Can Zackie Achmat Change South Africa From Inside Parliament?

“Most of you have been here, doing this for more than a year,” he told the room, a group that ranged from those young enough to be first-time voters to those old enough to have grown up under apartheid. He reminded them that the election was not an end point but—if he won—a moment of transition. They were not just running a campaign; they were building a movement that would need to last through Achmat’s five-year term.

Mandla Majola, who has been organizing alongside Achmat for more than two decades, spoke up from the back of the conference room: “This is the failure of many activists. We’re good at taking care of others but fail to take care of ourselves.” His choice of words was revealing. As Achmat broke the team into groups to discuss steps they could take to protect their health, it was no longer obvious whether this was a campaign meeting or a lesson in movement organizing. For Achmat, there was no reason it couldn’t be both.

One of the most successful activists in South African history, Achmat crusaded against apartheid and, after the country’s democratic transition in 1994, to secure LGBTQ+ equality. He drew international attention in the late 1990s when he launched the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a grassroots movement that helped win affordable access to HIV treatment globally. But he now believes he has reached the limits of outsider activism in South Africa.

Taking advantage of a 2023 change to the electoral law that allowed candidates to run for legislative seats without the backing of a party for the first time, Achmat has spent the past year assembling movements of young people, people with disabilities, people without secure housing, and members of the LGBTQ+ community and hopes to ride their support into office. He is not promising them legislative success if elected. In fact, he is not promising them anything except to use his parliamentary privileges to help compel the government to meet specific demands they believe will help secure their rights and improve their lives. Essentially, Achmat is positioning himself to be the outsider’s insider.

At the same time, he is curious to try on the role of politician. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the country has been ruled by the African National Congress (ANC). Once the party of Nelson Mandela, its leaders are now dogged by allegations of corruption. Achmat, once a card-carrying party member, believes decades of scandals have contributed to a widespread perception that the party no longer works on behalf of its constituents but to line its members’ pockets. That has dampened voter participation and—30 years after the ANC took power—now threatens the future of the country’s democracy. He wants to help restore faith in politics by demonstrating how a lawmaker can engage citizens.

“I just want to show people what the position can do,” he said.

Achmat takes part in a Treatment Action Campaign protest outside Parliament in Cape Town on Feb. 16, 2005. Protesters marched to Parliament to call on the government to treat 200,000 people living with HIV. Obed Zilwa/AP

His rupture with the ANC came during his years campaigning with TAC. The movement’s original goal was to force multinational drug companies to make HIV treatment affordable to people across the global south. Already contending with resistance from the pharmaceutical giants and their backers in the U.S. and European governments, TAC’s work became even more difficult in the early 2000s when President Thabo Mbeki began entertaining the lies of HIV denialists.

Their claims that AIDS was not linked to the virus, but instead the result of poverty or poor diet, led Mbeki’s health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, to infamously encourage people living with HIV to use garlic and beetroot to manage their condition. Tshabalala-Msimang was also among the members of the administration who denied the scientific evidence that antiretroviral drugs could reduce an HIV infection to the point of undetectability and frustrated the activists’ efforts to expand access to treatment.

Achmat, who can turn uncompromising in his anger, dropped out of the party in 2004 at the height of Mbeki’s denialism. Despite his outrage at the president and his acolytes, Achmat and the rest of the TAC leadership were careful to maintain links with the ANC. They understood that they could not afford to alienate the many TAC activists who were still members.

Achmat and former South African President Nelson Mandela at Achmat’s home in Cape Town in July 2002. Anna Zieminski/AFP via Getty Images

But Achmat now believes there was a naivete in the movement’s continued engagement with the ANC leadership. In the immediate post-apartheid era, there was a “belief that the ANC could do everything” toward effecting the progressive vision its leaders had laid out ahead of assuming power “as long as there’s a bit of pressure from outside,” he said. “We focused on good governance, accountability, openness, believing that it’s just a matter of opening eyes rather than a very real material interest.”

