Perhaps the best thing to do is to follow the advice of Tim du Plessis, a wise old owl and a veteran witness of our politics, and just leave the DA alone to be the party it wants to be. After all, Du Plessis wrote in his column in Rapport this past weekend, if that leaves it stuck with national support of between 15% and 20%, then that is its own responsibility.
Du Plessis was obviously writing just before the DA policy conference at the weekend, the one where it decided to become, from now on, an explicitly nonracial party — in other words, that no aspect of its values or its policies would make any reference, ever, under any circumstances, to race.
Two documents to that effect, put to the virtual conference, were adopted overwhelmingly, handing the leadership of (once again) Helen Zille a mandate to break free from what she certainly regards as an unsustainably ambiguous position on racial redress in SA and the use of race as a proxy for economic and social disadvantage. From now on, the DA will make what it will regard as progressive policies but without reference to the colour of the people it may be making policy for.
Will it work? Hard to say. We know for sure that the party’s attempts in the past, also led by Zille, to draw in specifically black leadership have failed miserably, with the poor showing in last year’s general election leading to the departure of party leader Mmusi Maimane and Joburg DA mayor Herman Mashaba, who has just started a party of his own.
The DA leadership, with Zille as federal council chair and John Steenhuisen as party leader, has had enough of trying to be a “better” ANC, and, as Du Plessis hints, it probably puts a cap, for the next while, on any possibility of real growth. It means the DA will not be contending to govern the country anytime soon, though it would be in the mix somewhere should provincial or national coalition opportunities arise.
Does it remain a liberal party? Probably, though it doesn’t get there by renouncing race as a proxy for disadvantage. You could consider race a serious proxy and still be a liberal party. Many people will be looking for that new home after this past weekend. It doesn’t yet exist (Mashaba’s party doesn’t quite cut it), but politics hates a vacuum and there’s no doubt this one will be filled.
It is interesting, though, to look back and see what the DA just did.
After Maimane and Mashaba left the party late last year, after Zille had been elected to the vacant federal council chair, Gwen Ngwenya — who had been appointed head of policy by Maimane and then resigned because he ignored her — was reappointed and given two tasks: to draw up a draft document on DA values (what it stands for) and one on economic justice. In both, her clear goal, or instruction, was to design values and policies that do not consider race.
I rate Ngwenya. She is clever, brave and diligent. The work she produced is good. But it isn’t perfect and to try to be fair to her I though it worthwhile to reproduce the documents here again and to comment on them. Most reporting on the policy conference ignored the economic document and concentrated on the dropping of race as a DA measure and a series of insider politics and disciplinary actions that very few people know much about. I am not one of them.
But the values documented here are nothing if not exhausting on what members of this renewed DA should hold dear. I was particularly interested in the appearance of the “social market economy” in the document. The Germans call their model a “sozialmarkt” and it recalled visions of unions sitting on company boards (a key reason why Germany powered itself out of the ruins of World War 2 and why it remains the most productive industrial economy in the world), widespread consensus on the pursuit of profit and a general change of direction. But it didn’t. “A social market economy refers to an economy in which participants (firms and consumers) rather than the government decide on what to purchase, where to invest, and how much to produce,” Ngwenya’s document says.
That sounds a lot more like a good old Anglo-Saxon free market than a social market to me, but then she goes on to stress, almost paradoxically, that a “social market economy, however, is not one where there is no government intervention at all. Left entirely on their own, participants who enjoy market dominance can engage in behavior which keeps out smaller participants and competition. Alternatively, participants can collude and fix prices with one another to the detriment of the consumer. Governments have an important role to play in improving access to markets by championing open and competitive markets, because openness and competition is not inherently the natural state of affairs.”
Ebrahim Patel could not have said it better himself.
For the most part, though, the values document is good. Mainly in the sense that it does no harm, other than to those DA members who feel the party should be chasing down the ANC rather than the Freedom Front Plus. “Nonracialism is the rejection of race as a way to categorise and treat people, particularly in legislation. The assumption that one’s ‘race’ represents people who think, feel, or have the same experience of shared events, based on their physical appearance, is false,” the document reads. “Nonracialism is therefore a commitment, not just to reject racialism and racism, but to fight for the deconstruction of race, and the reconstruction of a nonracial future. The DA unequivocally stands for nonracialism, not multiracialism.”
Yes, OK, but then there’s this. A Great Big Fudge. “Policies which tackle inequality of opportunity — including interventions in education, health care, the economy, and safety and security will always be central pillars of our programme of action. So profound is this commitment to equality of opportunity that it is reflected in our vision of an ‘open, opportunity society for all’.”
I’m sorry, but that is just meaningless, the slogan of a committee. Zille has been going on about “opportunity” as her core political value for as long as I remember following her. But making that “open, opportunity society for all” is so far from reality it really means nothing. What is it exactly that the DA proposes to do to make it real?
You will not find the answer in the values document. Nor will you find it here in the economic justice draft. In fact, after the first ringing commitment to creating a social market economy in the values document, I struggled to find mention of it in the economic document at all, and I have read them both twice.
“No political party has ever put before the public a policy which would address the legacy of economic exclusion while simultaneously freeing South Africans from apartheid race classification,” Ngwenya writes in the introduction to the draft of her new economic proposals. “If there is a possibility that we can achieve both these noble goals, we must do so.”
