In the wake of DA leader John Steenhuisen’s decision not to seek re-election in April, attention has predictably focused on a replacement. The most likely candidate is Cape Town’s popular mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, but it would be good if he were challenged. That way we would get to know more about him.
Steenhuisen we knew as a belligerent DA chief whip in parliament, a job he did well, and his deep skill was to talk nonstop when he had to. Not easy.
The DA was in turmoil after the poor results of the 2019 election, which resulted in Mmusi Maimane all but forced out of office. The revisionist argument that he left of his own accord is a brazen distortion. A quick mouth does not in itself make you a leader, but Steenhuisen was chosen to replace Maimane because there was no-one else.
If the party hopes to improve on, or even equal, its 2024 result, it must accept the racial redress imperative — for starters
The 2019 setback led to a profound change. Helen Zille, as party leader, had gone out of her way to bring blacks like Lindiwe Mazibuko, Mamphela Ramphele and Maimane into the party leadership but now, as chair of the DA’s powerful federal executive, she changed her mind. The DA erased the word “black” from its strategy and discourse. Race would no longer be a “proxy” for disadvantage.
I’ve always thought this was mad, but suggesting the party think again invites instant attack. Do I not realise, I’m asked, that “as soon as we accept race as a proxy for disadvantage you accept that ALL black people are disadvantaged and ALL white people are advantaged, which is patently not so”.
But what is patently true is that for hundreds of years, until 1994, ALL black people were disadvantaged, and the question to a new DA leader is: “What are you going to do about it?” The DA thought it had dug a neat racial escape pod for itself, a conceit, to dump our greatest difficulty while insisting that because most poor people were black they would benefit proportionally from its work anyway.
The DA was simply trying to distance itself from a deeply corrupted and BEE-dependent ANC as a way of luring back the conservative white voters it believed Maimane had alienated.
The actual effect, though, is that the DA is no longer in the argument about redress, and that is where opportunity lies — for the party base and for attracting new voters. Afrikaners still curse the savagery of Boer War concentration camps 130 years ago, but blacks are supposed to have put apartheid and its forced removals behind them already?
The DA just has to get this balance right. If it can’t, it risks remaining an also-ran. And there’s no time and not enough momentum to be too subtle. The DA is in a government of national unity today because Jacob Zuma broke from the ANC and not even remotely because Steenhuisen “won” a place there for the party.
While DA supporters who fear a move back towards the political centre may find some succour in an FF+ or elsewhere, this country is never going to settle until we all settle.
Forget secession. The only way to fix South Africa is together, led, or at least pushed, by a party with clear-eyed resolve.
A revived Scorpions is vital. The fight against crime and corruption is winnable with the right political support. Devolution of responsibility for public services — ports, rail, air traffic among them — to provinces and cities that have demonstrated a capacity to run them should become a simple fact of law. Maintenance of everything is everything.
It is hard to believe a party as dysfunctional and corrupt as the ANC has survived this long in power, but the DA should not be surprised. Caught forever between black and white nationalisms, South African liberals argued for years about federal and other options for the post-apartheid era. That’s done now — we’re a unitary state. Devolution is possible (even desirable) but federation is not.
And yes, while it would be great for the DA to run stable local governments in Johannesburg and Pretoria, along with Cape Town, it’s a foot in the national door that matters. Steenhuisen refers constantly to the DA polling now at 30% nationally, up from the 21.7% it won in 2024. But these polls are dated. To get to 30%, or even above 25%, in 2029 the DA will need black voters to support it to a degree they never have before.
That’s why it’s outrageous now that liberals ask voters to put the past behind them. Racial discrimination broke this country and the ANC is apartheid’s last political remains.
To replace it, the DA will have to find its way back into the middle of our political road, even if it is a scary project. It has to be brave.
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