Among the criticisms directed at Mosiuoa Lekota and his colleagues in the new ‘Congress of the People’ (COP) is that before they broke away from the African National Congress (ANC) they supported some of the very ANC policies they now deplore.

The accusation is true, but beside the point.

Much of the delving into the history of breakaways ignores two of the most instructive.  When Helen Suzman and some of her colleagues broke away from the United Party (UP) in 1959, they had been members of its parliamentary caucus for several years. However reluctantly, they had therefore supported its policies. They quit when they could stomach the UP no longer and formed the Progressive Party (the PP).

In 1975, Harry Schwarz, who had long been a UP member of parliament (MP), broke away over that party’s betrayal of the rule of law. But he had earlier followed the party line. His breakaway – which led to the metamorphosis of the PP into the Progressive Reform Party in 1976  - helped to precipitate the demise of the UP.

As with the breakaways from the UP, what will validate Lekota’s breakaway is what he subsequently achieves, not what he might have previously supported. Three things are now critical.

One is that the COP establishes itself well enough to worry the ANC. It will do this if it slices off a big enough chunk of the ANC’s current almost 75% majority in Parliament to reduce it to below 50% in the general election next year. But even if that is unattainable, the new party must do well enough in both the national and the provincial elections next year to present a real threat in the next election but one.

The second critical thing is policy. Lekota and Co have been pressing some of the right buttons here, none more important than the need for electoral reform that introduces proper constituencies while retaining the advantages of proportional representation. Our present constituencies are a sham: they do not choose their representatives, but instead have to put up with whoever the party ‘deploys’ to them.

This undermines democracy by shifting the balance of power from voters to party bosses. One consequence is that, as some MPs privately admit, their freedom of speech in Parliament itself is severely limited by the fact that if they offend the party leadership and are expelled from the party they automatically lose their seats and become jobless. Another consequence is to breed contempt of the electorate. MPs whose re-election next year depended on first being nominated by a constituency would be less likely to have defrauded Parliament and the taxpayers in the ‘Travelgate’ scam. MPs accountable to constituencies would be less likely to have toed the party line over AIDS.

However, adopting different policies from those of the ANC over electoral reform and other issues is not enough. The COP also needs to position itself differently – the third critical issue.  Here the COP is getting it wrong. This column argued a month ago that there was not much point to the whole breakaway if the new party turned out simply to be a clone of the ANC.

This danger now looms.   

For a party to style itself the ‘congress of the people’ is a totalitarian pretension that has no place in a multi-party democracy. The choice of the party’s name is no doubt designed to enable it to project itself as the home of true believers while branding the ANC as apostates.  But ‘Congress of the People’ harks back to 1955, when a conference of that name in Kliptown, Soweto, adopted the Freedom Charter, a blueprint strongly influenced by the South African Communist Party. This tired old document is not the right starting point for a modern party.

Squabbles as to who the rightful upholders of the Freedom Charter are might be an amusing sideshow. But they will have no relevance to the issues the new party should place before the electorate next year.  

Perhaps Lekota and his colleagues should take a leaf out of Barrack Obama’s book and look to the future, not the past.