Which is all well and good, but she never answers the question “Why?”. That seems to me because the whole object of the exercise isn’t to create new thinking on how to grow the economy, but rather to find a way to express mostly current positions merely without mentioning race.
Her device for getting over the hump that SA’s special history presents to anyone trying to do this is just not credible. Or so hopelessly credible it becomes unusable.
She bases her new thinking on something that already exists – the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).
Never heard of them? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Ngwenya lists all 17 of them on page four of her document, so you don’t have to go far. My first and lasting impression of those goals was that almost anyone could claim them as theirs. In fact, if any country has achieved them it would probably be China. That surely can’t be Ngwenya’s model? But it is!
What you have to remember as well is that the people who the party sends out to campaign in local elections next year and general elections in 2024 are going to have to remember all these goals and values and how they create economic growth. That is going to be quite a sight. Any DA campaigner knocking on my door is going to have to recite them all.
Ngwenya sets herself a target — to create a lean and capable state based on liberal democratic principles. Not, anymore, on social market principles — but that’s by the by. And another, to increase employment through growth and investment reforms which drive job creation. We are invited to check out a list of how to do that on page 40, where, I’m afraid, there is a list of 17 new proposals, most of which involve repealing or creating exemptions from current ANC legislation.
I have to admit I liked her suggestion to overhaul the current visa regime for importing skills and I’ve always thought a solar power rebate to help people generate their own power and sell it back into the grid makes sense, but I’m not sure the DA is aligned on this. The City of Cape Town was quite recently considering raising a new tax on solar panels.
There are other good ideas, including a debt ceiling, and some out-of-date ones, like privatising SAA.
But, overall, there’s not an actual new idea, or set of ideas, or thrust of argument, to set us on a new growth path or in a different economic direction. In all 58 pages of the economic policy document there’s no commitment to much except nonracialism.
Even then, in the economic document, all the other nice stuff like (nonracial) inclusion, is subject to a very big condition — economic growth. “Ours is a growth first agenda, meaning that measures to promote inclusion cannot come at the expense of a healthy economy,” the document insists.
I would argue that you can’t have growth without inclusion, but it’s the party members who decide. There’s no doubt, though, that if local companies would for once just stop chasing their share prices and focus on strategy, and if tax reform encouraged institutional shareholders to stay invested in a company that did that rather than to speculate with its shares, more jobs could be saved, more profits could be made and more growth could be achieved. Ngwenya misses this entirely.
It is partly because she’s tied up avoiding the words “black” or “white”. On page 29 of her economic policy document we are reminded that “Apartheid meant that there was a skewed pattern … South Africans did not have an equal starting point with respect to these factors, with the majority of South Africans provided with little endowments and a minority with higher initial endowments.” It’s painful.
And by page 35 she has simply lost the battle with words. “Through corporate reporting,” she writes, “companies have the flexibility to prioritise SDGs which they have the most impact on via their business model and value chain, thus allowing companies and investors the flexibility to focus on those SDGs most relevant to their operating environment.”
Which was when I gave up. It isn’t that the document is poor; it just tries to do an impossible job by claiming to demonstrate how to grow an economy by using an amorphous set of principles not necessarily as a guide to success but as a screen behind which to hide the bigger goal — the publication of an economic doctrine in 2020 SA that does not mention race.
Lord knows, the ANC has truly stuffed up our economy. He would also know that the DA has largely ignored economic policy for the past two decades at least as it has tried to pin down the ANC on race, corruption and other ills. But its failure to write and stand behind a coherent economic line is, in my view, its greatest sin. Tony Leon wasn’t that interested. Neither were Zille and Maimane.
But one of the favours Maimane did the party after its defeat in May 2019 and before he departed was to commission a report on the DA and its structures and policies. The review panel he named was led by former DA CEO Ryan Coetzee, and included Leon and banker Michiel le Roux.
Their report has been adopted only in patches by the incoming leadership, but the production of Ngwenya’s economic policy is in direct response to the panel’s urging that “the party urgently undertake a well-structured policy development programme to give effect to its vision for SA that it is both values-driven and evidence-based and that appropriate resources are made available for it … and that the foundation of the policy programme should be an economic policy that would enable growth, opportunity and inclusion”.
The boxes have been ticked, but I wonder, as party leaders celebrate the “nonracial” river being crossed, whether they truly think they now have a winning economic policy to steer by as well.
“A substantive, values-driven, evidence-based and properly costed policy platform is critical to the party’s long-term credibility,” the panel insisted almost a year ago. “The failure to produce one is in our view further evidence of the failure of leadership at the top of the party and the lack of clarity over the party’s values and vision referenced earlier. It is also a consequence of the privileging of organisational matters over philosophical and policy concerns. It speaks to a lack of interest in and commitment to ensuring the philosophical and policy infrastructure of the party is in good order.”
I don’t think Ngwenya’s toil at the economy paper brings the DA anywhere near a policy or set of policies it can call its own. And in its absence the party will probably continue to appeal to its base by attacking the ANC rather than building a real alternative.
There’s no doubt that where the DA governs it does so way better than the ANC, but its decisions this past weekend will leave it defending what it has rather than reaching for more. I understand why, in a way — the leadership has done what all political leaders do and put party before country.
In the meantime, disaffected (mainly black) DA members will look for new homes. I hope many choose to stay even though this weekend’s events might make some of them uncomfortable. As an opposition to the ANC, the DA has often been magnificent. Du Plessis’s sage advice at the start notwithstanding, the DA is still worth fighting for.
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