The last time a leader of the DA was elected by a full national congress, it was a coronation rather than a contest. That was back in May 2018, when Mmusi Maimane, already certain of his second term at the helm of the DA, stood unopposed to lead SA’s second-largest party.
Now, there is little in the way of certainty as the DA heads into a virtual elective conference — the first of its kind for SA and a watershed of sorts for the DA. The party is returning to its liberal roots, and has shed the social democratic experiment that took shape under Maimane.
The upcoming conference, and its aftermath, will determine how the electorate will respond to this refashioned DA.
At a time when the governing ANC is weak and rudderless, with few new ideas to extricate SA from its economic malaise, the political environment is ripe for opposition parties. Can the new DA — probably under the leadership of John Steenhuisen — reverse the decline which saw its share of the vote fall from 26.9% in 2016’s local government elections to 20.7% in the national election just three years later?
The shift in the trajectory of the party was largely a result of this dismal showing.
Five months later, the DA’s top leadership had been completely overhauled. Maimane had resigned as party leader, as had federal council chair James Selfe and party CEO Paul Boughey. It paved the way for the return of former leader Helen Zille as federal council chair, with chief whip Steenhuisen stepping in as interim leader.
Steenhuisen’s elevation was the result of a vote by the 150-odd members of the DA’s federal council, its highest decision-making body between congresses. In contrast, Steenhuisen and KwaZulu-Natal MPL Mbali Ntuli will this weekend vie for the votes of more than 2,000 delegates attending the DA’s first virtual national congress.
Steenhuisen is expected to emerge victorious as party leader on Sunday.
"There is absolutely no doubt that [Steenhuisen] is going to take it, and there is no doubt that his acceptance speech is already [written]," says political analyst and Unisa professor Somadoda Fikeni.
Steenhuisen himself tells the FM he is "cautiously optimistic", after weeks spent engaging with delegates across the country.
"My election would position the DA as the only party fighting for people power and nonracialism in SA," he says in an interview.
"Ever-expanding state control over the past decades is the fundamental reason why our country is in such deep trouble. Unlike any other political party leader in SA, I place my faith and trust in the people of SA ...
"The DA must do everything we can to take power away from the incapable state and give it to the people in a way that builds nonracialism and uplifts the 30-million South Africans who live in poverty."
Over the past few months, endorsements for Steenhuisen have streamed in from DA leaders and officials, including from six of the party’s nine provincial leaders.
The only provincial leader who has openly backed Ntuli is her colleague, KwaZulu-Natal leader Zwakele Mncwango.
Free State leader Patricia Kopane is one of just two provincial leaders who hasn’t come out to endorse a candidate for party leader. The reason is simple: she has yet to make up her mind, she tells the FM.
"Facing what we are facing now as a country, [the DA] needs strong leadership, a fearless leader," she says. In particular, she says, the party requires a leader prepared to make unpopular decisions.
It’s unclear where interim Gauteng leader Solly Msimanga stands.
Short of something extraordinary taking place on the weekend, the outcome of the leadership race seems to be largely a done deal. Ntuli has put up a good fight, ensuring a proper contest for the top position. She has been dogged in trying to run her campaign as publicly as possible, throwing her views open to the scrutiny of all who will be casting their ballots in coming elections.
But it’s been a trying time, with politicians having to navigate a completely different political landscape, after Covid-19 forced SA into lockdown for much of the year. With restrictions on public gatherings in force, political party events have been prohibited, forcing Ntuli and Steenhuisen to campaign mostly on digital platforms.
Those same restrictions led to the DA postponing its elective congress from May, before deciding to hold a virtual event.
Moving with the times
While this is all new and modern, it does take away a crucial aspect of campaigning — particularly on the congress floor, where candidates and their supporters usually have the opportunity to lobby delegates, possibly even changing some minds in the process.
The virtual congress changes that dynamic: about half the delegates will participate in the proceedings from their homes, while others will congregate at hybrid centres around SA. There’s likely to be little of the usual atmosphere of excitement of 2,000-odd people coming together.
While all bets are on Steenhuisen, Ntuli tells the FM anything can happen in the week ahead of the congress.
"I think we’ve run a very good campaign. We have spent nine gruelling months to show people what the DA could look like under a different leader," she says.
However things play out, she has ensured the congress won’t be a straight coronation, focused on just one person.
"I think it’s going to be very interesting, considering that at the beginning people didn’t think I would get two votes," Ntuli says. "There have been a lot of people who have come out to endorse me."
