(Vol. 64, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2009)
Jack Bloom has been his party’s spokesperson in the Gauteng Legislature on Health since 1994, first for the Democratic Party (DP) and thereafter for the Democratic Alliance (DA). He was Chief Whip until assuming the role of Leader of the Opposition in December 2007, a position he held until April 2009.Today, he continues to hold the Health portfolio and is also the DA’s spokesperson on issues pertaining to corruption.
This interview was conducted by the editor on 13 May 2009.
JA: When you were elected as City Councillor for the then Democratic Party in 1991, you became just one of many Jewish politicians then holding local or national positions. Today, only two Jewish members of the National Assembly remain while you are the only Jewish Member of the Provincial Legislature (MPL) in all nine provinces. How do you explain this dramatic falling off of Jewish involvement in politics at all levels?
Jews certainly used to be very active in Johannesburg local politics – every second or third mayor was Jewish. There remains a fair number of Jewish local councilors in Johannesburg – Shirley Ancer, Ray Wolder, John Mendelson, Darren Bergman, Allen Fuchs and Marcel Bloom-Ravid for the DA, Sol Cowan and Joy Coplan in the ANC and Mervyn Cirota for the Independent Democrats. So there is still a presence at the local level.
It’s a slippery path to get from provincial government to Parliament. There’s not that many seats and you need to work your way up. Funnily enough, there are more opportunities now, because there are more seats compared to in the past. In the old Johannesburg, for example, there were 51 seats in total. Today the DA, even as the Opposition, has some sixty seats.
I wouldn’t say there’s a lack of civic action, but it’s not the kind of action that is channeled into politics. If you want to see massive civic activism by Jews it’s in the Glenhazel Active Patrol, something pioneered by the CSO and Chief Rabbi. There’s almost a withdrawal from official institutions, and a prevailing attitude that we’ll look after ourselves because the State isn’t looking after us. That’s really what GAP and its allied bodies are all about.
JA: So far as creating alternatives outside the official structures goes, we also see initiatives like Hatzollah (Medical Rescue) and the fact that most Jewish children now attend private schools.
Absolutely. So there’s been an opting out of public education, health and security, and you can’t get more basic than that. There has certainly been an inward turn, which is part of the broader phenomenon of white withdrawal from active politics. We find in certain areas people vote massively for us at election time but don’t want to join the party and become involved. We also see that our most active branches are in the townships. Politics is very real to the residents there – they have grievances they want addressed. There are obviously grievances in the[mainly white] suburbs as well, but residents there don’t see redress through politics but through self-help activities. It’s really a failure of institutions –you shouldn’t, after all, have to set up private security,because it is the primary duty of the State to protect its citizens. So while there’s a lot of talent out there,we don’t see it being channeled into political actions.
The DA won just under 17% of the national votein the last elections, increasing its overall support by nearly 4%, and with at least a third of support coming from non-white voters. How do you account for these gains?
The proportion of non-white support was probably even higher than that, actually. It’s primarily minorities who support the DA now. The ANC has evidently lost virtually all its white support. There was a visible white support in 1994, largely Jewish in fact. It was all part of the Mandela enthusiasm of the time. There were important left-leaning Jews representing the ANC in Parliament, like Jeff Peires and Andrew Feinstein, but all that’s tailed off. ANC white support was at its lowest-ever ebb in this last election.
JA: Andrew Feinstein as quite disillusioned with the ANC in the end, writing a book to that effect after resigning from Parliament.1
Absolutely – disillusionment has very much taken root. Minorities in general have turned away from the ANC, which has also lost significant colored and Indian support and is becoming de facto a uniracial party. They do, of course, appoint minorities to Cabinet posts, even if this can be seen as a form of cooption, and they have a praiseworthy attitude to diversity, in which everyone gets a place in the sun.
JA: Turning to yourself and your own career, what motivated you to go into politics?
