Ex-politician’s new role in life is ‘advocacy’, at the helm of the Helen Suzman Foundation, writes

When the private sector becomes ‘more and more involved in peace enforcement . .. you’re talking about an environment where there are no rules. And where there are no rules the first victim is human rights’

Greener Pastures: Raenette Taljaard says that leaving Parliament has enabled her to reclaim her intellectual independence.

For five years Democratic Alliance member of Parliament Raenette Taljaard was the brightest star in South African politics. Then 18 months ago, still only 32 years old, she went out. She quit her party and she quit Parliament.

Such was the impact of her contribution, as shadow finance minister and scourge of the government, that her sudden departure came as a shock and caused a flurry of speculation.

Now she is back, on a smaller stage, as director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, a liberal democratic think tank established by the woman who inspired her to go into politics but couldn’t persuade her to stay.

Taljaard’s goal is “mainstreaming liberal values into the living, breathing, daily reality of South Africans’ lives”. It’s a fight that civil society needs to take up, she says.

Taljaard’s relationship with the DA was an uneasy one, not least because she opposed its formation in the first place ­ out of a merger between the Democratic Party and the National Party.

After seeing so much of her on the small screen, it’s a slightly startling experience to confront Taljaard in the flesh, as she leads one into an office in Rosebank, Johannesburg, that has about as much character and appeal as a dentist’s waiting room.

She is an imposing woman, both physically (at about 1.83m tall) and intellectually. She is very intelligent, and likes to show it, and attractive.

If you want to know why her party colleagues were not grief-stricken by her departure then these are not irrelevant observations.

If you’re young, bright, good-looking and a media star in the making then you’d better have a modicum of humility or you are not going to be universally liked and admired. Certainly not in the snake pit of clashing egos which is Parliament.

Humble, diffident and self-effacing are not adjectives that spring readily to mind with Taljaard. It is not hard to see why her meteoric rise and high public profile might have been resented. There were mutterings about her lack of commitment to constituency work, the unglamorous nitty-gritty of party politics which is done away from the glare of television cameras.

Taljaard is unapologetic.

“Ask any MP how easy it is to parachute into an area that didn’t elect you and where there may be four other MPs from four other political parities doing exactly what you’re doing in an alleged constituency. It’s farcical, I’m sorry. It’s a farcical system.”

Questions about her commitment ­ DA leader Tony Leon called her “the accidental tourist” ­ were raised again when she went off to Yale in the US on a fellowship.

In 2004 her name was put so low down on the DA’s election list that she would never have made it back to Parliament if Leon hadn’t intervened to have her bumped up. Nine months later she rewarded him by leaving. They have not spoken to each other since.

It was the end of a friendship that began when Leon welcomed her into the DP as a researcher and then persuaded her to enter Parliament.

While she was doing her master’s degree in public administration and public policy at the London School of Economics, Leon and old Progressive Party stalwart Colin Eglin asked her out for tea when they were passing through London.

She became Leon’s speech writer in 1999, which she found “very difficult” because she was “an academic, not a writer of sound bites”.

She wrote his speeches for the infamous “fight back” campaign, which was widely interpreted as racist. She was “a little bit uncomfortable with it”.

Taljaard says she got on “brilliantly” with Leon, “but that didn’t mean that I left my judgment at the front door”. She had “conversations” with him about strategic and policy differences “which put our friendship under a lot of strain”.

It was said that she found his autocratic style hard to live with. True?

She refuses to put Leon in a bad light, she says. But since leaving Parliament, she has been “absolutely delighted to reclaim my intellectual independence. That, to me, was the biggest sacrifice.”

She doubts if she will ever return to party politics. “I look at friends, across party lines, who do that every day and I know the emotional turmoil that’s involved. They live it every day in ways that would completely go over people’s heads unless you’re in that environment ... In that heart-wrenching sense, when you have to wake up every morning and ask: ‘Is there something
that my party did yesterday that I can live with?’”

