Let’s do the Democratic Alliance (DA). It had a horrible election and it is going to torture itself for the next few months as it tries to draw the right lessons from its poor showing. Not only did it fall back in the national vote, it fell in the provinces too and it barely, if at all, made any progress among African voters, which was surely the whole point of Helen Zille stepping down in favour of Mmusi Maimane in 2015 in the first place.
DA tradition would dictate that a leader who loses has to go. But hardly anyone believes Maimane lost this on his own. The DA leadership zone is a labyrinth of interests and hidden agendas. There’s a whole corporate arm we know nothing about. It has a CEO and a chief elections officer. Maimane is part of a team and it is a team that clearly made some catastrophic mistakes.
None of them is new. The primary error is a failure to talk to voters and about a core economic policy that could excite the country; something that chases prosperity and profit but includes more citizens in the chase and the spoils. It isn’t a difficult thing to envision. You simply ask yourself, before adopting any policy, how will it promote economic inclusion and how will it promote economic growth. If it doesn’t, drop it.
Instead the DA is obsessed with empty argument. I have counted, from the beginning of this year, about four or five substantial articles in the Sunday Times opinion pages written by members, or supporters, of the DA ahead of last week’s election. This is valuable editorial real estate. Did they use the opportunity to set out their stall? No. What they did was waste their time criticising me because I had the temerity to endorse a vote for Cyril Ramaphosa.
It was pathetic, though I was grateful for the publicity. Now that the election is over and Ramaphosa has an opportunity to do us all some good, I’m going to sit down with my popcorn and watch the DA tear itself apart.
It has already started. Zille wrote a piece in Rapport this past weekend that warned the DA not to forget about Afrikaans voters. Sadly, they had already done that. A lot of fingers are being pointed at Maimane for his bone-headed reaction to a photograph on social media of what looked like black children in a class being separated from their white classmates in Schweizer-Reneke. This is how the Freedom Front Plus, which plundered the DA vote last Wednesday, saw the issue unfold.
Daily Maverick ran Zille’s column in English this morning. She also raises the Schweizer-Reneke issue and warns about the dangers of the party convincing itself it is better off without the white vote that went to the Freedom Front Plus. It is a subtle criticism of Maimane who she feels treated her badly in the wake of her tweets about colonialism.
For a really helpful guide to what might follow, Business Day republished this Gareth van Onselen column this morning. He wrote it back in January, before the Schweizer-Reneke incident, and obviously hadn’t reckoned on the DA doing as badly as it eventually did.
I was alarmed to hear Radio 702 morning anchor Bongani Bingwa threaten the DA with some terrible retribution if, in the wake of this loss, the party were to rid itself of Maimane. There’s obviously a history in the party of black people who have been raised to leadership positions and then dumped because they didn’t do what they were told, but a blanket pass for Maimane? Why?
The fact is that he brings very little to the political scene other than the fact that he is a nice person with sound values. He is utterly bored by the economy and economics, which should be his central concern. Was he watching our sovereign bond yields move as the results unfolded? Of course not.
The fact is that if Maimane and the rest of the leadership are still in place come the next election, and they adopt the same approach, they will get another hiding. DA members are entitled to leaders better able to read the electorate and not to bungle as badly as the current bunch has.
There’s a case, nonetheless, for all South Africans to take some comfort from this election. Sure the turnout was low and that’s a concern. But populist politics remains marginal here, both on the Left and the Right. Despite their losses, both the ANC and the DA now form a formidable centre of our politics. That’s a good thing, at least for now. I thought Ranjeni Munusamy called it right in the Sunday Times. We did ok.
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