Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Mmusi Maimane has, thus far, transformed the racial make-up of the DA, not only in Parliament, but also across party structures.
I have written a number of opinion pieces on the dynamics within the DA, and its leader Mmusi Maimane.
Although the pieces remain relevant while dynamics take different turns, I feel obliged to cite excerpts from a few of them in order to unpack a smear campaign against Maimane following reports that he leases a house from his business partner and that he had driven a car donated to the party by Markus Jooste, the disgraced former Steinhoff CEO. The smear campaign, which brings to light what many progressive black executives endure when they transform white establishments, aims to discredit him, thereby engendering his dislodgement.
In Mmusi Maimane has passed his leadership litmus test, I posit, ‘The DA is an exemplar of the white establishment, and Maimane cannot transform it alone.’ In particular, he needs support from black DA members.
Comparing him with his ANC counterpart in Maimane is a real agent of change, not a white puppet, I wrote, ‘Unlike … President Cyril Ramaphosa, Maimane is honest about and remains true to his vision, despite coming under fire from white conservatives who hide behind a white voter alienation to preserve their white privilege at the expense of black poverty.’ Hence, we no longer hear and speak of a ‘black caucus’ within the DA. Rather, we hear and speak of a disgruntled group of white liberals, including its former leaders Helen Zille and Tony Leon, who are behind the smear campaign.
Delivering the 2019 Friedrich Naumann Foundation/Institute of Race Relations (IRR) Liberty Lecture, Leon said the DA has lost its liberal identity. Former DA head of policy Gwen Ngwenya, who had attended the lecture together with Zille, concurred: ‘At some point liberal became a dirty word in the DA,’ she said.
This is one of the reasons Maimane is under siege from white liberals, in cahoots with the IRR, often led by Gareth Van Onselen, a Business Day columnist and former DA director of political analysis and development, in the main. Conveying a message from the 2019 FNF/IRR Lecture, IRR analyst and writer Hermann Pretorius calls for ‘a white man’ in the Western Cape, Premier Alan Winde, to replace Maimane (Storm forecast: Winde, with brighter prospects), an opinion piece published on Daily Friend, an IRR newsletter. ‘This is what the DA should look like,’ he wrote, referring to what a DA MP had apparently told him following a speech by Winde in Parliament.
Van Onselen, who joined the liberal think tank in January 2018 as its head of politics and governance, has been very critical of Maimane’s leadership. As the 2019 general elections drew closer, he called on people not to vote for the DA in Vote for the DA, at your own risk, criticising its leader for many things, including his stance on BEE. Ironically, white liberals invented and imposed BEE, pioneered into a legislative framework by Ramaphosa, who chaired the BEE Commission under an ANC-led government.
Aimed at redressing colonial and apartheid vestiges, BEE and Affirmative Action (AA) are the two main race-based policies that divide the DA. Under its former parliamentary leader, Lindiwe Mazibuko, it voted in favour of their amendment bills, leading to a public fallout between her and Zille, who described them as ‘Verwoerdian measures’. Immediately after the 2014 general elections, Mazibuko resigned as parliamentary leader and went overseas to pursue a postgraduate degree. In came Maimane, who replaced Zille as the first black DA leader in May 2015.
A month after Van Onselen had joined the IRR, Maimane called for a policy paradigm shift. ‘We need a wholesale change in empowerment policies, to move away from race-based policies that enable elite enrichment, towards policies that fundamentally break down the system of deprivation that still traps millions of South Africans in poverty,’ he wrote in Bokamoso, a DA newsletter. However, Van Onselen says he suppressed ‘a debate about an alternative to BEE’, one of the reasons Ngwenya resigned as head of policy before the party could unveil its election manifesto.
Ngwenya having resigned. so did James Selfie as a federal chairman, the two of whom had co-authored a piece on the DA’s alternative policy to BEE; the last man standing is Maimane and he has to follow suit, according to Pretorius. Raising the ante on the smear campaign, he set out to diagnose Maimane as the problem, but dismally failed because he does not to know the factional phase in which the DA finds itself.
To start with, no party is immune to factionalism. Therefore, Pretorius ought to have determined which factional phase the party occupied when Maimane took over the reins from Zille and whether it is in the same phase today or not, as well as factors that impinge on its internal cohesion – and then ask himself whether it would grow with ‘a white man’.
