What Mmusi’s exit means for black liberalism and opposition politics

Helen Zille is resplendent in red, on a blue DA podium. She puts on her reading glasses and announces the new leader of SA’s official opposition party: "Mmusi Maaai-mane," she declaims, her voice shrill as she is drowned out by roars of approval from the party faithful.

This is followed by deafening chants of "Mmusi, Mmusi, Mmusi" as 1,200 delegates at the DA’s 2015 federal congress in Port Elizabeth usher in the party’s first black leader.

In his acceptance speech Aloysias "Mmusi" Maimane says: "I simply don’t agree with those who say they don’t see colour; because if you don’t see that I’m black, then you don’t see me."

The address from the charismatic "Pastor Al", as Maimane was known to congregants of the Roodepoort church where he once preached, was a hit with the delegates, 90% of whom voted for him to take over the leadership of SA’s largest opposition party.

Four years later and 18 months into his second term as DA leader, Maimane, dressed in black, last week solemnly stepped into the media glare, on a DA podium now draped in black, and announced his resignation. Zille, again dressed in red, stood next to him.

She started off as his champion and in the end midwifed his downfall in her new, comeback position as DA federal council chair. The fanfare of his pathbreaking election was long gone and Maimane stood before SA, a broken man from a broken party. It brought to mind his most powerful speech in parliament in which he described then president Jacob Zuma as a broken man.

Maimane’s resignation comes after the recommendations of a three-man review panel, appointed by him, to assess the DA’s disappointing 2019 general election performance, when — for the first time since 1994 — it lost support. In May the DA’s support fell, across all race groups, including among minorities, its traditional base. The decline was most pronounced among coloured and white voters, many of whom shifted to the Freedom Front Plus. Maimane’s leadership had not yielded the outcome Zille had hoped for — growth built on a significant rise in black voter support. The DA vote fell from 22.23% in 2014 to 20.77% this year.

The DA was shooting upwards in 2016 — mostly due to the corruption crisis in the ANC under Jacob Zuma: opinion polls just after the local elections three years ago forecast it could rise above 35% in the 2019 election. Now, according to the final review report, the DA is tracking below 20% in its internal polling.

Maimane’s resignation was inevitable. By his own performance criteria he failed to grow the party, and bled support among its core white base. The review panel says that while "immensely talented", he could be "indecisive, inconsistent and conflict-averse", and that this led to a lack of clarity about the party’s vision, confusion on key issues and deep divisions in its national caucus.

Maimane’s indecisiveness could perhaps be attributed to the dual forces he sought to please — the "old guard" who pushed him to the top of the party, as well as the constituency it expected him to attract: black voters.

The panel recommended that he step down as leader — and he did just that.

But his departure has set in motion a further reckoning for the party as it faces contradictions over its brand of liberalism — specifically, its stance on race and redress of historic black inequality. Maimane has brought the issue into sharper focus by saying the DA is not, after all, the vehicle to take forward the vision of "one SA for all".

But it was perhaps not just Maimane’s perceived weak leadership which eroded the DA’s electoral appeal.

Cyril Ramaphosa’s accession as head of the ANC suddenly deprived the DA of perhaps its best recruitment agent — Zuma.

Zille’s deeply divisive tweets on the upside of the legacy of colonialism alienated black opinion and was poorly handled by the party.

The furore over the axing of DA Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille (which also began as a factional fight between her and Zille) further tarnished its image.

The problems in the party go far beyond Maimane’s leadership and will not go away with his departure, analysts agree.

Meanwhile, the DA’s powerful provincial leaders are adopting a largely wait-and-see approach to how they should react to Maimane’s departure, based on what transpires at the DA’s policy conference, due to take place before an early congress next year.

"We must agree that the party is facing challenges," DA KwaZulu-Natal leader Zwakele Mncwango tells the FM. "These challenges will be with us until we have the policy conference."

Mncwango says the DA needs to have a robust and honest discussion on policy before it elects leaders. The main discussion has to be around the party’s economic policy, as this is what has created a great deal of internal turmoil, he says.

