Tony Leon’s book tells the party’s inside stories

In Future Tense: Reflections on my Troubled Land, Tony Leon, the former leader of the Democratic Alliance, comes across as articulate and persuasive.

Ever since its founding as the Progressive Party in 1959, the DA opposed injustices committed by the apartheid government. Today, its support is overwhelmingly from demographic minorities. Its current challenges include ensuring black people become its top leaders.

Recent turmoil included veteran party leader Helen Zille propelling Mmusi Maimane into the leadership of the party. The other was Leon’s role in pressuring Maimane to resign after a series of DA tactical errors culminated in electoral losses in 2019.

Chapters 2 and 3 provide the first insider account of the ousting of Maimane in October 2019. His meteoric rise, and that of former DA parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko, as well as the attempted recruitment of Mamphela Ramphele, the outspoken liberation struggle activist, were viewed as the DA expanding out of its former limits to gain African voters. Their departures deflated such hopes.

Leon also delves into the accompanying turmoil in the DA because of choices made by Zille, who has retained senior positions in the party and refused to relinquish power.

Leon mulls over the DA’S biggest challenge — “how to maintain its majority support among minorities, and increase its meagre voter share among the black majority”.

These remain unsolved conundrums even after two decades of democracy. African voters comprise four-fifths of the electorate. For the DA to become the ruling party, even in a coalition, it must win over more than just racial minorities voters.

Much of the book is taken up with summarising two decades of media exposés of corruption in the ANC government, and the descent into kleptocracy under Jacob Zuma’s presidency.

It also has more than a chapter on millionaire and billionaire emigration from South Africa, but it doesn’t have one sentence about the immigration of two million working-class Africans from other countries, and what this might tell us. Leon’s closeness to the plutocratic classes is matched by his distance from working-class realities.

The book as a whole is suffused with the perspectives and arguments of private wealth and investment bankers. But the contrasting arguments of the labour movement appear only in a sentence or two for dismissal.

Similarly, this book and the DA, which the author is still associated with, give readers the impression that they judge South Africa’s foreign policy by the degree to which it complies with those of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation countries, and have a tin ear for the importance of pan-african empathies. —