Misguided DA is selling Zibi to the world

IThe person best placed though to fish among black and white discouraged DA supporters may be Zibi himself

n all the 12 or so years I’ve known Songezo Zibi, first as a writer, then a Business Day editor and, now, leading his new Rise Mzansi party into the May 29 elections, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him talk about the DA.

He’s written about the DA in his books but they don’t come up much in conversation — not with me anyway. His obsession has been, even before he got into party politics, the need to remove the ANC from power. Stuck in the past, it’s deeply corrupt and smotheringly incompetent. South Africa, he says, cannot be saved while the ANC is still in office. His has been arguably the only new political party that has made an effort to go into far-flung rural areas and take the ANC on directly.

So it has been entertaining to watch what is now a fullon fight between Rise Mzansi and the DA in its fortress state, the Western Cape. I first noticed it in early March when a DA leader sent me a WhatsApp: “Do you think that Rise Mzansi’s support of EWC [expropriation without compensation] is a smart strategic move?”

What I am sure of now is that the DA was looking for a target to plant on Zibi. What they had found was video of him answering a question about land expropriation and in it he said he approved of it provided it took place within the (current) law. It was enough to set off a burst of DA accusation that for some reason either got under Zibi’s skin or he smelt the fear in it.

Since then he has spent a lot of time in the Western Cape and the DA has given him publicity he couldn’t have dreamed of by attacking him.

The thing about trying to smear Zibi is that he is actually decent, is actually coherent and actually a constitutionalist.

Where for a while his party was scarcely making news, now it is in the media a lot.

Whether he can turn that into seats in parliament waits to be seen but he is also on record saying he would, if he had to choose, rather help a minority government which might include the DA, to stay in office, than lend any level of support to the ANC.

That the DA attacks him is bewildering.

Like it or not it has got itself into a position where it is simply not attracting black support. Following its poor showing in the 2019 poll, and the subsequent departures of Mmusi Maimane and Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba, a significant number of well-known black figures have also left the party.

The current DA leadership has explained these departures as bordering on the routine and of little interest. The party these days affects not to care about race or to even notice it, and thus cannot respond to the departure of black figures other than to lament it as the normal comings and goings of political life.

But they are not. This is race-soaked South Africa and this little conceit may prove expensive.

While the DA voting base is holding, it is most likely not expanding much. The only way to grow it is to appeal to specifically black voters and that’s no longer what the DA does. I doubt somehow that the black people I know who voted DA last time would follow Maimane or Mashaba into their respective political wildernesses — if anything both men are trying to rope white voters away from their old party.

The person best placed though to fish among both black and white discouraged DA supporters may be Zibi himself, perhaps particularly in the Western Cape. I think the DA figured that out slightly before he did, which is why it started the fight. But he knows it now.

I feel for the DA: I live in the Western Cape and I can attest to the quality of its management. But management isn’t enough. South Africans vote with their hearts and not their heads. It is why a rough and outrageous Gayton McKenzie is able to eat so heartily off the coloured vote in the province.

By dint of omission or commission by the DA, black voters are going to avoid it next month. I think the 25% it’s scoring in recent polls is well beyond reach.

It will be up to new DA leaders after the election to sort out the strategic mess that’s been contrived since 2019. It was one thing to get back the base Maimane lost in 2019 but we will only know the cost of that after May 29.