DA Gauteng leader John Moodey describes the situation in the party as "toxic" — he was waiting to see whether there would be an attempt to purge the party of leaders who had backed Maimane.

"I know that charges are already being made up for me for an opinion piece I wrote and against others in Facebook and Twitter posts. Purging is where the real danger lies in terms of splitting the party even further," Moodey says.

The future of the DA depends on the congress and the policy conference, during which it is essential that both sides of the divide within the DA "find each other". "If we don’t get it together, we will not be able to get near that ‘one SA for all’. A winner-takes-all approach won’t work, we should work to remain the most diverse party in SA."

Moodey says his structures have raised grave concern over the events in the party and have been asking if it is time to leave. His reply remains that the DA is "our party and we cannot abandon it".

Independent electoral analyst Dawie Scholtz says it is difficult to predict how electoral support for the DA will be affected, but that events in recent years have been "very destructive", culminating in the poor 2019 election result and weak by-election showings since then. He says a surge in DA support in a ward in Ekurhuleni last week (after Maimane resigned) by no means reflects a positive shift in support. The ward was not contested by the DA’s main rival in largely white areas, the FF Plus.

Though it is possible that the DA could reclaim support lost to the FF Plus this year, it could bleed even further among coloured and black voters. Uncertainty and infighting are always a turn-off for voters of any party. The "personality changes" at the top are but a short-term measure, says Scholtz. The DA needs to strategically reposition itself in the long term to address the structural fault lines in the economy.

"The coming months will be critical for the DA," he says.

Zille, who appears oblivious to her own complicity in the party’s decline, agrees that Maimane’s resignation was not the cause of the problems, but a consequence of them.

"We knew we faced a range of problems, one symptom of which was our decline at the polls," she says. "The leader did the right thing by convening an independent review panel that analysed the extent and cause of our problems. The review panel concluded that the leadership could not take the party out of its hole." She says the panel proposed that the leadership resign.

Zille says the DA is the only party in SA "and probably Africa" that implements "effective leadership accountability".

She says Maimane himself drew in some of the best minds in politics and business — Tony Leon, Ryan Coetzee and Michiel le Roux — to help him analyse and define the DA’s problems, and propose solutions, which they did and which the party duly acted on.

Zille takes exception to people blaming her for ousting Maimane. But her election as federal council chair was the catalyst for Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba’s resignation, closely followed by Maimane’s.

The momentum for change at the federal council came from public representatives, who were in the majority and who feared losing their jobs, which happens when parties lose electoral support.

Trends in by-elections since May continue to show declining fortunes for the DA. By its calculations it faces losing 386 councillors in the 2021 election.

"I had nothing to do with appointing the review panel, nothing to do with their recommendations," says Zille. "Furthermore, I did not elect myself. I was one of four candidates and the majority of members of the federal council considered me most suited to deal with the challenges the party faces."

She says the entire federal executive wanted Maimane to stay on until the federal congress, but he decided to resign immediately and so did Athol Trollip.

"They fell on their swords. No-one pushed them to go when they did."

Zille says the federal executive was fine with Maimane wanting to stay on as parliamentary leader but that the caucus, after he attacked the party during his resignation speech, lost confidence in him and he resigned before facing a no-confidence motion.

"It did not have to be like this," she says.

Zille says the DA will undoubtedly take a blow, but it was the view of the panel report that the electoral blow would be much worse if the leadership were left in place.

"Our governments in Gauteng are very vulnerable," she says. "We are undertaking a major opinion survey of the voters in Tshwane and Johannesburg to poll their opinions of service delivery and our governance working relationship with the EFF.

"We are anecdotally picking up quite a bit of dissatisfaction and we want to test that empirically."

Zille says the issue, however, is not about race but leadership and that the review panel concluded that the DA had to change the leadership to fix the problem.

"As usual in SA, people always revert to race and most analysts can’t see beyond it. It is also rather a stretch to suggest that Mmusi Maimane and Herman Mashaba represent black South Africans. Herman has, in my experience, been vocally anti-BBBEE, and is more of an economic conservative than many others in the DA," Zille says.

According to political analyst Somadoda Fikeni, race is the albatross around the DA’s neck. It was the party’s fixation, under Zille, with black leadership that began the contradictions it now faces.

