The DA’s liberalism and racism are false antinomies driving its internecine war

Supposing the guesstimates of the speculative industry are correct, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Mmusi Maimane is at the last lap of his tutelage.

Last weekend, we learnt that no less a figure than Ryan Coetzee, the party’s former strategist and one of the progenitors of the 1999 malodorous “Fight Back” election campaign platform, recently led a four-person delegation that met Maimane to instruct him to step down as party leader at an early congress.

Following a sojourn in the United Kingdom which included a stint as the right-wing Liberal Democrats’ elections strategy director in the 2015 UK general election – one which, according to the London Independent editorial of October 8 of the same year, led “the Liberal Democrats into electoral oblivion” – Coetzee is leading a panel to inquire into the DA’s decline in the May 8 general elections.

If the review succeeds to jettison Maimane out of the party, he will be the third black leader after Lindiwe Mazibuko and Patricia de Lille to leave acrimoniously amid allegations of racism and the marginalisation of black leaders.

The sharpest and most pointed clue of the racial dynamic in the DA’s turmoil was offered by Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba last weekend.

“I am angry and disappointed by the cowardly act[s] of some racists within the party who claim to be liberal,” he said.

Given to neither nuance nor subtlety, Mashaba added: “If they don’t want to see a DA with black and white members, they must pack their bags and live in Orania.”

We are witnessing outpourings of contradictions that are, frankly speaking, also schizophrenic, in the DA’s approach to race, racism and the unavoidable policy questions that attach to the construction of an inclusive post-apartheid political economy.

Whereas it seeks to woo black voters, the party’s policy positions have so far failed to resonate with their better part who see it as the political representative of a racial capitalism that continues to confer privilege and disadvantage according to race.

The ambiguities and constraints of the DA’s posture on affirmative action and black economic empowerment under Maimane’s leadership are not unimportant in the context of its politics. Neither is last weekend’s remark to the media by Federal Council member Khume Ramulifho, that “we must introduce policies that are aimed at redressing past imbalances”.

It was only a matter of time before these contradictions burst out into the open in ways that can no longer be downplayed.

In March 1999, Dr Bukelwa Mbulawa, then the only black woman out of the Democratic Party’s (DP’s) – the DA’s forerunner – two black members of parliament, defected to the ANC protesting that the DP was “fundamentally opposed to transformation in our country.”

The incident coincided with the “Fight Back” campaign whose barely veiled swartgevaar (black danger) metaphor vacuum-sucked the National Party’s social base into the DA, resulting in a 9.6% gain in the 1999 elections from the paltry 1.7% it secured in 1994.

The growth trajectory continued after Helen Zille’s ascension to leadership in 2007; it grew from 16.7% in the 2009 elections to 22.2% in 2014.

She initially appeared mindful of the folly of the fight back misadventure, going out of her way to court black voters.

But a decade later, Zille would be extolling colonialism on Twitter, expecting approbation from fellow travellers brought up on a diet of the civilising virtues of the colonial project and a black population that is supposed to be grateful for the chains of its bondage.

The long-term opportunity costs of this folly are now being blamed on Maimane and others whose souls appear to be tethered on the poor.

He is under fire for the DA’s two percentage point reduction in the May elections. Yet the continued electoral decline of the ANC since 2009 notwithstanding, the saleability of its presidential candidate, Cyril Ramaphosa, to the electorate presented a challenge to all opposition parties.

De Lille’s unceremonious ejection from the DA and the migration of its ultra-conservative elements to the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) – which speaks more of them than Maimane – also bled the DA.

Loss of this stratum of the DA’s constituency to the far right FF+ reportedly features prominently in internal debates as one of Maimane’s supposed crimes – which justifies his ejection – without so much as an appreciation of the irony of its self-characterisation as a paragon of non-racialism.

Herein lies part of the trouble with South African liberalism: its tolerance for racism and racial social inequality, and its haughtiness and condescension in national discourse about both, relative to the construction of a post-apartheid future.

The truth is that to any astute observer of political dynamics, the DA’s liberalism and its racism are false antinomies.

The observation is neither new nor original.

In a 1987 book, Democratic Liberalism in South Africa – its History and Prospect, Jeffrey Butler and Richard Elphick wrote: “Liberalism, if it is to survive in South Africa, must align itself with the democratic aspirations of blacks and with their determination to end several centuries of wrong.”

Implicit in Butler and Elphick’s counsel is whether liberals are prepared to co-exist in a shared citizenship, appreciating the scrambled egg nature of our past, present and future, as well as the responsibilities that attach to it.

What are those who bear the accumulated socio-economic brunt of three centuries of wrong expected to think of repetitive expressions of commitment to non-racialism which take to battle at the slightest suggestion of infusing non-racialism with a social content?

The question is also not new.

When he crossed swords with dyed-in-the-wool racists like Cecil John Rhodes over the question of the African franchise in 1852, then attorney-general of the Cape Province William Porter asked: “If you now blast all their hopes and tell them they shall not fight their battles constitutionally, do not you yourselves apply to them the stimulus to fight their battles unconstitutionally?”

Porter’s question is as instructive to our history as it is to current attempts to wrestle with colonial and apartheid social relations.

Ratshitanga is a consultant, social and political commentator (mukoni@interlinked.co.za)

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