Spectre of past returns to haunt DA with race narrative about De Lille

Fiasco around rapid ousting of Cape Town mayor 17 years ago also differs from damaging drawn-out imbroglio

The DA is in turmoil. The party leadership attempts to fire its Cape Town mayor, who is both coloured and a populist, though also someone who has migrated across the party political map. The proximate causes for the party move against the mayor and the termination of her DA membership are varied: alleged maladministration, caucus disunity and tarnishing the party image. Notwithstanding the “charge sheet”, the DA leadership offers the mayor a “soft landing” in another seat.

The mayor contests the termination and launches an urgent application against the party in the High Court in Cape Town, citing procedural unfairness. Meanwhile, strategic leaks from the DA parliamentary caucus suggest the party is adrift — divided on strategy, infirm on tactics and ideologically at war with itself.

Demonstrators outside the court hold placards stating that the mayor is the victim of a “baas” mentality pervasive in the upper reaches of the party.

In 2001, when I was party leader, the above snapshot summarised the saga when the DA attempted to oust then Cape Town mayor Peter Marais. With only the slightest change of detail and a new cast of characters (except for James Selfe, who was then as now DA executive chairman), history in the Cape of Storms appears to be repeating itself.

But is it? And how will the latest chapter, still being inked at the time of writing, end? And with what consequence?

If you are an opposition supporter at the national level in SA, or simply believe in the importance of the DA as a brake on one-partyism, there are some important distinctions between the events in Cape Town 17 summers ago and the imminent departure, whether on her own terms or not, of Patricia de Lille from the DA.

Despite the noisy affirmations on her character and popularity, De Lille is likely to have fairly short coattails wherever her next political home is located. Her Independent Democrats never broke the 2% ceiling in national politics.

Before the siren calls from then mayor Helen Zille persuaded De Lille to pack up her party, her solo outing as Cape Town mayoral candidate yielded just 10% of the local vote in 2006. Most South Africans, regardless of race or province, also tend to put party ahead of personality.

The spectre that haunted the DA’s handling of its previous Cape Town mayoral fiasco has furthermore now, mercifully, been removed from the book of laws: floor crossing. This charter for political charlatans and mercenaries simply meant enticements, often in the form of cash envelopes, could change the balance of power in city hall without any voter input.

However, the Marais saga of 2001 lasted all of one month between informing him of his dismissal and his departure. The DA suffered an embarrassing court defeat and he departed to the New National Party (NNP) the next day and later to the ANC.

In contrast, the De Lille matter has been front and centre of the party and national attention for eight excruciating months, in the midst of the worst drought in 300 years accompanied by enormous city-imposed hikes in tariffs imposed on its core ratepayer base.

DAMAGING WAR

A combination of circumstances, some self-imposed and others from the forces of nature, have done what the heavens have largely declined to do in Cape Town: rain severely on the parade of promises made by the party — competence, ethical leadership, cost-effective services and showcasing its local governance as a template for its national prospectus.

But the Marais ousting was simply a proxy, though damaging, war between two factions that were uneasily wed in the DA — the liberal Democratic Party (DP) and the NNP, which were then the dominant opposition forces of the day. The merged party’s big election win in local elections in 2000 masked a fundamental disagreement on the party’s purpose and profile.

It would take the DA nearly a decade to recover the electoral support lost when the factions that had been welded together split apart in 2001.

Of course, post De Lille the DA will not split along the same lines, or at all, in the manner of its last divorce. But since the current saga coincides with, or is emblematic of, a race narrative triggered when party leader Mmusi Maimane set the DA’s face against “white privilege”, another ghost from the past has re-emerged.

DA national spokeswoman Refiloe Nt’sekhe declared on News24 on Monday that although about 70% of the party membership was black, its parliamentary caucus was “relatively untransformed”. She described this as “calling a spade a spade”. Less kindly, one might also describe her choice of words as bombing your own ship.

Three aspects stand out from the national spokeswoman’s interview, which suggests a fundamental division elsewhere within the party. She uncritically accepts the language and nature of the ANC critique of the party.

Indeed, Nt’sekhe recently committed the DA to completing the work of assassinated South African Communist Party chief Chris Hani.

But the problem with racial accounting is that it cuts two ways.

This leads to the second lesson to be learnt from the DA split in 2001. The NNP component, which was assiduous in signing up party members, demanded that party membership be the determination for allocating seats.

The DP element insisted that electoral strength be the determinant. So while one faction of the party now demands the caucus reflects either national demographics or DA members, another can equally demand that the caucus should represent the people who actually vote for the party. That demographic, with a huge support of national minorities, yields a very different result.

But another issue is perhaps the most fundamental: the DA is playing on the wrong terrain. If the argument is about race then it is always going to lose, not because it has nothing to say on the topic but because its opponents will always outbid it on this turf.

President Cyril Ramaphosa recently emerged as the unlikely defender of Maimane on the white privilege issue. But he was eyeing his chief opponent with as much sympathy as a python looks at its prey.

One aspect of the DA story, however the current chapter ends, remains unchanged. It is involved in a historic project at a time when liberal democracy in SA has never been more contingent. Alone in the political ring, it stands for a broad South Africanism that is both/and — not either/or.

It should not be found in the corner of doubling down on identity politics. This is not simply losing ground for it, it is also strategically incoherent since all the party’s opponents represent variants of illiberal democracy.

The DA’s unique proposition should be to call out all those inside and outside its ranks who seek to entrench a group identity on individual South Africans. That is the way of the liberal democrat. Or, as Gideon Rachman recently wrote in the Financial Times, it is about accepting that every person has a composite identity.

In SA that means acknowledging the past, but not being entrapped by it going forward. That is the firm ground of principle that will allow the party to reclaim its core purpose in the life and politics of SA.

● Leon, a former leader of the opposition, now chairs Resolve Communications and is a senior adviser to K2 Intelligence of London. @TonyLeonSA.