Besides, she tells the FM the week before the congress, she’s still got a bit of time — "and a lot of things can change in a week".
Ntuli says the main reason she’s running is because she feels the current DA leadership is happy to be "almost a niche party that speaks to about 20% of this country".
While that may suit other political parties, she believes the DA should be bolder, and focus strategically on growth: there were, after all, about 12-million people who didn’t vote in 2019 who were just waiting for someone to excite them and to understand them, she says.
"People are tired of the status quo and the same kind of politicians and anything that we’ve had before. Which is why I think if the DA could vote for someone like me — someone who is capable, who’s competent, who has experience, but also [brings] a new dynamic to the SA political terrain — I think you would give [them] excitement, I think you would give them the idea that the DA is doing something else, the DA is trying to experiment, the DA is trying to be relevant."
Whether her message resonates or not, she believes the campaign has been good for internal democracy in the DA.
Steenhuisen also picks up on the point of the DA’s internal democracy, saying he’s proud that the party has proved resilient in the face of Covid-19, making a seamless transition into the digital age.
"Even in the face of the challenges presented by the lockdown, the DA chose to protect our sacrosanct commitment to internal democracy by organising a historic digital congress," he says.
But he’s also looking further down the track. From the moment the DA wakes up on the morning after the congress, it must be "singularly focused" on showing South Africans that it is the only party determined to take power away from an incapable state and give it to the people.
"Our unparalleled governance track-record makes it clear that only the DA is committed to delivering world-class services that empower citizens to build lives of value."
However, while Steenhuisen’s victory is all but assured, a senior DA insider tells the FM it will be important to keep an eye on the margin by which he wins.
If he takes the election with an overwhelming majority, it will indicate that the DA will remain largely as it is at present. But if the race between Ntuli and Steenhuisen is close, it suggests there may be a substantial bloc of voters looking to change the party’s current trajectory, says the insider.
Too close to call?
Then there’s the race for federal council chair — a contest that’s not nearly as clear-cut as the one for federal leader — between former DA leader Helen Zille and Gauteng chair Mike Moriarty.
While the more than 2,000 congress delegates vote for the party leader, the election of the federal council chair is in the hands of the roughly 150 federal council delegates. The federal council is said to be divided, though the scales could tip in Zille’s favour. She’s already been in the position for just over a year, giving her the advantage of incumbency — but her missteps on social media may count against her.
Following her election as federal council chair last year, Zille promised to "stay in her lane" and not overshadow the DA leader. But just a few months into her position, she caused a furore when she tweeted that there are more racist laws in democratic SA than there were under apartheid.
It no doubt caused headaches for Steenhuisen as interim leader, raising concerns over whether he has the power to rein in Zille.
Zille’s tweets, and the subsequent fallout, resulted in some party members — even her staunchest supporters — questioning whether she should remain in the position of federal council chair, arguably the most powerful position in the party.
But much has changed in the intervening months. Most notably, Zille has been on her best behaviour, steering clear of any social media controversies.
She won’t be drawn on the outcome of her contest with Moriarty, saying she never pre-empts an election result.
"If I am re-elected, I will continue working to improve our internal systems and processes, ensuring they work fairly for everyone. That will give us sound organisational underpinning for the 2021 local government election," she says.
Asked by the FM about the view that she will simply overshadow the leader if she is re-elected, she says her role will be to follow the direction set by the leader, and to implement the decisions of the federal congress, the federal council and federal executive.
"I will do that diligently, just as I have over the past year," she says.
Moriarty believes he could pip Zille to the post, as canvassing has been going well. But he has been surprised by results before, he says, adding he would be astonished if it was anything besides a very close race.
Moriarty says the difficulty with predicting the outcome of internal elections, particularly in close races, is that the people one canvasses are often very polite, and don’t want to offend. While it’s possible to get a sense of where those who have very strong opinions stand, it’s much more difficult to call those in the middle.
"My real objective in running this race is to put a challenge to the party to take hold of the mission, set down by John Steenhuisen on January 24 to our federal executive, that we should become the core of a realigned majority in 2024 in order to deliver an open opportunity society for all South Africans."
It’s a proposal that was "music to [his] ears", he says. "If you are going to achieve stuff in life you ought to have defined objectives and a pathway to get there, and you must pursue that pathway relentlessly. What [Steenhuisen] did when he laid that down as an objective was to make it very clear what the pathway should look like."
It is this mission that he says must be the DA’s guiding light.
Litmus test
Given recent electoral setbacks, however, this may be a tough ask.
