DA Western Cape committee steps in over leadership race

The DA’s Western Cape provincial executive committee held an emergency meeting on Monday morning to discuss the “damaging” reports around its leadership race.

The jostling for acting leader in the province is getting ugly, with accusations of racism and doctoring of reports taking centre stage. An election is due on Saturday to fill the post left vacant by Patricia De Lille, who resigned in January.

While five candidates will fight it out for the position, many are predicting that the real race will be between interim leader and human settlements MEC Bonginkosi Madikizela and the DA’s Cape Town metro chairman, Shaun August.

But some within the DA are calling for August to be disqualified after he was found to have violated the party’s procurement guidelines.

August and fellow DA councillor Matthew Kempthorne were found guilty in January of procuring party T-shirts during the 2016 local government election campaign without following tender processes. They were fined about R50,000 each and given suspended membership terminations, which means that their membership will be cancelled should they be found guilty of a second offence in the next five years.

Madikizela said on Monday some members of the party were saying the DA should not have a black leader in the Western Cape since the province had a majority coloured population.

“It’s only a few people and I think the party should take strong action. I am not worried it will have an impact on the outcome [of the leadership race]. I am the interim leader and I was the deputy, which shows this party has confidence in me.”

It is also alleged that August’s camp leaked a sanitised, or doctored, federal executive report to an Afrikaans publication, which tried to clear him of the T-shirt procurement scandal.

Western Cape DA spokeswoman Anneke Scheepers said the provincial executive committee had decided to refer the matter to the federal legal commission for further investigation. “These are damaging allegations, but people are innocent until proven guilty and that is why the matter has been referred to the commission,” said Scheepers.

August said it was nonsense for anyone to claim that the interim leadership race had been racialised. “There is no race card. We are campaigning on the basis of what candidates can do. It has nothing to do with race.

“If he [Madikizela] wins, we will unite behind him.”

The other candidates are Lennit Max, who lost to De Lille in 2015, and relative unknowns Peter Langeveld and Cape Town councillor Arlene Adams.