DA risks the race by ignoring race
TToday the DA is the only large party in the elections which has no plausible African candidate within a mile of the leadership
here’s so much froth being written about the DA ahead of the May 29 elections it is worth saying that where it is in government it makes a difference for the better. From public services to job creation, it’s just a fact.
The big question now, though, is why the DA is struggling to make real progress in the face of a general failure of the ANC countrywide and, frankly, a national economic emergency.
Yet, it’ll be extremely lucky to get just 25% of the vote.
The 2019 elections inflicted deep psychological damage on the party. It slipped from a record 22.23% — 4.1-million votes and 89 MPs — under Helen Zille in 2014 to 20.77% — 3.6-million votes and 84 MPs — under Mmusi Maimane, Zille’s hand-picked successor.
Maimane’s toppling soon afterwards was inevitable but it heralded a wide review of DA policies which, in turn, sowed the seeds of the uncertainty the party faces today.
As it picked over the bones of its 2019 setback, a DA old guard was determined never again to find itself adrift of the conservative votes it had built up. And demoralised by years of what it saw as failed attempts to get black people into positions of authority in the party — Lindiwe Mazibuko, Mamphela Ramphele and Maimane the most prominent — the DA now turned its back on the notion that being black in
South Africa was an automatic proxy for disadvantage. It was an historic error in my view. An expensive conceit.
It decided to drop all references to race in its policies in favour of measuring the actual disadvantage of individuals who would (and it hoped this would somehow be obvious without it being actually said) mostly be black. Way too subtle. It walked away from the African voter.
The policy calls made at a virtual party congress in Covid-hit 2020 shifted control of the DA back to socalled “classic liberals ”— Zille returned as Maimane departed. Now chair of the DA federal council, the party’s highest governing body outside a congress, she drove the changes.
With not much obvious success. A string of prominent black leaders and members have left the DA since the policy changes. As they left they were labelled “racial nationalists” and the DA affected not to notice much. But they have given rise to many of the smaller parties now yapping at the DA’s heels and causing present party leader John Steenhuisen to complain about “some small parties obsessed with targeting the Western Cape”.
It may be just politics. But the DA was wildly misguided when it dropped race as a reference for policy if it imagined this would grow support among the majority of South Africans. Either themselves or their ancestors, Africans were violently abused their entire lives precisely because they were born black.
It may have been intellectually comforting to arrive at a position where you could declare colour or race a thing of the past, but you cannot at the same time then pretend to supporters who trust you that you are still in the business of contesting for power in the land. Not in this country.
Today the DA is the only large party in the elections which has no plausible African candidate within a mile of leadership. In this race-obsessed country, where Afrikaners still hold to the Anglo-Boer War, and South African Jews to the Holocaust, it is absurd to expect Africans to forget what was done to them. And without them the DA will be a 20%-25% party if, again, it is lucky, for a century.
What we have now is the DA as, maybe, possibly, a coalition contender. Better than nothing yes, but our great democratic political tragedy is that it could not find a liberalism that embraced a wider social democracy. Its policy documents in 2020 claimed to have embraced a “social market economy”, borrowing from the German soziale Marktwirtschaft but there is none of the German obsession with social consensus in it.
That’s because it was the rush from race that drove the party then, not economic policy. But as the DA contemplates May 29 I wonder where it believes the decisions of September 2020 are most clearly succeeding. I can’t think of any. They’ve just made no difference.
Was it all worth it? It would have been easy for Zille and Steenhuisen to make good political progress without dumping race in policy. All South Africa needs is responsible, honest leaders who live in the real world. I wish them the best next month but, jeez, what were they thinking?