Luckily, the party doesn’t have to wait until the local government elections next year to test the waters with a large group of voters. The first by-elections in months, involving hundreds of thousands of voters, are set to take place within two weeks of the congress.
The November 11 by-elections, held in 96 wards in 56 municipalities, will be a test of voter sentiment not only for the DA, but for all political parties, after months of limited interaction with their constituencies.
These will also be the first by-elections since the DA’s September policy conference, at which the party placed "clear blue water" between it and the ANC on issues such as race as a means of classification.
It brought an official end to one of the most fraught debates in the DA, settling the question of whether race should be considered a proxy for disadvantage. The answer, the party resolved, is that it should not.
In the wake of the policy conference, Steenhuisen believes the DA, for the first time in a long time, has clarity of purpose and policy direction.
"Our policies are evaluated on the basis of one key principle: does a given proposal give more power to the incapable and corrupt state, or does it give more power to the people? Evaluating every policy position against this metric, and always choosing people power over state control, holds the key to fixing SA," he says.
"Our new nonracial empowerment policy is evidence of this. By selecting beneficiaries on the basis of their financial means rather than their skin colour, means-tested empowerment will directly benefit the 30-million South Africans who still live on less than R992 a month, while making it impossible for politically connected elites to hijack empowerment opportunities."
Coming full circle?
While it has yet to be seen whether such policy decisions will make a real difference at the ballot box, there are questions as to whether the DA is reverting to a party that focuses on minorities — particularly given its attempts over the past year to woo back voters who defected to the more conservative Freedom Front Plus.
Has the party, in other words, come full circle to where it was under Tony Leon?
Political scientist RW Johnson tells the FM he believes the DA was a fairly orthodox liberal party under Leon. It then went on a "long looping trajectory" under Zille, who promoted people of colour into leading positions in the party at "lightning speed", despite their lack of experience and expertise in politics. (Maimane, for instance, rose rapidly through the ranks of the DA.)
The issue, according to Johnson, is not one of race, but the promotion of people who did not have the requisite political and leadership experience.
"If you had done that to white people it would have [also] been a disaster," he says.
"Now that [Zille’s] learnt her lesson from that, she’s come back to the principled nonracial position. Well — fine — but this has been a great, big, long, looping excursus: [the party has] moved back to not very far from where it was under Leon."
All of this has robbed the DA of a precious commodity: momentum.
"Nothing is more powerful for voters or members or donors. That’s just music to their ears. They feel like they’re on a winning team," he says. "That was what was thrown away, particularly with the Maimane experiment. And now [the party has] to somehow try to pick up from there. And that’s going to be difficult."
In particular, winning support back from the Freedom Front Plus will prove problematic, says Johnson.
He doesn’t think the DA has lost a lot of ground when it comes to black voters — rather, it hasn’t really made inroads on this constituency at all.
Johnson says about 15% of black voters are willing to consider a DA vote. But, from that group, the party is securing just a fraction of support.
"[The DA needs] to keep at it and hope to expand," he says. "But it’s a long haul — it’s not an easy climb."
‘Restore factory settings’
Fikeni, meanwhile, argues that the DA has weakened itself strategically, and may be perceived as being more concerned with the white voters it has lost to the Freedom Front Plus than the black voters it stands to lose.
He says the stigma, for the DA, is that it’s always been seen as a white minority party.
"The question of identity and race has always been the central albatross around the neck of the DA, no matter how it articulated its policies," he says. "There seemed to have been a shift when the party tried to diversify and embrace other leaders and so forth."
But, he says, with that no longer happening, the DA has reverted to its "factory default".
"Now when you press ‘factory default’, you shrink the DA to a narrow party where, despite all its protestations, it will be seen as a party of whites and defending white privilege, and resisting the fundamental transformation expected of the democratic moment in SA. That is the unfortunate part."
Fikeni remains unconvinced that the party will be able to persuade voters that it is not a party for minorities. Instead, he says, he stands by what he casually told former talk show host Eusebius McKaiser in an interview in January 2018: "The DA is in a corner, mutilating itself unprovoked."
Fikeni says the DA will also have to contend with competition from disaffected members who have left the party. Maimane, former Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba and former Gauteng leader John Moodey, who all left the party in the past year — and who roundly trashed it on the way out — will probably be fishing in the DA’s pond.
Another problem is the working relationships the DA established with smaller opposition parties in 2016, when it entered into coalitions to wrest control of some of the country’s metros from the ANC.
"Its relationships are so badly damaged with these parties that they can’t even make a call — they won’t even pick up the phone," says Fikeni.