"As much as the review spoke of leadership, it was largely tone-deaf on race. If in SA you have no understanding and appreciation of race you cannot deal with the legacy of the past … it is like saying to a Jewish person ‘think of yourself as an individual and not a Jew’ — it just does not work."

It was on economic policy that the DA got hamstrung in discussions on BEE and whether race was a proxy for disadvantage. This is perhaps the most contentious issue in the party. In effect it split the party in two — between the old guard who see themselves as classic liberals and those who see themselves as social democrats. It has reignited debate of whether there is a place for liberalism in SA, in the sense that implies reliance on individual merit and a free market to achieve a better life for most people.

Interim DA parliamentary leader John Steenhuisen, who was elected at the weekend and is to contest the post of party leader, says that when the DA talks about liberal views and liberalism it does not do so slavishly shackled to John Locke’s 17th-century England.

"This is 21st-century Africa and we need a modern, progressive and compassionate liberalism that understands the SA context, the deprivation and the inequality that still exist almost three decades into democracy," Steenhuisen tells the FM.

"Liberalism, by definition, requires that we fight poverty and unemployment. How can anyone be free unless they have the wherewithal to live a life they value?

"This is the DA’s purpose: to promote substantive freedom by ensuring every person has the right, space and wherewithal to live a life they value. Thus, our liberal values compel us to transcend SA’s history of discrimination, division and inequality that are the legacy of racial oppression."

Yet political analyst Steven Friedman, writing in The Conversation, contends that some in the DA are stuck in a school of thought described by SA philosopher Richard Turner in the 1970s. He argued that white liberals believe that "though blacks are not biologically inferior, they are culturally inferior. They may be educable, but they may need whites to educate them."

According to Friedman, Zille’s understanding of liberalism seems to match that description. In her view, he says, the single and most important internal issue in the DA "is the clash between racial nationalism and democratic liberalism".

But he argues that SA has always had and still has many black liberals and that black liberalism has deep roots here.

"The problem for the white DA leadership is not that [black liberals] are nationalists, but that their liberalism is influenced by their experiences as black South Africans," Friedman says.

Fikeni says ideologically, the DA is grappling with classical liberalism in a post-apartheid and post-colonial society, with deep inequalities which are racialised. He believes that "purist liberals" in the DA are closer ideologically to US neoconservatives than to liberal democrats.

Friedman says the DA’s current ideological conundrum may present an opportunity for SA liberalism: a credible breakaway from the DA could be one led by black members, who could link up with other liberal currents within black SA to form a party whose liberalism would reflect black experience.

"Whether that happens or not, black liberalism in SA is not a contradiction in terms. A party which expresses it could become an important fixture in the country’s politics."

Though Maimane has not spoken about his political plans, there has been talk of a "movement" arising from the crisis in the DA. It is understood that there are talks between senior leaders, inside and outside the party, to build such a vehicle.

But it is a waiting game. DA provincial leaders, for example, are waiting to assess the outcome of the party’s policy and elective congresses before deciding on the way forward.

The resignations of Maimane and Mashaba have brought to the fore a crisis of perception of the DA, which could have a significant impact on black voters.

While Maimane was comparatively reserved in what he thought of his erstwhile political home, Mashaba trashed the party on his way out. He effectively called the DA anti-poor and said he was gravely concerned that the party that emerged from the federal council meeting that elected Zille was not the one he signed up to.

"The DA no longer represents a party that is able to achieve what I desire most — a movement that can save SA, unseat the ANC and deliver ‘one SA for all’. Without this I am deeply concerned for the future of SA politics," Mashaba said.

While the merits of Mashaba’s view are up for debate, his comments echo criticism levelled at the party by other black leaders who fell out with the DA.

So is there a future for potential black leaders in the DA? A number of DA provincial leaders pointed out to the FM that most of the leaders who have resigned in the wake of the election were white.

Previous federal council chair James Selfe, former CEO Paul Boughey, former head of elections Jonathan Moakes and Trollip, the former federal chair, were all white men. Zille and Steenhuisen make the same point.