Having done that somewhat in Maimane is a real agent of change, not a white puppet and in Politics of factionalism, published in The Star in January this year, I agree with him that the official opposition has not reached its ‘maturity’ stage, not by a long shot. However, his assertion is racially myopic. ‘The seed of the DA’s recovery has been planted by a white man in the Western Cape,’ he wrote.
He continued: ‘Electorally, Winde’s campaign to retain the Western Cape for the DA managed to win 55.45% of the vote. This is a decline from the party’s high of 59.38% in 2014, but, seeing as internal opinion polls for the DA mere weeks out from the election showed the party nudging just above or just below the 50% mark, and also taking into account the national weaker-than-expected performance shows that the provincial party did something right.’ Yet he does not compare Winde’s popularity ratings to those of Maimane in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and Eastern Cape, as well as in the national sphere.
Gauteng holds sway on power, followed by KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, and the Western Cape comes fourth. With the ANC on the verge of losing Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, where its support has dwindled to 50.2% and 54.2% respectively, Pretorius should ask himself as to whether a Winde-led DA would win these provinces with outright majorities in 2024, or muster near majorities to secure power-sharing arrangements, be it through a coalition government or a confidence and supply deal, without the EFF, which is set to hold sway on decisive power in our body politic for many years to come, if not replace the DA as an official opposition party in the near future.
The question not only lays bare his racial myopia, but also relates to external factors that engender the DA to ideologically reform. Following the 2016 local government elections in which the DA dislodged the ANC in Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB), and Tshwane metropolitan municipalities through coalition governments (thanks to the EFF, which opted for a voluntary confidence and supply deal in its support), Maimane has been at pains to lay much emphasis on the idea that we are poised for a power-sharing arrangement. Therefore, it is important for him to bring the DA closer to the centre of the ideological divide.
Although the DA has lost support for the first time under Maimane, its performance can be summarised as having lost some (white liberal) voters and gained some (progressive black) voters. Therefore, its prospect of growth looms large with gained voters, who constitute the black majority. Contrary to Pretorius, the DA’s ‘brighter prospects’ lie in a black man rather than ‘a white man’.
Like Ramaphosa with the ANC, Maimane is in a position in which he can and should boldly dare his detractors to dislodge him and see whether the DA would retain Johannesburg and Tshwane in 2021. In the event that it were to retain them through coalition governments, Pretorius should ask himself whether Winde would get along well with EFF leader Julius Malema, who, and, by extension, his party, uses a conquer-and-divide strategy, which targets an individual of non-African descent, to pursue a particular agenda.
To punish the DA for not voting in favour of its motion in Parliament to amend section 25 of the Constitution in order to enable land expropriation without compensation (EWC), for instance, the EFF targeted former Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB) executive mayor Athol Trollip, who is of European descent. Teaming up with the ANC and the United Democratic Movement in the main, it tabled a non-confidence motion in him to dislodge a DA-led coalition government in NMB.
Although Maimane and Malema, the two of whom are in their late thirties, are on opposite ends of the ideological divide, there is an African brotherhood that exists between them. That African brotherhood, which extends to Johannesburg executive mayor Herman Mashaba and Tshwane executive mayor Steven Mokgalapa, has thus far kept the DA in power in Johannesburg and Tshwane.
In his campaign for Western Cape Premier Winde, whom he exalts as a ‘job creator’ and ‘crime fighter’, Pretorius says: ‘In terms of his record in governance and at the ballot box alone, Winde seems an obvious candidate to lead his party nationally from its current malaise to a recovery, slow as such a recovery might prove to be.’ Ironically, Winde has just become the premier following the 2019 general elections, held in May. It is too early to assess him on any performance indicator.
Perhaps, the irony of it all is that Pretorius criticises the DA for its ‘racial identity politics’ on one hand and he pushes a racial agenda on the other hand. Zille, who has been embroiled in a few racial controversies herself, supports him. ‘The underlying point he was making, with which I agree, is that the DA cannot be a race-driven party,’ she said.
