Why the DA needs to fire whoever is giving it advice

The way the DA has handled its little crisis with Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille has been and continues to be an object lesson in how not to manage public perception of your brand.

It’s embarrassment piled on awkwardness heaped on tone-deaf blunt pigheadedness.

And the longer it carries on, the worse the DA starts to look and the more De Lille begins to emerge as the victim, rightly or wrongly.

It may well turn out that she is in fact guilty of all the things the DA accuses her of, but her party will need to acknowledge that they haven’t been able to convince even everyone in their own ranks of her flaws.

If they had, the first motion of no confidence brought against De Lille in Cape Town’s city council earlier this year would have booted her right out of Cape Town Stadium. The DA has a huge majority in the city, but several DA councillors refused to vote against her.

De Lille also had the support of the opposition – I suspect mostly just to annoy Maimane and co.

To hear DA federal executive chairperson say that she’s “gone off the rails”, as he did on Sunday, surely can’t sit well with people who’ve come to respect De Lille for her years of fighting against injustice, from her struggle record to her opposition to the arms deal corruption and the Aids denialism of Thabo Mbeki.

The DA is treating her as if she’s a political has-been, an assessment they may find much reason to regret. The EFF would welcome her with open arms, as would the ANC. She can restart her own party, where she enjoyed much success. She’s been outplaying the DA for a while, it seems, especially with her insistence that her disciplinary hearing be open to the public. For the DA to refuse that just comes across as if they have something to hide.

If she can cement her martyrdom status and build on that, it would spell trouble for the DA, which I don’t think has ever been appreciative enough of just how important the support of coloured voters is, particularly in the Western Cape. They take the so-called coloured vote a little for granted, don’t they?

But I’ve also always had the impression that coloured voters in the Western Cape have gravitated to the DA more because they simply don’t want to vote ANC, and not because the DA genuinely represents coloured identity in any kind of obvious way.

Once that changes, the blue wave might falter, even if it doesn’t break.

The election of most of the same old faces into the party’s senior ranks on Sunday was further evidence that this is a DA that has been slow to change. For James Selfe to declare shortly after his re-election that black DA members (who are now in the majority in the party) don’t just vote for other blacks, they vote on merit, was simply terrible. It tied in to the defenceless paradigm that continues to dominate white thinking in this country that white men are in their positions on merit while anyone else is just being accommodated.

Selfe would of course say he didn’t mean it that way at all – but that’s not how many people interpreted it.

Then we read about how the DA spent time at its elective congress debating the need to introduce legislation in parliament that would allow workers to opt out of the minimum wage if they choose to.

Naturally, this is well meant and based on the idea that any job is better than no job, but it comes across badly in a country where black people have been exploited for centuries, and it looks as if the DA is cooking up ways to ensure there are loopholes for them to willingly be exploited for centuries more.

In a political landscape in which the DA’s biggest up-and-coming opponent is promising bounteous redistribution of land to black people every time he dons a beret and opens his mouth, all this quibbling over a few bucks in the minimum wage isn’t doing the DA any favours.

On Thursday, they blundered yet again when they decided to announce how unhappy they were that De Lille had spoken at the Mama Winnie memorial. Selfe said he would be demanding answers in writing for why she hadn’t told them about her plans. It may be that they will now use this as an excuse to put into practice their new recall clause, which they claimed only days ago hasn’t come into being specifically to recall De Lille.

If they do that, it will look bad, and they will come across as scheming liars. If they don’t do that, then all this hoo-ha about a woman speaking at the memorial of a close friend just comes across as petty.

They would have been far better served just keeping quiet and, for once, seeming like the “bigger person” in the whole affair.

But no. That’s not the image of the DA we’ve become accustomed to. Instead, we know the DA will yap and bark about every little thing that moves in any kind way that it finds remotely suspicious.

Whoever is giving them advice about managing their public image needs to be fired long before they get around to firing De Lille. But I doubt anyone is really giving them advice.

They’re probably just shooting from the hip, and they’re coming across as amateurs. In the process, they’re putting themselves exactly where De Lille wants them because they haven’t learnt the lesson that sometimes doing absolutely nothing is the best thing you can do.

Citizen digital editor Charles Cilliers