stand as the party’s candidate for Western Cape Premier in the 2019 general elections.

“Mr Marais is a seasoned politician,” said Groenewald, which may be an understatement.

The 70-year-old Marais, who served in the apartheid-era Tricameral Parliament, has since hitched his colours to the National Party, the new National Party, the DA, the New Labour Party, Cope and the Independent Civic Organisation of South Africa (Icosa).

In recent years, he has been most visible as the founder of the Bruin Belange Beweging (Brown Empowerment Movement).

In a statement from Marais, he explained that his decision to stand as the FF Plus candidate is being undertaken with the “backing” of the BBB.

“The BBB will retain its own identity as a pressure group for the protection of coloured people’s rights,” Marais said — adding that the relationship between the BBB and the FF Plus is “not written in ink”.

Even in the often surreal landscape of South African politics, the marriage between Marais and the FF Plus has a fever-dream quality. Marais was unable to talk to Daily Maverick on Tuesday.

On paper, what binds the two is a concern for minority rights — of coloured people and white people respectively — and a commitment to advocacy for Afrikaans speakers.

What attracted the FF Plus to Marais, claims Groenewald, is the fact that “he offers such expertise and experience that it undoubtedly makes him the Western Cape’s top premier candidate”.

This ignores the fact that Marais’ tenure as Western Cape Premier and Cape Town Mayor saw him lurch from one controversy to the next, with the final nail in his coffin being accusations of sexual harassment by four women — charges of which he was subsequently cleared in court.

During Marais’ short-lived stint at Cope, his chequered political record was seen as a gift by an ANC anxious to clip the wings of Mosiuoa Lekota’s breakaway party.

A 2009 document leaked to Mail & Guardian, allegedly commissioned by the ANC to gather damaging information on Cope leaders, listed under Marais’ name “13 cases of ‘political idiocy’, alleged sexual harassment and fraud”.

Among the instances of “political idiocy” to which the ANC was likely referring were Marais’ unilateral decision to rename Cape Town’s Wale and Adderley Streets after FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela; his practice of paying a “spiritual adviser” R500 an hour while he was Mayor of Cape Town; and his proposal to erect loudspeakers all over Cape Town to enable him to address citizens directly.

The most obvious reason why the FF Plus would be willing to overlook this record is in order to gamble on Marais’ supposed ability to garner coloured votes for a party hitherto assumed to be attractive almost exclusively to white voters.

As Groenewald himself put it:

“It shows that the FF Plus is serious about reaching out to minorities.”

Whether Marais does indeed have a magic appeal to the Western Cape’s coloured voters is, to say the least, open to question. In 2004, when Marais was still vivid in the public consciousness from his Western Cape leadership positions, he contested the elections under the banner of a party he founded named the New Labour Party.

It managed to win just 13,318 votes.

While the FF Plus has occasionally paid lip service to the rights of the Khoi-San in the past — evidently as a means of bolstering their wider argument about the rights of South African minority groups — it will be interesting to see if they would back Marais on issues such as land and re-naming now that he is part of the FF Plus family.

Then again, perhaps it is Marais who will shape-shift to fit the diameters of the FF Plus.

The selection of Marais as premier candidate by the FF Plus is clearly intended as a warning shot fired over the bows of the DA. In reality, DA strategists may be hooting with glee.

Peter Marais in his own words

On the laying of sexual harassment charges against him in 2002: “The gay lobby inside the DA is very strong and they want to destroy me because of my attacks on homosexuals.”

On Marthinus van Schalkwyk “stealing” the Western Cape premiership from him in 2003:

“I trusted Marthinus like Caesar trusted Brutus, but refused to die like Caesar. After the many battles I fought and won, I could only ask him: ‘Et tu, Brute?’ ”

During the August 2003 defamation case Marais brought after being accused of sexual harassment by a provincial minister:

“I would be the most stupid politician south of the Sahara if I had to kafoefel with the minister in the office of the premier, and I am not stupid otherwise I wouldn’t have survived so long in politics.”

During the same case, during which he also claimed that God spoke to him in his dreams:

“I move on the world stage and am one of the few people who can meet with Yasser Arafat and [former German politician] Dr Edmund Stoiber.”

On announcing the formation of the short-lived New Labour Party in 2003:

“No more will we allow ourselves to be humiliated by white politicians.”

In a Facebook post in 2013:

“Any coloured person or white person who still supports and votes ANC is like an abused woman who thinks that if she marries the man who abuses her, that he will stop doing so. But of course, there are such stupid women.”

On announcing he was standing as the FF Plus Premier candidate in 2019:

“All people come from brown people. Black people are just darker brown people. And white people are just lighter brown.” DM