Thus far, Maimane has somewhat transformed the racial make-up of the DA, not only in Parliament, but also across party structures. However, it remains largely, if not exclusively, white in courts of law. Hence, Maimane should not resign, and no black leader should replace him.
Like the ANC, the DA thinks it can address its internal dynamics by a mere leadership change. A leadership change without a proper diagnosis of the factional phase in which a party finds itself, and the effect of external factors on its internal cohesion, brings a ‘change and continuity’ phenomenon, as has been happening within the ANC over the past twenty years. It brings a change in that the ANC has been electing new leaders every five years and continuity in that some dynamics remain the same, or are intensified.
With the DA, which is in a state of competitive factionalism, a second phase of factionalism in which members are opposed to each other over policy direction and positions of power, a leadership change would further divide it to the point of break-up because Zille, who has suspended her IRR fellowship, is vying for the position of federal chairpersonship. She is to the DA what former president Jacob Zuma is to the ANC – both divisive figures who cannot let their successors govern without their shadows looming over them.
With Zille as its federal chairwoman, the DA would hastily plunge into degenerative factionalism, the third and final phase of factionalism in which the ANC finds itself. Besides Mazibuko, she has fallen out of favour with Maimane, Mbali Ntuli, and other progressive black DA members.
Maimane is also under siege from DA-cum-IRR handlers, who also handle Ramaphosa. In Thabo Mbeki: the Dream Deferred, Mark Gevisser says some in an inner circle of former president Thabo Mbeki told him that Ramaphosa resigned as ANC secretary-general and went into business as part of a ‘shrewdly calculated’ plan by the economic elite to parachute him ‘back into politics a few years later, his hands apparently clean but utterly beholden to the business environment and captive to the racial supremacy of white liberals’.
Some of these white liberals have donated in the region of R1 billion to his ANC presidential campaign, dubbed CR17. Leon knows a property owner who donated R30-million to the campaign. He revealed this after Ramaphosa had endorsed a constitutional process to amend section 25 in order to allow for EWC, a 54th ANC National Conference resolution. According to Leon, the property owner ‘might have second thoughts [about the donation] given his approval of amending s25’. This is what constitutes state capture.
Vehemently, the DA and the IRR are opposed to EWC, one of the reasons Zille had joined the liberal think tank as its senior policy researcher. To allay their fears and those of his handlers, Ramaphosa appointed a Panel of Experts and an Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) to address the land issue while a final decision on EWC lies in the legislature, not the executive.
In fact, DA-cum-IRR handlers engage in state capture of a special type through BEE. By lodging a complaint with Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane to investigate the R500 000 the late African Global Operations CEO Gavin Watson donated to CR17, Maimane has disrupted state capture of a special type, intertwined with neopatrimonialism. It may very well be that DA handlers are withdrawing their funding for the party as a strategy to cajole it into dislodging him.
Zille criticised the DA for lodging the complaint with Mkhwebane, whose appointment the party did not support. In addition to Watson, Mkhwebane investigated other CR17 donors. She found that, in his reply to a question posed by Maimane about the R500 000 donation, the president ‘deliberately’ misled Parliament. This may lead to his dislodgment, a possibility which raises fears among DA-cum-IRR handlers and investors at large about a David Mabuza presidency.
Although Pretorius believes that the DA’s ‘brighter prospects’ lie in Winde, he is concerned that Mabuza, of all people, has exalted him as a ‘very good man’. This speaks volumes for the Mabuza fear factor, probably the reason he does not address key business events, although he is a leader of government business.
Mkhwebane went on to order National Speaker Thandi Modise to ‘demand publication of all donations received by President Ramaphosa because as he was the then deputy president, he is bound to declare such financial interests … in the spirit of accountability and transparency.’ Successfully, pending a court review of her report, Ramaphosa has asked the court to seal names of his donors. Whatever the court ruling, Maimane has disrupted state capture of a special type.
The problem that is Maimane continues to irritate both the DA’s and Ramaphosa’s handlers. In the last presidential questions session, Maimane ambushed the president with a letter from former ANC treasury-general and Health Minister Zweli Mkhize to Gavin Watson’s company in which he thanked it for its R3-million donation to the ANC.
Molifi Tshabalala is an independent political analyst. He submitted this article to the Daily Friend as a right of reply to this article.