Try as I might, I can’t get too worked up about the elective congress (or is it conference?) the official opposition, the DA, held at the weekend. I woke up on Monday to a Twitter feed alive with indignation at the election results the 2,000 or so virtual delegates returned. The big votes were for party leader, where the favourite and almost incumbent, interim leader John Steenhuisen, beat KwaZulu-Natal MPL Mbali Ntuli by a sizeable 1,443 votes to 361. Holding on to her (relatively new) position was the DA’s come-back federal council leader, Helen Zille.
The congress returned a majority white leadership overall, which led to the furore on my Twitter feed. You could understand it in a way. In a body politic obsessed with and rooted in race, the DA has recently declared itself above all that and will from now on proceed on the basis that race is simply not a factor in SA. How far that gets it politically will determine how long this new point of principle survives beyond the local government elections next year.
My own opinion is that of a quizzical bystander. Seriously? No race? Of course the only way to make this new position count is to constantly repeat that you don’t recognise race, which may in fact turn out after a few months to amount to actually recognising its power simply by virtue of repeating the new mantra a gazillion times.
Because that is what it is going to take. I don’t take offence though. Neither should anyone else. This is a free country still and a political party can decide for itself what it wants to be. A lot of the people carping away after the congress are not DA members and never will be, so their impact will be minimal.
But some of it made a sort of visceral sense to me. The author and public intellectual Sisonke Msimang said on social media that: “A party with all-white leadership in a black majority country can’t reflect the diversity of thought and experience required to address SA’s very significant problems. This isn’t just arrogant, it’s intellectually short-sighted. Forget principles, this is just stupid.”
That’s sort of my feeling. Perhaps the party has simply decided to stay, you know, compact. I know and like Steenhuisen but with the best will in the world it is simply just too soon for a majority of South African voters to put their trust in a white male. Try to imagine the British response to a politician with a strong German accent.
I had better get off that, however, and first congratulate him and Zille on their victories and to say particularly to Mbali Ntuli that I thought she was absolutely terrific. With the party machine firmly against her and unable to use any of its structures to create the open contest she wanted with Steenhuisen, she nonetheless showed us what a determined young woman with charm, confidence, purpose, ambition and principles can do.
She learnt how to raise money and, without any shadow of a doubt, she has planted the seeds in these past few months of a political career which will, if she stays put, see her lead the DA one day. She is just too good with the public to not succeed. The DA will have to grow up to keep up with her.
Meanwhile, the party is clearly going to spend between now and the local government elections round about midyear next year trying to woo back the conservative white voters it lost to the Freedom Front Plus in the general election last year. It opened the congress with a silence for people killed on farms, a tiny but politically critical subsection of all 20,000 people murdered every year in this country
This may or may not work. Some of what the DA leadership says and does in the next few months is going to make my toes curl but I am convinced it is a temporary move to the right. The DA is an unforgiving beast. If Steenhuisen can’t reclaim PE and Johannesburg next year, or at least improve on the 2016 results, he will start feeling the heat. The party’s heart is in the centre and it will default to that place again one day.
Fortunately, the ANC has gifted the DA and Steenhuisen with an economic crisis of epic proportions. How hard would it be to take advantage of that? In the case of the DA, as it turns out, pretty hard. Run by sociologists and lawyers, it simply doesn’t understand the economy and struggles to even be interested in it. That minute’s silence at the start of the weekend said everything. It could have been for the thousands of employers put out of business by the government’s poor Covid lockdowns. Or the jobs lost. Or the revenue lost. Or the coming fiscal collapse.
This is just a party that never thinks business or economics first. Never. It is why it is going to continue to struggle to grow. It grew up on race under apartheid and, fundamentally, that is still top of mind. It fights marginal emotional battles but the electorate wakes up every morning to an empty larder or a growing overdraft.
Obviously crime and security are easy political levers to pull. And to an extent they work. But the DA isn’t the only one pulling them and the Freedom Front Plus is not going to be an easy opponent.
I’m not even sure that the DA has an economic policy yet. I originally thought that one of its conferences earlier this year was to agree on an economic policy, as it was urged to do by three party elders who compiled a report into its poor showing in last year’s election.
But I have been subsequently assured that, no, what policy head Gwen Ngwenya did a few months ago was to produce a position paper on economic values, not policies.
Oh dear. And I read the whole very long paper twice just to be sure. But if the DA under new leadership cannot now produce a clear, liberal and attractive alternative to the ANC’s crippling management of the economy, then when can it?
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