The DA weakened itself by leading these coalitions — a concept it championed after realising how difficult it is "to wrestle the ANC to the ground", he says. "That is gone, so it has weakened itself in strategic terms."
Johnson similarly calls the DA’s endeavours in government in Tshwane and Joburg "a big shambles". He says it will be very hard for the party to start afresh in those metros.
It is this DA — a party on the back foot after losing momentum in the 2019 general election— that Steenhuisen will have to get back on track if he’s elected this weekend.
"Undoubtedly Steenhuisen has got a very difficult job," says Johnson. "He’s coming into a party which has lost momentum and which has overreached itself with those last election results, and he’s having to start again under difficult circumstances."
How well Steenhuisen will do is, however, largely a question of how badly the ANC will perform.
Johnson says the DA has historically performed better in local government elections, as its voters are more willing to turn out, while the ANC finds it difficult to mobilise support on the day.
He believes this is the best hope the DA has. But whether the party will prove able to rouse its base is another matter.
Steenhuisen may be a "much better, safer pair of hands than Maimane", in Johnson’s view. "He will be energetic and sometimes he has a good turn of phrase. But it’s just that he has a mountain to climb."
Among the issues facing the DA is how to win back white support lost to the FF Plus while also trying to woo black voters
— What it means:
How the DA will vote
With Covid-19 forcing the DA to hold its first virtual elective congress, the party has had to find a new, digital way for its more than 2,000 delegates to vote.
Gone are the days of voters physically making their mark on a ballot paper, placing it into a box and having a team painstakingly count each vote. Instead, the party will be using the OpaVote online voting system this weekend.
Greg Krumbock, co-presiding officer for the congress, says the system is internationally recognised.
“It’s very secure and completely secret, and [this] is why we have chosen [OpaVote] to be our electronic platform for the congress,” he tells the FM.
Krumbock explains that all delegates will receive an OpaVote link, which will allow them to access the system.
Then they will receive an OpaVote code, which only they can use and which can only be used once.
Some DA delegates will be voting from home while others will be at a hybrid voting venue, set up for those who don’t have home internet access or who live in a deep rural area where there is no coverage.
There will be 38 hybrid voting venues around SA. The smallest will serve just two delegates, says Krumbock, and the largest about 105. About half of the conference delegates are expected to attend via the hybrid centres.
When voting opens at 11am on Saturday, those at home will vote on their laptops, while those at the centres will be provided with laptops for the vote.
The first ballot, for federal party leader, will contain the names of John Steenhuisen and Mbali Ntuli. Krumbock says the delegates will place a digital cross next to the name of their preferred candidate and click “submit”, after which the vote will be logged in the cloud.
The next ballot paper, for the three deputy federal chairs, will then pop up, says Krumbock.
The four candidates standing for this position are Anton Bredell, Annelie Lotriet, Refiloe Nt’sekhe and Jacques Smalle.
Krumbock says delegates will be asked to rank the candidates from most to least preferred. Once this is done they will again submit the ballot, and their vote will be captured in the cloud.
There are three uncontested positions at the congress: Dion George is standing for federal finance chair; James Masango and Thomas Walters are unopposed for the two deputy federal council chair positions; and Ivan Meyer is the candidate for federal chair.
The vote for federal council chair will pit the incumbent, Helen Zille, against DA Gauteng chair Mike Moriarty.
However, not all delegates will vote for this position; voting is left to the federal council delegates, who number about 150. Krumbock says these delegates will be provided with a third ballot, for the federal council election, when they log onto the OpaVote system.
The candidate with the most votes will take the position. In the event of a deadlock, the DA constitution requires a second vote.
“We always vote a second time to try to break the deadlock, and then only after that [if nothing changes] would lots be drawn,” he says.
Though the digital voting is expected to proceed quite quickly, the vote will remain open for six hours, until 5pm.
Krumbock says this is in case delegates experience load-shedding, their phone or laptop batteries die, or they encounter technical difficulties.
Once voting closes, Krumbock says the votes will be downloaded onto two flash disks in Cape Town, and put into an envelope with a security seal. Under the watchful eye of the candidate agents and the DA’s national auditor, the envelope will be locked in a safe at the party’s federal head office.
“Only the auditor will keep the key and on Sunday [the envelope] will be retrieved under the same circumstances, the seal will be broken and we will take the flash disks out, download [the data] onto a computer and run the results,” he says.
The results are set to be announced at the closing of the congress on Sunday afternoon.
Genevieve Quintal
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