JUSTICE MALALA: Why the DA snubs black liberals

I have met a fair number of “foreign investors” in my time. Very few ask about the “party of business”, the DA. One or two might scrunch up their forehead and remember something about John Steenhuisen, the party leader, but most of the few who inquire remember Helen Zille or, surprisingly, Helen Suzman.

In this election cycle, they ask incessantly about President Cyril Ramaphosa, and are obsessed with the ANC’s chances of scraping through with a 50% majority. For these stakeholders, stability, and even economic progress, lie with an ANC win or a solid ANC-led coalition.

Put another way, they don’t think the DA has a chance in hell of winning this election or forming a coalition to run the country. Why?

It’s been 30 years of our higgledy-piggledy democracy and yet the DA still doesn’t get one thing: there is no upside whatsoever to denigrating black South Africans’ experience of apartheid, or the symbols that replaced that system. It may seem like a smart idea to depict the corrupt and incompetent governance of the ANC with a burning flag, but if the DA had some wise brains around, someone would have asked: “Why alienate potential black supporters when you can just tweak the ad a bit?”

This is exactly what didn’t happen when the DA considered its election advert featuring a burning South African flag. Instead, the party went for the smart-aleck “gotcha” ad, and then spent last week being called names by even the mildest of analysts and many black liberals who may be amenable to the party’s message. That the party’s leaders, from Zille to Steenhuisen, spent the week digging in their heels tells you just how removed from the reality of South African black experience this party is.

Let me say it one more time for those in the DA who are prepared to listen: don’t denigrate the symbols of this new democracy. It just perpetuates a narrative (true or not) that the DA despises this new country. You are letting your slip show.

Let me say it one more time for those in the DA who are prepared to listen: don’t denigrate the symbols of this new democracy

The ignorance and arrogance displayed by the DA leadership around the flag issue are tragic. The party continues to drive black liberals into the wilderness of new parties and independent candidacy, or makes them simply walk away from politics.

Has the DA ever really tried to understand why Mmusi Maimane, Herman Mashaba, Mamphela Ramphele and so many others have left the party? Has there ever been an examination of how it positions itself vis-à-vis the history of this country? The more I try to understand the DA, the more I get the debilitating feeling that the wing of the party that runs it today does not want to do the simplest of things — shed the smugness, the condescension, the superiority complex and the juvenile attitudes that characterise those who don’t believe that apartheid was that bad.

The DA should by now be the one party that is about to wipe out the ANC. Its history of confronting the ANC since 1994 should have positioned it in such a way that it does not need to be begging other parties to join it in a multiparty coalition. It should boast a plethora of black leaders who feel at home in it and committed to its cause.

Instead, it has driven them out. What a lost opportunity. For what? To sound smart?

I have said this before: South Africa is a country of black liberals. From Mashaba to Maimane, and many others in the civil service and business, their natural home should be the DA. Yet, again and again, the DA does something so hurtful to them that they would much rather go with the devil they know or risk wasting their vote on a smaller party than vote for the DA.

The DA, which should be getting ready to walk into the Union Buildings in two weeks, will not become the governing party of South Africa any time soon. A black liberal party, possibly a conglomeration of the liberal side of the ANC, ActionSA, Rise Mzansi, Build One South Africa and others, will likely get there first.