She concedes that her decision to “live with it” was the result of self-interest. “One could be harsh and say I made my own trade-offs.”

Among these was her desire to play a part in the arms deal investigation which had just started when she came to Parliament.

She and Gavin Woods (who represented the Inkatha Freedom Party at the time) took a relentless hammering in the select public accounts committee where they stood virtually alone, trying to prevent a cover-up *1.

“It was like pseudo-psychological warfare. And if you really want to ask about constituency work, I was going through probably the most challenging time in my existence, practically alone in large parts, with people still yapping at my heels about constituency work and not understanding the personal sacrifice of being the point person on the arms deal. Having no clue, absolutely no clue.”

She is not surprised that Germany has started investigating bribery allegations related to the deal. “Arms deals are notorious. When they are covered up they leak for years *2.”

Taljaard’s English is fluent. It’s hard to believe that she was brought up in an Afrikaans-speaking home on the West Rand, and went to an Afrikaans school, Vorentoe High in Auckland Park.

Her parents (her stepfather taught English and is a school principal) spoke English when they didn’t want Raenette and her sister to know what they were saying. “We realised very early on that we were going to get on top of this game, and we did” ­ by learning English.

Her sister emigrated to Canada but that is not for Taljaard, who has just returned from a three-week trip there.

The “boredom and predictability” would kill her. “We’ve become people who live in the middle. We don’t quite want full-on anarchy, but at the same time the other is also a bit off-putting to us. We like straddling the middle.”

A high-ranking military officer from Canada, whom she met at Yale, told her she was lucky to live in South Africa. “I live in Canada,” he explained, “where the biggest crisis is if Tim Horton’s runs out of doughnuts.”

The way things are going it’s the kind of crisis she could happily live with right now, though.

“Sometimes I think we can do with a bit less excitement. It’s been too much. Every minute on the television, the radio, in the newspaper. It’s just too much gruesome stuff. It penetrates your awareness every five seconds.”

At school she did target shooting in the cadets and read Andre Brink, who made her think “there’s something seriously wrong in my society”.

At Rand Afrikaans University she read politics and constitutional law. The Codesa negotiations for a new South Africa were under way and every day “I had to rip pages out of my books because suddenly the distinction between ‘own’ and ‘general’ affairs didn’t exist anymore”.

Taljaard’s research at Yale was on the proliferation of private military companies. The DA might not have appreciated her work there, but the ANC’s Kader Asmal did. She mentions proudly that she was the first MP to be invited to appear as an expert witness before the joint standing committee on Defence chaired by Asmal.

Pushing for international legislation to control the privatisation of military activity has become her mission in life. In October she will address the international security forum in Zurich on the subject, and she is compiling an impressive list of international publications to which she has contributed and which she hopes will contribute towards a PhD from the University of Cape Town.

Her role in life now is “advocacy” and she clearly sees the Helen Suzman Foundation as a useful vehicle.

“When you’re talking about the private sector becoming more and more involved in peace enforcement, and indeed in warfare, you’re talking about an environment where there are no rules. And where there are no rules the first victim is human rights,” she says.

When she’s not watching World Cup Soccer with her 51-year-old Italian lover, luxury leather goods manufacturer Lucio Gottardo, she’s reading up on “fourth generation warfare, rules of engagement and military strategy”.

Not that she hasn’t had moments of sublime optimism, however. She dated Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s controversial “adviser” Mario Ambrosini for more than a year after meeting him at the opera. “Our relationship was thoroughly operatic from there onwards.”

It inspired from Finance Minister Trevor Manuel the “personal and really offensive” comment that she should be investigated for Mafia links. But he sent her a handwritten note saying he’d overstepped the mark and was very sorry.

Taljaard accepts that he was “feeling a bit hot under the collar about the Iraqi oil story”.

No need to guess who had been applying the heat.

With acknowledgements to Chris Barron and Sunday Times.