Jacob Zuma’s presidency, which began in 2009, disabused him of that perspective. Achmat spent much of that time helping to launch campaigns in Cape Town, including efforts to improve the region’s rail services and to demand affordable housing. But he was also increasingly fixated on the monied interests capturing the state, seemingly with the president’s permission. As evidence mounted in 2017 that Zuma’s administration was effectively controlled by the Guptas, three businessmen brothers with long-standing ties to the president, Achmat helped organize a march to Parliament demanding Zuma be recalled.

The president ultimately stepped down from office the following year rather than face a parliamentary vote of no confidence over the corruption allegations. Nevertheless, in the solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic-era lockdowns, Achmat concluded that the only way to compel politicians to fully deliver on the constitution’s promises of freedom, equality, and dignity was “through political power both inside and outside.”

This was around the time of a 2020 ruling from the Constitutional Court declaring it unconstitutional to prevent independent candidates from standing for the National Assembly, prompting the change in the country’s electoral law. Until that point, citizens had voted for parties, which then filled their National Assembly seats from a candidate list. The Assembly members, in turn, selected the president. Now, for the upcoming election, there will still be a national ballot but also a new regional ballot specific to each of the country’s nine provinces, listing independent candidates alongside parties.

That opening spurred conversations in Achmat’s circles, with them “playing around with the idea of what an alternative looks like, what it means if an alternative would be born out of this civil society.” said Zukie Vuka, who first met Achmat as a student organizing for better schools. Ultimately, Achmat and his comrades hit on a model they think might work.

Achmat holds a campaign sign as he joins thousands of people in the annual Cape Town Pride parade on March 2. Rodger Bosch/AFP via Getty Images

Despite the lack of funding or party infrastructure, the lifelong movement-builder is convinced he can still win by building another movement. Actually, he’s building several movements. For the past year, Achmat and a core group of comrades drawn from a lifetime of activism have been organizing across a wide spate of groups: people living in informal settlements, young people, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. They are mostly drawn from the townships that surround downtown Cape Town, areas where the apartheid government began relocating the Black and mixed-race—“Coloured,” in South African parlance—communities in earnest in the 1960s.

Within these areas, there is a rage that is echoed in Black and Coloured communities across South Africa. After withstanding the abuse, torture, and disenfranchisement of the apartheid regime, many allowed themselves to believe in the ANC’s promise of a post-1994 transformation that would deliver on the tenets of freedom and equality and make room for everyone to thrive economically. Yet, 30 years later, with inequality as deep as ever, there is a fear that the ANC’s promised miracle has passed them by—or that it never arrived at all.

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In the Cape Town communities where Achmat has rooted his campaign, there is an equivalent frustration with the Democratic Alliance—the national opposition party that has controlled the Western Cape government since 2009—and a growing distrust of political parties, in general.

Achmat is keenly aware of this skepticism because he shares it, which is why he is organizing movements instead of a political party.

He has cautioned the activist forums that he is building not to expect systemic transformation at the outset but to rally around policies that will improve people’s lives. For instance, the youth forum, dubbed Youth in Action, wants to curb the drug and alcohol abuse that is rampant among unemployed young people. Achmat and the other seasoned activists have encouraged them to begin with achievable targets, though, such as limiting alcohol advertisements around schools and restricting the hours that alcohol is sold, hoping that these initial victories will win them new followers and help build toward more sweeping solutions.

Since announcing his candidacy in March 2023, Achmat has spent much of his time forgoing door-to-door campaigning, which he doesn’t much enjoy, to help the forums craft their strategies. “I believe the campaign I’m working on is a knowledge-based campaign,” he said. “It is not, ‘Here’s the candidate. Let him kiss your lovely baby.’ I’ve built up a store of knowledge with a bunch of activists. We are going to share that knowledge.”

Like so many people in Cape Town over the decades, Gadija Abrahams Idas credits Achmat with her political awakening. It happened when the 20-year-old went to a candidate meeting in her area, Eerste River, and quizzed Achmat about how he planned to deliver jobs and improve their schools.

Achmat talks with a seller at a Cape Town market in November 2022.Jay Caboz/Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism

With the slightly ironic smile that is something of his trademark, “he told me he’s going to do nothing,” she said. “He told me he’s going to teach us, give us the tools to do it ourselves.”

