DA leader John Steenhuisen says his party will not sacrifice its principles to govern at all costs.
The DA, the official oppositions in parliament, with other smaller parties, are hoping to take advantage of the dwindling ANC support at the 2024 general elections. In coalition with a number of smaller parties, they have since taken over the governance of Johannesburg, Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Nelson Mandela metros.
While coalition governments are fast becoming the norm in SA, Steenhuisen said the DA will not enter into government with parties that do not share its “core principles”.
Several surveys have pointed to the ANC’s electoral support dipping below 50% in 2024, raising the prospect of a coalition in order for the former liberation movement to stay in power.
In an interview with Business Day, Steenhuisen said it is impossible to work in coalition with parties that “do not even remotely agree with your core principles”.
“For us these can be distilled into four key principles: no-racialism, respect for the rule of law and the constitution, a social market economy that views the private sector as partners in the growth and jobs agenda, and the building of a capable state free of cadre deployment,” he said.
“I reject the notion that we have fought for political power at the expense of delivery. Quite the opposite, we have fought to remove the ANC and find common cause with other parties precisely to improve delivery, and the results speak for themselves.”
He said the DA’s co-operation with the IFP in KwaZulu-Natal and in several other metros is a step in consolidating the “united front against the ANC”.
Land expropriation
Steenhuisen said the DA’s “core mission” is to break the ANC majority in “all centres of contestation”.
But it would not be at all costs, he said. In this regard the DA is diametrically opposed to most of the EFF’s key doctrines such as the expropriation of land without compensation.
“We wish to govern, but not at all costs. We learnt hard lessons under the [former DA Joburg mayor Herman] Mashaba/EFF tie-up in 2016 that this can fundamentally undermine your core offer to voters and impede your ability to deliver clean and accountable government,” Steenhuisen said.
He said race-based legislation has deepened the divide between rich and poor and led to “every single metric in the country moving in the wrong direction”.
“We need to build a stakeholder economy in which more South Africans have a stake in our future. The current insider-outsider stitch-up between big business and big government locks 35-million South Africans out of opportunity,” the DA leader said.
He said talented people are leaving the country because opportunities are drying up. “Our ANC government’s policy approach has led to huge stagnation and drying up of opportunity and this is reflected in record unemployment, poverty and hunger and the rising rates of skilled emigration to other centres where opportunity exists.”
The key to reversing this trend, he said, is to grow the economy and thereby expand opportunities for more South Africans. “A focus on addressing ‘push’ factors like crime, load-shedding, broad-based BEE gouging and so on would also assist in retaining our skilled citizens in SA”.
Leaders left
Steenhuisen said the DA, viewed to be struggling with nonracialism after the exodus of several black leaders, has far less racism than most parties. Most of the black leaders who left the party cited racism as their key reason for leaving. He lashed out at former DA leaders who have left the party, saying he had no confidence in them and questioned their political nous.
Leaders that have since left the DA include Patricia Kopane; Makashule Gana; Mbali Ntuli; Phumzile van Damme; Mmusi Maimane; Lindiwe Mazibuko; former Johannesburg mayor and now ActionSA leader Mashaba; former Gauteng leader John Moodey; former Midvaal mayor Bongani Baloyi, now ActionSA member; Athol Trollip, who is now ActionSA Eastern Cape chair; and former Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille, now leader of the GOOD Party.
Asked if their departure was a vote of no confidence in him as leader, Steenhuisen said, “I do not share your confidence in these individuals ... the recent by-election result for [ActionSA] in Gqeberha was negligible and hardly points to good organising. The Pretoria by-election also disproves the theory. I do not regard the departure of those individuals as anything more than their personal choice to exercise their rights of political association.
“[ActionSA] has also lost far more people in recent months (including their entire KwaZulu-Natal leadership) than the DA has. [Former DA member] Mabine Seabe works as the media spokesperson for the DA mayor of Johannesburg.”
Steenhuisen said the 2021 local government elections under his leadership were a better result nationally than the national election under erstwhile leader Maimane in 2019.
“I guess the 2024 election will be the real test. I certainly believe that the DA is far more united, coherent and sure-footed under my leadership,” he said.
omarjeeh@businesslive.co.za
mkentanel@businesslive.co.za
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