Moral outrage against apartheid, actually – I felt it was the right thing to do. I went knocking on doors for Douglas Gibson of the Progressive Federal Part in the Bezuidenhout constituency in 1981. Then, I was not a member of the party, but a volunteer. (On that point, the PFP had a high calibre of people involved as volunteers in those days, giving time and expertise for what they saw as a worthy cause). I formally joined the PFP in 1987, and lost the council seat to Howard Bloomberg of the National Party the following year, by 28 votes. It was Bloomberg’s father, Sam, who got me into politics in the first place, in fact – I was outraged that Jews were standing for the National Party. But ultimately, I suppose I am intrinsically a political animal.
I was elected unopposed in the Highlands North constituency in August 1991, becoming the youngest member of the DP in the Johannesburg caucus. After 1994, I jumped over everyone’s heads to become one of only five DP members in the Gauteng Legislature and, because so few were elected in 1994, I am today the longest-serving DP-DA MPL in the country.
The DP did very badly in the 1994 national elections, but already was performing somewhat more strongly in the subsequent municipal elections.
We did appallingly in 1994, winning only seven parliamentary seats. We recovered to a degree in the municipal elections, and still had a base in Johannesburg, but the real breakthrough came in 1999. There we emerged as a much larger party, with more opportunities. However, even in our smallish caucus prior to that we had Jews like Peter Horwitz and Peter Leon. Today, even at branch level, there is little Jewish participation, although I see Jews as being very active in civic activism – rate-payers associations and so on – in Cape Town as well as Johannesburg. But it is very hard to get any whites, Jewish and non-Jewish, involved politically nowadays.
JA: Could you tell us something about your role within the Gauteng Legislature over the years – what kind of issues you focused on and what you feel your main achievements have been?
I’ve been Health spokesman since 1994. I was not particularly enamored with doctors and hospitals and suchlike, but was given the portfolio and ran with it. Certainly, my name recognition today on hospitals is high. I pioneered hospital visits by political representatives, and still visit hospitals very regularly, acting on complaints. The DA’s policy on health was largely written by myself – I think it’s not enough for the Opposition just to criticise; we have to have alternate policies as well.
With regard to hospital visits, the then Gauteng Health MEC Brian Hlongwa tried to bar me from conducting them, but Advocate Jules Browde of the Integrity Commission ruled in my favour, saying I could visit whenever I felt it necessary without prior notice. So I have an official ruling, applicable to any institution, which I regard as a victory for all public representatives.
I also now have a new portfolio, called Corruption (which is all pervasive across the board and not just in the health sphere). Actually, I believe I have already been very successful in exposing corruption, uncovering areas that people would prefer to remain hidden. I certainly was the one who brought down Brian Hlongwa, and can claim to have had some part in Paul Mashatile not being reappointed as Gauteng Premier.
Over the past five years, I’ve asked 380 questions in the Legislature, acquiring something of a reputation for this. The ANC was very hostile to questions initially. We started off with the spirit of ‘national unity’, in which asking a question was regarded as being almost disloyal. I can probably claim to have been the highest profile member of the Legislature since 1994. The former Speaker even acknowledged this, calling me the ‘spokesperson for the Legislature’ and saying that if it wasn’t for me people wouldn’t know that the Legislature even existed.
JA: Presumably, one of the regular issues you’ve brought up has been the HIV/Aids question.
Yes. I was the first politician in Gauteng to call for anti-retrovirals for pregnant women and rape victims. In fact, I was publicly credited in the Legislature by former Gauteng Premier Mosiuoa Shilowa with having influenced him in this regard. I was also the first to call on Mandela to make a statement on it. Looking back to the 1990s, we see how late we were in mobilising on this. I got into some controversy recently because I disapproved of condoms in schools, saying in general that condoms were not necessarily the answer (Gauteng has distributed over a billion condoms over the past ten years and the HIV rate has hardly budged). I was attacked for this by Zachie Achmat and Nathan Geffen from the Treatment Action Campaign – was accused of all sorts of things. On HIV/Aids, I believe it is a question of behavior change, and values have to be a part of it. You cannot get away from the fact that the epidemic is spread as a result of mass promiscuity and multiple partners, something many people are denying.
