Hard to sell DA liberal values to black voters
After more than two decades in power, the ANC is in severe trouble. The euphoria around the appointment of Cyril Ramaphosa is fading as he increasingly encounters resistance from within the party to a thorough cleansing of the state.
On top of this the financial crises in key public utilities seem to be getting worse while key economic indicators such as unemployment, production and inflation are rapidly deteriorating.
You would think the prospect of the official opposition, the DA, displacing the ANC at the next election would be getting better. But the latest polls indicate the DA’s support has shrunk. The party’s prospects of equalling its performance at the last national poll – when it obtained 23% of the national vote – look dim.
What, then, is going on? There are a host of reasons to point to. The first is that Ramaphosa, despite his initial post-Zuma popularity having been punctured, remains a far more impressive and weighty figure than the DA’s leader, Mmusi Maimane.
Part of Maimane’s problem is that the DA’s attraction to many has been its claim to represent cleaner and more efficient government. But these claims are being tested as it faces the dilemmas and temptations of running the three major metros it took control of after the 2016 local government elections.
It gained control by forging awkward coalitions with the Economic Freedom Fighters (to whose principles it is bitterly opposed) and other smaller parties. This has meant its hold on power has often looked fragile, and it’s had to engage in wheeler-dealing. Necessary, but not good for the image.
Meanwhile, the party allowed its fight with its Cape Town mayor, Patricia De Lille, to drag on for far too long.
And then there is the issue of race, which divides the party all the way to the very top.
The DA was founded on principles of liberalism. Its ideological position comes with the assertion that the individual, not the group, is the primary unit of society, and that freedom and equality are realised through the freedom of the individual. That’s not sitting well with many of its newly found black supporters.
The DA’s classical liberalism has run up against the problem of how to address racial disadvantage on an individual basis in a society where fundamental rights and material goods have been allocated by race historically.
Either the DA breaches its liberal principles by accepting the need to address racial disadvantage frontally, or, if it doesn’t, it sends out the message to black voters that it’s not really committed to addressing racial inequality.
This tension played out recently when the party became embroiled in an internal spat over whether to support black economic empowerment (BEE).
The DA’s share of the vote has increased with every election. That growth came at the cost of having to dilute its core liberal principles, as it sought to expand its appeal beyond its white base to black, coloured and Indian voters.
In 2013 the party accepted that race should become a basis for redress. In 2015, it adopted freedom, fairness and equality of opportunity into its constitution.
Subsequently Maimane has suggested the party needs to adopt affirmative action by pushing hard for the DA to accept the need for greater diversity in its composition – a way of saying more black people are needed in leadership without saying so.
The more recent internal spat about BEE points to these tensions. Head of policy Gwen Ngwenya announced the DA had ditched BEE in favour of real empowerment from the bottom. But many among the party’s newer members realise they would never be where they are were it not for a policy engineered by the ANC – for all its failings.
True, the DA pumps out the message that the children of a black millionaire do not deserve a special hand-up from the state. However, without a clearly stated policy about how it is going to pave the way for “equality of opportunity”, it’s going to have to work hard to rid itself of its unwanted reputation of being primarily a party protective of white interests. Liberalism, conclude many black people, works for white people only.
The problem for the DA is there is no easy way out of the dilemmas it faces. It comes with the territory of being the major party of opposition and drawing the major body of its support from a white racial minority. Its problem is that on the route to power, principle is always likely to become fudged.
This points to the still greater problem the DA has to confront (and this is the great unsayable). No opposition party in any country in southern Africa has managed to displace a liberation movement, despite their record in government having been dismal, and the vehicle for the rise of corrupt “party-state” elites. Look no further than Zimbabwe, where in 2008 the opposition Movement for Democratic Change won a parliamentary majority before crashing into the rocks of ZanuPF intransigence.
The great question hanging over South African politics is what the ANC would do if it really did lose its majority.
How the DA resolves its dilemmas around race will dictate how it will react in such a situation, for without mass black support it would lack any chance of confronting the ANC were the latter to trash the constitution and maintain its hold on state power.
On the route to power, principle is always likely to become fudged ROGER SOUTHALL