Yesterday, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen formed part of a delegation that visited Donald Trump to plead South Africa’s case. Precisely what Steenhuisen’s contributions were is not yet clear, but this is what he should have done: encourage the Americans to place pressure for reform on the South African government, rather than follow the inaptly so-called “leadership” of Cyril Ramaphosa.
A clearer picture of the meeting will doubtless emerge in time, but I have significant doubts about whether the DA leader stood on principle.
In the months since Steenhuisen misguidedly led his party into an inequitable, formal coalition with the African National Congress (ANC), the DA has abandoned previously clear and unequivocal stances on expropriation without compensation (EWC) and race-based rent seeking.
Not only that, but Steenhuisen, who previously had – and I bore direct witness to this – cordial, even good, relations with the Solidarity Movement, has since graduated to accusing the Solidarity mission to the United States of spreading disinformation.
During the leadership of Mmusi Maimane, the concern rightly was that the DA had rhetorically begun abandoning liberalism and acceding to the rhetoric and policy preferences of the socialist ANC.
Today, the worry is not simply rhetorical: in fact, the DA is – despite protestations to the contrary from many in the rank and file – assimilating into the ANC policy ecosystem.
Not only is the DA’s rhetoric on EWC softening, but DA minister Dean Macpherson was on stage at NAMPO this May explicitly defending the Expropriation Act that his party had been nominally opposed to since the beginning. Steenhuisen joined his colleague, implicitly defending the Act on the basis that there is no “mass” (a red herring if ever there was one) property confiscation in South Africa, despite the law now formally allowing precisely that.
The DA is litigating against the Act, but not on substance. It avers that the Act was adopted in a procedurally irregular manner – and I think this is a relatively strong formal argument – rather than that “nil compensation” is (as it is) constitutionally suspect.
At NAMPO Macpherson went so far as to say that property owners in South Africa now have greater protection than property owners in the United States, and that the new Act better protects property than the old Expropriation Act did. (The old Act was repealed in part because it offered, in the view of Macpherson’s ANC colleagues, inequitably large protections for owners.)
More than that, Steenhuisen himself in February signed two AgriBEE instruments as DA agriculture minister. When business group Sakeliga rightly called Steenhuisen out on this, he called a press conference to lambaste Sakeliga – in grossly dishonest fashion. “It’s the law!”, the rallying cry of the 21st century’s useful idiot, was Steenhuisen’s best comeback.
This does not even dwell on DA environment minister Dr Dion George and his crusade against free enterprise in his portfolio.
This is all to say that, while under Maimane the vibes and rhetoric of the DA were moving in an unacceptable direction, under Steenhuisen the DA has conducted itself not only in contravention of the democratic mandate granted to it by its voters, but also in diametrical opposition to the very constitutive principles of the party: pro-property, non-racial.
The whole DA?
There are many DA leaders I have the utmost respect for, but their claims that Steenhuisen, Macpherson, and others are not representative of the “whole DA” is useless in practice.
The whole DA is taken wherever its present leadership takes it. Of course, many in the DA are frustrated and disagree fundamentally with the direction of the party – and I wish only strength to their arms in these tumultuous times – but unless they say and do something substantive about it, it counts for naught.
I have warned since November 2022 – these articles are all linked above – that the DA would be co-opted by the ANC if it went into a formal coalition without adopting a more Machiavellian posture.
I was wrong about some things back then. I assumed that some DA representatives would as a matter of principle resign their positions should the party go into a coalition with the ANC – none to my knowledge have done so. I also predicted that the coalition would not last long – it has now lasted a full year. Perhaps most naïvely, I also expected that the DA would be able to get some superficial compromises from the ANC – primarily on foreign policy. And, boy, how wrong I was!
But about co-option it has been clear for a while that I was right.
There are many holdouts in the party who have not been co-opted, but for as long as the leadership remains in place or is allowed to continue along the current course, it is only a matter of time before everything is swallowed up.
Each time some concession by the DA is allowed on the basis of “pragmatism,” the needle inches away from the DA as an independent entity with a separate value proposition, and towards its being a peripheral part of the ANC ideological ecosystem. It will be imperceptible at first, but eventually people will realise that nothing really separates the public policy postures of the two parties any longer.
This is a crisis of massive proportions that those in the DA who still value honesty and integrity, but primarily the tenets of classical liberalism, need to do something about without delay.
[Image: By Staff photographer in the employ of the Democratic Alliance – Democratic Alliance, CC BY-SA 3.0 za, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=150007930]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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