Bloodless e-election will rob DA of ideas

While the country is suffering both the government’s increasingly chaotic coronavirus lockdown and the unintended consequences of trying to get out of it, there is something not entirely pleasant beginning to take shape inside the DA, the official opposition.

It concerns a decision taken recently by its 30-strong federal executive (fedex) to hold a critical party leadership election digitally, on October 31, because of the lockdown and the impossibility of gathering delegates to a special elective conference.

The decision has to be taken to the much larger federal council for final consent.

Former party leader Helen Zille is chair of both. Confirmation is certain.

But the election is a big deal for the DA. It is the ultimate result of the party’s poor showing in the 2019 general election and its immediate aftermath. Remember?

That saw former leader Mmusi Maimane depart, along with Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba, after a report into the party’s election by former DA strategy chief Ryan Coetzee, former leader Tony Leon and banker Michel le Roux last October.

It was powerful.

They found “confusion about the party’s position on key issues, the erosion of the party’s unity of purpose, deep divisions within the national caucus, a breakdown in trust between the leader and some of the party’s structures, a failure to produce a credible policy platform, a general erosion of discipline across the party, the ‘outsourcing’ of key leadership matters” and concluded: “It is our carefully considered view that the single most important factor in shaping the DA’s current circumstances is a failure of effective leadership.”

Which is why the decision to hold a digital election and, I presume, a digital campaign, seems so out of kilter with the wisdom of the report.

A digital election is not going to fix the DA’s leadership problem. Zille was elected to replace James Selfe as federal executive chair last year.

John Steenhuisen, however, remains interim leader of the party. Both Steenhuisen’s and

Zille’s positions would be up for grabs in the forthcoming election.

Also, the election was supposed to follow a two-day policy conference designed to address the party’s inexplicable lack of a compelling economic policy to counter the ANC’s dilapidated empowerment doctrine.

Documents on values and policy have been drawn up, but the coronavirus has blown the policy conference out of the water as well.

So, now, no discussion and no real campaign.

You don’t have to read very far into the Coetzee document to figure this is all a bad idea.

There is no particular need to hurry a new leadership election. This could easily wait until next year.

Steenhuisen is a perfectly competent interim leader and would probably win an open three-dimensional contest anyway. And it would take quite a force to remove Zille from her job.

So why the rush? Does Steenhuisen need to be leader before next year’s local elections, just in case the party does badly again, making it harder for him to win a real leadership election? Surely not.

There are other contenders for the leadership.

KwaZulu-Natal MPL Mbali Ntuli and Gauteng DA leader John Moodey have both expressed interest in the job and, quite frankly, I’d like to hear from them, if only as an interested member of the public.

Ntuli sent a note to party members this week expressing her dismay at being in effect disallowed an opportunity to campaign properly.

“Our party has come from a bruising election result and a review report that clearly stated our party needs to have serious introspection and ask some hard questions,” she wrote.

“There may be a time in the future when we will be able to use online platforms for some parts of a federal congress. However, now is not the time.”

Zille defended the fedex decision.

“It is important to understand that fedex has not approved a full-blown virtual congress,” she said in a party circular.

“It has only given the goahead for an elective congress, to elect leadership to take the party into the 2021 local government election ... I think we can all agree that it is highly undesirable for any party to go into an election campaign with interim leadership, if we want to be taken seriously as an electoral contender.”

I’m not so sure.

What the DA needs is its credibility back and it isn’t going to get that by steamrolling a leadership election (let alone abandoning a policy conference the Coetzee report said was critical) that would be patently unfair to other contenders given the strength incumbency gives Zille and Steenhuisen.

They must know this. Hell, why not market Steenhuisen, Ntuli and Moodey as a troika if the local elections actually go ahead next year? One of them can be properly elected later.

The danger isn’t that the black woman or the Indian guy loses.

The danger to the DA is that in the face of an immovable status quo, fresh faces and perhaps ideas just give up and walk away.

Surely no serious politician wants the bloodless execution of a nonelection?

We want a fight!

An election without an opponent is a little (to misquote former Australian prime minister Paul Keating) like having a shiver without a spine to run down.

● Bruce is a former editor of

Business Day and the Financial

Mail.