Patricia Kopane, the DA’s Free State leader, says she has outstayed the resignations of party leaders Tony Leon, Zille and now Maimane. She would not go so far as to say the party is in crisis as a result of Maimane’s resignation. Such a view amounted to undermining the intelligence of other black DA leaders since "I did not come here because of Mmusi."

Joe McGluwa, DA North West leader, says the outcome of the past week was a result of the review report which Maimane himself commissioned.

"We are [affected] by the resignations, but it’s not the end of the world," McGluwa says.

A critical test for the DA, he says, will be how it does in by-elections in the Mamusa local municipality in North West, which includes the small town of Schweizer-Reneke and which was recently placed under administration. Schweizer-Reneke was at the heart of a racial debacle in which a teacher was accused of being racist before the facts were established. The incident also divided the DA along racial lines.

The furore erupted after DA youth leader Luyolo Mphithi shared a picture of a classroom in the town, in which black and white pupils appeared to be segregated.

The incident cost the DA at the polls, as Afrikaner voters, seeing it as the final straw, swarmed to the FF Plus.

The next local poll will show if the change in DA leadership succeeds in bringing Afrikaner voters back into the fold.

Nqaba Bhanga, the DA’s Eastern Cape leader, says the party has not changed policy. He does "not think the DA has lost its course in building one SA for all — that’s why many of us in the DA are still here".

The message from these black regional DA leaders is clear — the DA can’t give up on its aim of building a better SA with its multiracial vehicle, as that will be to the detriment of the country.

The fear of such an outcome prompted even former president Thabo Mbeki to step into the fray. In an extraordinary statement last week he said the DA had an "imperative obligation to reassure the nation, practically, unequivocally and transparently, that it is conducting and will conduct itself in terms of all its internal and public policies and programmes in a manner which truly helps to transform SA into a nonracial country".

Steenhuisen admits the past few weeks have been tumultuous for the party.

"The departure of a leader, a chair and a metro mayor — and the manner of their leaving — dealt a blow to our cause. But I must say that I do find the commentariat a little bit overdramatic in their unseemly haste to sign the political death certificate of our party."

Steenhuisen says "the way forward is to unite the party around the value proposition and principles that have sustained us and our predecessors [through] tough times".

Makashule Gana, chair of the DA’s MPL (member of the provincial legislature) Network, believes there is ample space for black South Africans in the DA.

Gana, a grassroots activist who continued passionately campaigning for the DA after losing his bid to become the party’s Gauteng premiership candidate earlier this year, says there is no doubt the DA brand has been damaged by recent events. Gana says the DA now has to reconnect with South Africans to rebuild lost trust, and that it is incumbent on all DA leaders to rebuild the party.

"You need to be as clear as possible [on what the DA stands for] so that South Africans must look at the DA and see that it is committed to solving the problems of the day and is not scared to grapple with the complex issues of SA," Gana says.

Contrary to what Maimane says, Gana believes the DA is still the vehicle to bring about "one SA for all".

"That’s why I am still here," he says.

"Whatever is broken with the DA right now, I will roll up my sleeves and fix it."

In spite of despair from critics, many black DA leaders say they have faith in the party and believe it offers the best hope for SA to create a bright future

—  What it means

While people such as Maimane and Mashaba have jumped ship, Gana says he does politics differently.

"I always tell people when I joined in 2002 I joined a particular DA. That DA is not the DA of today. The DA has gone through many changes and is still changing. I will be very worried if it doesn’t [since] society is never static, it keeps changing.

"This is not the end. We are going to work, to rebuild the trust. That’s the commitment some of us are making, not only to ourselves, but to the people of this country. SA needs a stronger DA, not a weak DA," Gana says.

Selfe, who now heads the DA’s governance unit, diagnoses what he believes is the biggest threat to the DA: "That people just give up hope. They just tune out, they disconnect from politics and watch rugby and just become uninterested in the whole thing, because they can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. And that makes it very difficult to activate and enthuse people who would ordinarily vote for us."

Such an eventuality would not only damage the DA, but SA’s multiparty democracy, which rises and falls on the strengths and weaknesses of all of its parties.