DA’s missed opportunities

The word is that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address was written in just over a day, largely by Ramaphosa himself. There was nothing really startling in it. It was mostly common sense and what many have been asking for. DA leader Mmusi Maimane himself said as much when he was interviewed after the address.

Right now, strategically the DA is nowhere. The state address jerked the rug from under its and the EFF’s feet. While the DA may themselves have made many of the points in debates in Parliament and elsewhere, as far as I am aware they have not collated them into a single document as a DA vision or plan for SA.

Instead, they squandered the past few years by focusing on Jacob Zuma.

The DA should have spent some time preparing high-level strategic plans around the themes presented in the address and released them prior to the speech. That would have given them first-mover advantage on everything outlined in the address (while the ANC was mudwrestling Zuma out of the presidency) and made the speech resemble nothing more than a cutand-paste job, a summary of all the past debates around state capture. If we’re honest, that is largely what it was.

The political battleground is now centred on execution of the vision in the state address That much is obvious from just about all the political reactions to the speech.

The DA has a similar opportunity now to document in some detail what those plans should look like and get them into the public domain. However, all they have done since the address is advise the president to fire errant ministers and replace them with competent people. This is little more than grandstanding. As a strategy it fails to give the DA any political advantage as most other parties are saying the same. They have now positioned themselves as just “one of the rest”.

I’m not a fan of the DA at all, but I am hoping the party will get its act together as the official opposition. We would all be better off for it.

James Drew

Via e-mail