Question-dodging Maimane must practise the accountability he preaches

Portraying your political party as the only morally upright one is a dangerous game – your opponents will be itching to prove you’re no better than them.

This happens to the DA a lot. At times, it’s a bit of a reach, like when motions of no confidence appear to have been used by the ANC and other opposition parties as an excuse to try to remove DA mayors in various municipalities from power. Other times, however, those wanting to prove the DA does not live up to the level of accountability it preaches are handed a gift.

One example of such a gift is Maimane apparently declaring to parliament that a house was his when it was actually rented from a friend, leading to members of his own party demanding to know if he was actually the one paying the rent.

Another example is the discovery that Maimane drove around in a car paid for by Markus Jooste and Steinhoff – the man and company that executed what has been described as South Africa’s biggest-ever case of corporate fraud.

While some would argue this doesn’t exactly prove corruption, what it does do is put Maimane on shaky ground in his attempts to cast President Cyril Ramaphosa’s CR17 donations as being criminal.

If Ramaphosa is expected to be transparent about donations, then Maimane should be too. If the CR17 situation, which shows the usual morally ambiguous machinations of politics rather than any actual illegality, can be held up as proof of corruption, as Maimane has tried to do, surely the DA leader can’t be surprised when the same happens to him.

The party’s deputy federal chair, Mike Waters, the only DA politician so far who appears to be openly and explicitly gunning for Maimane, uses this same logic against his party’s leader to devastating effect: we are the ones who are meant to champion accountability and transparency, and so we must be held to a higher standard.

“If we hold the ANC to that standard and President Ramapahosa and the president before him, Jacob Zuma, we have to have that same culture within our party,” he said in September.

Which is possibly just an excuse, for recent events appear to vindicate those who believed longstanding rumours that the mainly white, liberal camp in the DA, which seems to mostly call the shots, wants Maimane gone. Waters – one of the DA’s many members who have embraced right-wing reactionary politics as a supposed antidote to the ‘woke’ left – seems to be a member of that camp.

It’s ironic that it seems to be the DA itself, as opposed to a rival party, which is proving its leader’s worst enemy, with several media reports indicating that this plan by the so-called ‘liberal faction’ to oust Maimane may have been hatched even before the party’s dismal election results came in.

Whatever the motives behind the revelations surrounding Maimane, and whether they amount to any actual criminality on his part – there is no concrete evidence so far that this is the case – it’s definitely not a good look for him, nor is his dismissal of the allegations against him as “smear campaign”. These will likely come back to bite him in the bum the next time he preaches that the ruling party lacks accountability.

The other problem with that whole throwing stones in glass houses cliche is that the media will hold you up to a higher set of values than your rivals.

Attempts at engaging with the party in the past couple of weeks demonstrate how their high-ranking members become defensive and belligerent when a journalist dares not to immediately take the party’s side.

I am used to the ANC failing to get back to me, or to EFF spokesperson Mbuyiseni Ndlozi ignoring my questions and then tweeting some rubbish about Stratcom an hour later.

But the DA purports to conduct itself differently, which is why their total lack of skill when confronting difficult questions is mind-boggling.

Maimane himself is adept at dodging questions.

Ones sent by me and addressed to him last week – about several allegations levelled at the DA’s Joburg mayor, Herman Mashaba – were fielded by his spokesperson Azola Mboniswa in such a way that I’m still not sure if they actually reached him.

I was told that Maimane is not the person within the DA who can answer questions about Mashaba, to which I replied that I specifically wanted to know how the DA leader feels about the allegations. It’s not for a political party to tell the media what questions it can and can’t ask their leader, and the opinion of Maimane, who has led “Hands off Mashaba” marches, on accusations that the mayor has fuelled xenophobia and may have bought the EFF’s loyalty in Gauteng through the Afrirent tender, is certainly relevant.

When I persisted, Mboniswa referred me to James Selfe’s chief of staff, Elsabe Oosthuysen who, in what was beginning to become a bit of a farce, simply referred me back to Mboniswa.

Eventually, James Selfe told me that for mysterious reasons only he, not Maimane, could answer questions about the DA’s governments.

It’s hard not to feel like the DA is simply so used to be treated with kid gloves by the media that they exhibit total bewildered confusion when engaged in the way that any independent journalist should.

DA national spokesperson Solly Malatsi once told me he was “very unhappy” with how I portrayed him in a story when literally all I said was that he was unavailable for comment.

Based on his reaction you’d think I had accused him of snorting cocaine off a sex worker.

Mboniswa loves The Citizen when we send people on one of the many publicity events Maimane holds, such as when he leads a visit to a job-creation initiative in Cape Town or engages with the chamber of commerce and industry on economic challenges and solutions.

The implication is almost that the media works for the DA, with its job being to cover the party’s events in the way they want you to cover them. You are expected to publish stories about Maimane visiting factories to hear the stories of workers affected by Eskom, or to publish whatever platitudes the DA leader is saying today.

Your job as the media, according to the DA, is certainly not to ask any difficult questions.

Which makes the party as bad as the ANC and the EFF. Or maybe worse, because at least those two parties have the decency to not even pretend to be better than the other politicians.

UPDATE: A previous version of this article said Elsabe Oosthuisen is Mmusi Maimane’s chief of staff. She is in fact James Selfe’s chief of staff. 

The Citizen digital news editor Daniel Friedman. Picture: Tracy Lee Stark.

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