Reports of DA’s demise are greatly exaggerated

The DA. Did you see? It’s fallen apart. It’s finished now that Helen Zille’s back in the office. It’s the end of a dream. No more “transformed” sunlit upland. Whites will never change and all the black people in the DA are coconuts. I don’t remember anything like it — a synchronised cacophony arose, everyone racing to be the first to call the demise of the official opposition.

To be first to say Zille’s election as chair of the federal council last week was fatal, and logically led to the resignations of the mayor of Johannesburg, the leader of the DA itself and its federal chair. Hurry, hurry, don’t be late. It’s rock ’n roll. Get your clicks on Route 66. South Africans are addicted to bad news and we know how to scare you.

So we went with a return to the dark ages and terminal decline. Fortunately for the many people who have written more or less that, the news cycle in this country is so crazy that within a week most normal people will have forgotten what they said. Zille herself looked stunned every time she appeared on a TV screen. Why, though, if it’s true this was all planned? She said on October 4 she was standing for James Selfe’s vacant job, after having officially left politics when her term as Western Cape premier ended in May. Between then and last Sunday, October 20, when she was elected, more than two weeks had quietly passed without any outrage.

But it was obvious she would win. So why did Herman Mashaba not jump out of the party and his post as mayor of Johannesburg earlier?

Over at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), which has angered Mashaba, they have gone bonkers about race, as if the word may not pass the lips of a true “classic liberal”.

I don’t blame Mashaba for taking offence, but Zille’s two-month sojourn at the IRR as a fellow was pretty feeble resignation material. There’s something else afoot.

Mashaba was off the day after Zille’s election. Another day of punditry and then it was Mmusi Maimane’s turn to go, along with Athol Trollip. By now we are in a crisis. Across the board on TV, Maimane’s departure requires no more analysis than that the DA remains racist.

Meanwhile, a fresh young shaver from the IRR is all over TV, believing, I guess, that he’s there to provide balance. No lad, you were set up. He keeps talking about classic liberals, as if the IRR is now dictating some sort of reset in DA policy. It might want to be, but the world has been fighting for a few centuries now about what a liberal is and the IRR isn’t going to nail it now.

Besides, the institute seems to have mightily annoyed John Steenhuisen, who was DA chief whip until Maimane also left parliament and is now a potential leadership candidate for the party. Cue more punditry. Steenhuisen can’t figure out why the IRR doesn’t just shut up and sit down. I hope he becomes leader if only to give two fingers to the IRR.

There’s no doubt this is terrible for the DA but there’s no way of knowing if it’s terminal. Wait. Be patient. The DA is the best-organised and best-funded political party in the country. It has been the official opposition for more than 20 years.

If you’re young and politically ambitious, the DA is where you have the best chance of succeeding, whatever your race.

I doubt even Maimane imagines the party will simply fold, as we are assured it will, in his wake.

It doesn’t happen like that. There are lots of black leaders in the DA. Some will stand in elections to replace Maimane. The DA’s federal executive, which, before last Sunday, voted in favour of the political report commissioned by Maimane — which recommended that he go — is less than 20% white.

What the party has to do meanwhile is find a way of talking about race and redress that involves actual words and not merely winks and nods. Race won’t go away, not here. It has to be dealt with imaginatively and sincerely.

John Stuart Mill, the British philosopher with whom the IRR and our “classic liberals” prefer to align, was a creature of his century (the 19th) just as the liberals of today are creatures of theirs. You have to be liberal about what’s in front of you — Mill once favoured introducing birth control for the poor. And for a long time he questioned the utility of private property.

I’m a liberal of sorts and I have no problem with racial redress. Black empowerment under the ANC is a mess, however. What the DA has to do is find a better way to bring prosperity and dignity to the poor.

If it works, the race of the leader won’t matter a jot.