It was the late Chief Rabbi Harris who said that there is a 100%-effective moral vaccine for Aids. I try to bring a moral dimension to politics, and this whole ethos of ‘moral neutrality’ is wrong. I think that we need to make judgments – we may be a multi-faith and diverse country, but I do think that there are objective standards and that we do need to make moral judgments. I certainly haven’t steered clear of making value judgments, and that can be awkward in a country which is diverse.
JA: What other important areas do you think you have helped to bring to public attention?
Well, I was the one who raised the whole issue of teenage pregnancies. I obtained the figures from the Gauteng education department, and they reported a school with over fifty pregnant students. That provoked a huge public debate.
JA: That would tie in with the HIV/Aids question.
Yes, because by definition teenage pregnancies is unprotected sex. If the number of teenage pregnancies is large, that means there’s more highrisk sex, so we should find out what’s going on in these schools. It was quite pleasing to me [following my raising the issue] when I compared the relevant schools from one year to the next, and found that because we had identified high-risk schools they went in with a team and tried to improve things. The school that had had fifty pregnancies the one year did not have the next, because some action was taken. So that’s one way of working as a politician – you expose the information and affect debate that way.
JA: You have been very active in countering anti-Israel propaganda and antisemitism in your private capacity. Has this impacted on you politically?
Pot-shots have certainly been taken at me in the Legislature from time to time because I’m Jewish. The question of Israel will suddenly be raised, without any relevance to the topic at hand. Still, such incidents have been few and far between.
I must stress that I am a politician who happens to be Jewish and don’t represent Jews in my political capacity. However, as a Jew I am very concerned about antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and in my private capacity make available what expertise I can.
The eye-opener for me was the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, which I attended and where I saw how minimal Jewish activism was. That conference exposed the lack of Jewish preparedness very cruelly. Since then, fortunately, the community has built up impressive resources in this area, websites such as Its Almost Supernatural and the like.
JA: You’ve authored three books to date. Could you tell us something about them?
The first was called Black South Africans’ Disinvestment Dilemma (published by Jonathan Ball), which I saw as a treatise on political ethics – what sort of means you employ to attain what ends. It was adapted as a political ethics model and used by the Wits Business School for a course on labour relations, and the balancing of means and ends. I interviewed black trade unionists and asked if they felt it was worth putting their members out of work to force political change. It was an acute ethical dilemma that I found very interesting and which they had various ways of responding to.
Out of Step (2005) was really something I needed to get out of my system. It’s part autobiography and part presenting my views on a whole range of issues, including religion.2
The most recent book, Rising Tide – How freedom with responsibility uplifts everyone [reviewed in this issue], is a book of essays on a whole range of issues, many of which had been previously published (mostly in the Citizen, where I am now writing a regular column). It comprises a fair mix of articles, originally emails that went out every Monday to senior media people and key opinion-formers. Two of these attracted a fair amount of public attention, were discussed on Radio 702 amongst other things. Some were ultra-topical at the time, others were reflective.
I believe in the concept of liberty with responsibility concept, “How Freedom With
Responsibility Uplifts Anyone” as the subtitle of my new book has it. There are two common themes – freedom but also responsibilities – constraints.
JA: It’s a very Jewish approach, really – the idea that true freedom is bound up with self-restraint and the acceptance upon oneself of certain obligations and standards of behaviour.
Very often I put out Jewish concepts – Torah concepts – without explicitly saying so and have been amazed at how positively many people react to what they see as fresh ideas. In the beginning of Rising Tide, I include the famous quote from Hillel – “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” That has been a guiding light to me, and it summarises much of the book. So what do you do with your freedom and is your freedom going to impinge on others? It’s Pesach leading up to Shavuot – freedom followed by the acceptance upon the nation of certain responsibilities.
NOTES
- Andrew Feinstein, After The Party: A Personal and Political Journey inside the ANC, Jonathan Ball, 2007
- Reviewed in the Pesach 2006 issue of Jewish Affairs.