In this way, it’s the same activist model Achmat has followed his entire life—except that he now believes political power is necessary to speed and sustain any transformations. So even as he encouraged Idas to join Youth in Action, he also asked her to campaign for his candidacy.

If he is elected, he has pledged to do whatever he can to support the activist forums. That means arming activists with vital information that a lawmaker might prefer they not see by releasing reports or contracts that might normally get snarled in bureaucracy. He also aims to win a place on a committee with spending oversight and then leverage the position to hold his peers to account. Even if he misses out on his preferred assignments, he will still have the right to attend committee sessions, to ask questions, and to bring his activists to the hearings.

“His role in Parliament is not to be a voice for the voiceless,” Vuka said. “His role in Parliament is to get in there and open up the books.”

And if he fails in his campaign, Achmat still intends to maintain the activist forums and continue to press for improvements to people’s lives that politicians are not delivering. This is his answer to critics who accuse him of running a campaign as a vanity project.

“I’d be disappointed,” he said. “But for me, ultimately, the most important thing is the movement that’s come out of it.”

Achmat, with his dog, Nawal, poses for a portrait at his apartment in Cape Town in November 2022, wearing TAC’s trademark HIV-positive T-shirt.Jay Caboz/Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism

Tired of political parties that have done nothing to improve her life, she told a pack of Achmat supporters that she was not planning to vote at all in the upcoming election. “Our mothers voted for ANC, and they never saw any changes,” she said. “They keep on voting, but we don’t see anything.”

This is an increasingly common reaction. Less than half of all eligible voters turned out for the last national elections in 2019.

But when Achmat’s supporters filled Mishikwane in on his biography, she got excited that he “might change the situation we are seeing.” In the hurry to register more supporters, there was no time to dive into his theory of change: that it would come slowly and only if people like her joined in the organizing efforts.

But even if Mishikwane doesn’t join any of the movements that have sprung up around his campaign, Achmat believes he can still go some way toward meeting her expectations. As he inches closer to political office, he understands that it will give him power beyond movement-building. And he is warming to the idea of exercising it.

There is no reason that he cannot bring the weight of his position into conversations with a local social security agency office, for instance, where bureaucracy is making it difficult for people to register for benefits. And he is willing to coordinate with like-minded politicians to deliver legislation that cuts across party boundaries, even if it means reining in his usual scorched-earth tactics, like the time in 2003 when he helped launch a civil disobedience campaign by leading a group of TAC members to a Cape Town police station and demanding officers either arrest Tshabalala-Msimang and Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin for failing to provide treatment to people living with HIV or the demonstrators. He jokes that he has mellowed with age.

He will also be uniquely positioned to gain a national profile, said William Gumede, a political analyst who is working during this election cycle to coordinate a multiparty opposition coalition.

“He’s going to be quoted every day, able to address constituencies, civil society organizations, communities,” Gumede said. “And compared to many political party leaders who don’t have substance, who can’t have a debate, he can do all of those things.”

Most of all, in the wake of the Zuma years, Achmat wants to model what a responsive politician can look like. And though he does not pretend he can single-handedly restore people’s faith in South Africa’s democracy, Majola, the organizer, is convinced Achmat has the capacity “to get people to believe again. The whole idea is to help them to dream again.”

Yet the candidate is fearful of going too far down the path of becoming a politician, aware that sometimes “it doesn’t matter with what good intentions you go in or how good a person you are.”

Part of the impetus to build an extraparliamentary movement is that there will be a structure to hold him accountable. He has actually signed contracts with the activist forums pledging, among other things, to name corrupt companies and officials, to hold monthly constituency meetings, and to stand down immediately if he is charged with corruption. If he fails in any of his obligations, he has urged his followers to recall him. He also promises to keep his own council, though, aware that without independence, there is a risk of tipping over into populism.

But to begin executing any of these careful plans, Achmat first has to win.

The campaign estimates that he needs about 85,000 votes to secure a position outright. The candidate is “cautiously optimistic” he can hit that total. If he does, that’s when the real work will begin.

Some of the photos used for this article were provided by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism in South Africa. Learn more at Bhekisisa.org.