The survival of the DA is a concern

As the dust and confusion swirl around the trio that toppled the Democratic Alliance (DA) into an existential crisis, there is at least one thing that we should know.

Contrary to Herman Mashaba’s explanation when resigning as Johannesburg’s mayor, it is not primarily because the return of Helen Zille. It may have been infuriating that the abrasive Zille’s “retirement” was all so brief. But her return was not, as claimed, the restoration of an ideological dynasty.

While the dispute around the centrality of race in DA policy is certainly an issue, it was primarily the DA’s organisational dysfunction and disastrous electoral performances – in May, in by-elections since, and potentially in the 2021 local elections – that made it impossible to continue as usual. Zille’s return was simply the ill-timed tap of the hammer that finally cleaved the DA along those old fault lines.

Mashaba is perhaps the greatest loss, and not only to the DA. Here was a potent vote-getting counter to the governing party’s welfarism — a black, socially conservative, unabashed capitalist who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps.

Unfortunately, by his own admission, Mashaba got on better with his coalition partners in the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) than his own party’s councillors.

The resignation of Mmusi Maimane as DA leader should be no surprise. It’s been unavoidable since the May election. The party’s post mortem, which concluded that the primary problem was “a failure of effective leadership” was a formality that he should not have waited for.

When Maimane went, the departure of his biggest ally, Athol Trollip, became similarly inevitable. There are almost certainly going to be further high profile resignations and Zille’s first challenge will be to ensure that a changing of the guard does not become a party schism.

And the DA’s basic problem remains unresolved – the relative prominence to be accorded to race and merit in its policies. Finding that golden mean is not simple.

The ANC’s stress on skin colour has been enormously successful at drawing into the machinery of society the hitherto deliberately excluded. It has, however, also reached the stage, by excluding and demonising race minorities, of risking the destruction of the entire New South Africa concept.

So the commentariat’s widespread schadenfreude over the DA’s plight is misplaced. At least that party is wrestling honestly with these realities, whereas the government, business and academia, pretend these are not challenges that are basic to our survival as a nation.

What happens next in the DA is critical to all South Africans. Not only does good government depend on strong opposition. It matters also where on the political spectrum the strongest opposition is sited. For that is the direction of compromise, the ideological direction in which the government is pushed, in order not to lose votes to its strongest rival.

The DA’s value is not as the government-in-waiting that it egotistically and delusionally claims to be.

For the foreseeable future, its most important role at a national level is to stake out pragmatic alternatives to existing government policies.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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