Steenhuisen has put the DA back on a winning path
Last week, the Sunday Times deputy editor, Makhudu Sefara, not for the first time, stepped outside the bounds of journalistic ethics with his slanderous attack on the DA and its leader, John Steenhuisen. His evidence-free vitriol demands a fact-based response.
First, there’s his revisionist claim that the DA overreacted over losing “a few voters” in 2019. While it may be convenient for Sefara and others who are invested in painting a racialised narrative about the DA to rewrite history, the cold, hard truth is that Steenhuisen’s predecessor as DA leader cost the party nearly 500,000 votes in 2019.
If Sefara had bothered with such niceties as basic journalistic due diligence, he would have read the 2019 review report’s findings that this resulted from “a failure of effective leadership”. It was in this difficult context that Steenhuisen stepped forward to lead in 2020. And lead is what he has done.
After Steenhuisen obtained his first mandate from thousands of DA members, after painstakingly rebuilding the DA’s internal systems and processes, and after restoring internal cohesion and message discipline, the DA stabilised and got back to growth in the 2021 local government elections.
It was during the 2021 election, with Steenhuisen at the helm, that the DA won its first outright local government majority in KwaZuluNatal, in the uMngeni municipality. The DA also retained big outright majorities in strongholds such as Cape Town, while further expanding its government footprint in Gauteng.
Without attempting to cite a shred of evidence, Sefara claims “the polls show that Steenhuisen is unlikely to increase the DA’s support” in 2024.
This claim is so spectacularly wrong that it could only have been motivated by something other than journalistic observation. Here’s what the credible polls actually say: the Social Research
Foundation’s October polling puts the DA nationally on 31%.
The Brenthurst Foundation’s data, also from October, puts the DA between 25% and 27%. The Institute of Race Relations survey in November puts the DA on 26%. These public polls, which show DA support in the upper-20s or better, compared with the 20% the party got in 2019, are confirmed by the DA’s internal tracking polls, which modelled the results of the 2021 election for all major parties within a 1% margin of error.
Sefara’s statistical illiteracy extends to favourability ratings. The IRR’s November poll shows that Steenhuisen has the highest net favourability of any opposition leader in the country. Then there’s the fact that respondents to Brenthurst’s October poll indicated that Steenhuisen is by far the preferred candidate to run as the multiparty charter (MPC)’s presidential candidate, should the MPC decide to go that route.
Speaking of the charter: it is telling that Sefara fails to mention this game-changing initiative. Steenhuisen made the DA’s commitment to this project unequivocally clear during the DA’s April congress, where he was re-elected with an 83% majority. The formation of the MPC has already realigned politics, as the maturity of co-operation demonstrated by opposition leaders has, for the first time, given voters a credible alternative that can beat the ANC in next year’s election.
Given the overwhelming data demonstrating that a more focused, disciplined and coherent DA , is on track to grow substantially in the 2024 election, Sefara’s evidence-free polling claims can only come down to dishonesty or malice. And not for the first time: in 2021, the DA secured a devastating Press Council ruling against Sefara over his lies about the party.
But what could possibly motivate such a “petty, childish and pathetic” agenda? A clue may be found in the fact that Sefara used those exact terms — “petty, childish and pathetic ”— when confronted in August by respected GroundUp journalist Raymond Joseph over a DA exposé that showed how R24.7m in funding from the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) was channelled to Sunday World, apparently in exchange for favourable coverage. And who was the editor of Sunday World during the period of this scandal? None other than Makhudu Sefara.
Despite a request from the DA to the owners of the Sunday Times calling for Sefara to be investigated over this scandal, and despite calls from respected media leaders such as Anton Harber that these “concerning” allegations must be dealt with, it appears that Sefara has gotten away scot-free. Readers of Sefara’s column have the right to know that his coverage of the DA is likely tainted by the party’s consistent work to combat corruption at the NLC.
Sefara’s greatest fear is clearly that the DA succeeds. For if the DA emerges as the big winner from the 2024 election, as all current trends suggest, it will destroy, once and for all, the racebased grift that he has been peddling for years. A DA that ascends to the Union Buildings next year as part of a new coalition government will signify the end of race-based politics as we know it.
It must, in the end, be painful for Sefara to watch the DA making meaningful inroads on its way to finishing off a weakened ANC in 2024. While this prospect fills millions of South Africans with hope for a new era of politics focused on delivery, it is the worst nightmare of all those whose livelihoods depend on fanning the flames of racial division.
I have bad news for Sefara. Very soon, posters showcasing Steenhuisen as the flag-bearer carrying the hopes and aspirations of millions of DA voters into this country’s first national coalition government, will go up across the country. While a sad person like Sefara will see in those posters only a skin colour he detests, many millions of voters will see the face of a proud South African committed to rescuing our country from collapse.
And one can only hope Sefara has help on hand when, in as little as six months from now, his worst nightmare comes true, when South Africa elects a new government with Steenhuisen and the DA at its heart.