Is Maimane the tonic to cure the DA’s ills?
Damaging perceptions and policy drift are at the top of the agenda, says
IN May 2007, Tony Leon offered some sage, unsolicited advice to his successor, Helen Zille, as she basked in the glory of her victory over Athol Trollip and Joe Seremane at the DA’s federal congress in Midrand.
“This is the height of your popularity,” he told her. “Your political capital will never be higher. If you are a leader of consequence, ready to take unpopular decisions, you will start spending your political capital from today. It is like a bank account which will become depleted and, despite occasional inflows of capital, it will never be at the current level again.”
Today, Zille will hand over the reins to her successor, likely to be Mmusi Maimane, and after the brouhaha about him being the first black leader of the DA has died down, a frank and brutal assessment of the state of the DA, and a calmer assessment of his strengths and weaknesses in leading it, will follow.
On the upside, the DA has a sound and well-qualified staff structure of hundreds of people, a very loyal core voting con- stituency, the high ground on clean government and a struggling opponent.
On the downside, the party is confronted by policy drift, internal toxicity, race-based challenges and a lack of coherent strategy.
Maimane inherits a party that is professionally run, and whose finances are very healthy. It is the only party in South Africa with a CEO, something rooted in the mindset that the DA must operate much like a business.
Its fundraising and telemarketing teams run like clockwork, and it has a staff of hundreds countrywide, including a small army of paid researchers, polling experts and constituency communication workers.
For sheer professionalism, no one can beat the DA staff. This even leads to some resentment from strong-willed, independent-minded town councillors, members of provincial legislatures and parliamentarians, who must conform to an often despised quantifying, box-ticking exercise called the performance development management system, through which
NEXT IN LINE: Mmusi Maimane, outgoing leader Helen Zille and DA MP Gordon Mackay at a briefing in Cape Town in March they are regularly assessed on the number of, for example, speeches made, parliamentary motions put, money raised, media mentions accumulated and voter outreach programmes hosted.
Election results show that DA-supporting voters are more likely to make the effort to vote than supporters of any other party in the country. This loyalty manifests in a turnout differential, especially in local government elections such as the one South Africa will have next year, and helps the DA do better in overall proportional representation results.
Another plus for Maimane is that he inherits a party that, mostly through its performance as the government of Cape Town and the Western Cape, has earned a reputation for relatively cleaner and more efficient government than its rivals.
Thus, the DA benefits from the mistakes, corruption and sometimes violent internal rivalries of its opponents, gaining in comparison.
That said, the new leader will inherit a party beset by its own problems and challenges, some of which he would have to take care not to embody.
The first among these is organisational and policy drift.
It is often said that the DA is defined more by what it opposes (the perceived racially based crony capitalism of the ANC, the racial prejudice of the extreme right wing) than what it, itself, stands for. In this regard, Maimane would have to define to the country what he stands for.
His statements on referendums about issues defined and protected in the constitutional Bill of Rights raised worries that he might be more of a populist majoritarian than a constitutional democrat who appreciates that such provisions protect the vulnerable against the excesses of populism.
He would have to confront, and through positive actions disprove, the perception that he is a remote-controlled show pony who falters without a prepared script.
In this, he would be greatly assisted if there could be greater clarity on exactly what the DA’s policies are on vexed, divisive issues, and whether there is an overarching world view in which they are rooted, as opposed to the pragmatism embodied by the DA’s perceived reliance on polls measuring voter preference.
The new leader will also have to confront a nasty toxicity that has crept into the DA, embodied best, perhaps, in the behaviour of some of its members on social media e-mails.
Tangled webs will always be woven in political organisations, especially growing and strong political parties where there are fiefdoms, income and positions to be gained as a byproduct of voter and donor loyalty.
The mark of a truly strong leader would be to limit the toxicity and build a team. In this, Maimane has excelled over the past year. He presides over arguably the most united and happiest DA parliamentary caucus in the party’s 15-year history.
Another issue the DA has to confront under its new leader is race, and how to handle it. The DA is supposedly a nonracial party, but that principle is honoured mostly in the breach these days.
Does the mud of the ANC jibe — that a black DA leader is a
and
in
anonymous hired native — stick in the mind of voters, and if so, why? Is there a white boys’ club running the DA? What is the role of minorities, who support the DA en masse, not only in the country, but also in the party? Why are there no Indians in real leadership positions? Can a white male still rise on merit to claim the ultimate political prize? If not, why not?
More to the point: Can only a black leader get black voter support? Are black voters only capable of voting for black leaders? And would the DA put up black leaders merely to gain black support?
These are not theoretical questions, but they require principled answers for the DA to be of practical use to its supporters who wish to see it, eventually, as an alternative government.
The new leader will have to confront a nasty toxicity that has crept in The DA’s nonracialism is honoured mostly in the breach
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