GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Is Herman Mashaba the next DA leader?

Western Cape Premier Helen Zille produced a substantial newsletter on the water crisis, "Day Zero and the way forward", on Monday. To say it was well received is an understatement. The media and public devoured it with wild enthusiasm.

For example, with an accompanying link to her piece, Peter Bruce, highly critical of Zille in the past, went so far as to tweet: "All other issues aside, when the sh*t hits the fan, who you gonna call? – this woman. Inspiring, frightening piece...".

That kind of hyperbolic sentiment was replicated a thousand times over on social media.

There are a few reasons why the piece was so embraced. For one, in a crisis the public wants information. It’s a bit like being diagnosed with a terminal disease — your first instinct is to understand. Information gives you something to hold on to and Zille, who is authoritative by nature, provided a raft of the good stuff.

But the letter encapsulated something else too, something less tangible. It seemed to embody the kind of bold, unreserved conviction so sorely lacking within the DA leadership these days. Essentially, Zille “took charge” (as a hundred online headlines boomed) and you could tell.

At face value her newsletter says there is a natural disaster in the city and the province needs to step in. But, between the lines, it reads that the city is essentially incompetent and it is critical that someone else plot a new path, and now!

It is clever, too. By including a request to President Jacob Zuma that the drought be declared a national disaster, attention will be directed to the national administration, where the DA believes it should have been from the start.

All of this is delivered in great detail, with considerable foresight and infused with a real sense of urgency, in the way only Zille can.

And only Zille can, that is the point. Mmusi Maimane, the DA leader, cannot. He simply doesn’t have it in him.

He has been forced to follow Zille’s lead. On Wednesday, at 11 am he will appear on a Facebook livestream, to set out the party’s response to the drought. But it was Zille who set the tone. 

It is true, Zille has a legislative mandate and actual state power behind her to act on this matter, which is something Maimane lacks. Such things help to engender a sense of purpose. But it matters not, even without them she would still embody that sense of conviction and purpose Maimane so desperately lacks. Simply because those are traits particular to her character.

Her newsletter was so celebrated because it was delivered into a leadership vacuum.

The DA is flailing, caught in a thousand cross-breezes and pushed and pulled in every direction, sometimes simultaneously. Some of these problems are of its own making, many are not, but one way or the other they all seem to have come together in a perfect storm. And in the eye of that storm sits Maimane. The storm has him.

Maimane has many admirable qualities, some considerable charisma, a calmness and generally unflappable character, he seems immune to the kind of petty vindictiveness that marks so much of South African politics these days. He has a relatively high EQ and can deliver a predetermined message up there with the best of them. Cruelly, the phrase that perhaps best describes him also damns him. He is essentially just a really nice guy.

But for all that, he is not commanding. Unscripted he is unsure of himself. Indeed, without a predetermined message he is often quite vulnerable. He seems to have no vision for the party of his own, outside of "activism" which really is an internal mechanism, not a vision or purpose. And, most importantly, he seems to have no strategy. There is no plan to get from A to B to C, only clichés, about "believing" and the prospect of a "better tomorrow".

This problem, of a lack of strategy, is a long-standing and profound one. It goes to the heart of the DA’s and Maimane’s problems. It is difficult for the public to understand because the DA is always doing something, but the lack of a coherent strategy is best illustrated by this question: what exactly does the DA stand for?

There are the obvious platitudes in response, of course — good governance and service delivery, a strong stance on corruption and a general kind of "people first" attitude — but really any political party worth its salt stands for those things.

They are not distinctive or defining. They are fragile ideas that live or die by how well the governing party embodies them.

Outside of those things, you might ask, why should anyone vote DA? There was a time when it stood for an open opportunity society for all. Those days are long forgotten. Deemed too complicated for public consumption, under Maimane the party proposed a series of three supplementary values: freedom, fairness and opportunity.

The DA lacks a bottom line. It is a bottom line that helps you determine when and when not to push forward

They are still the tagline the DA uses at the end of its many and various daily mission statements. But because the party behaves in such an amorphous and indistinct manner, they have become amorphous too. Just words. They evoke nothing concrete in the public mind.

Maimane’s whole game, his personality, is centred on  hyper-circumspection. Under him, the DA has become like the man trapped in a minefield. Very carefully, he extends his leg, gently touching the ground before him, before slowly and very gradually transferring his weight forward. And if he does hear a click, or anything feels wrong, he quickly retreats. In turn, his purpose seems not to get to the other end of the minefield nor to plot a course, but simply to survive. And so he wanders round in careful circles, avoiding danger.

That is not how you lead. And the problem concerns not just things such as policy, of which the DA has none (and that which it has proposed, under Maimane, is confused and ill-thought through) but the fundamental essence of leadership. The DA lacks a bottom line. It is a bottom line that helps you determine when and when not to push forward. When to take a hit in the name of some difficult cause and when to compromise, for the sake of the greater good. You can feel it in almost everything the DA does.

Without it, every issue is quickly reduced to an independent puzzle, to be solved not in relation to some grand design, but by the parameters the problem imposes itself. Both Zille herself and, more recently, Patricia de Lille, have caught the DA in this trap. Without the ability or will to deal with either problem politically, the legal, paralegal and technical processes that defined the more bureaucratic route the party had taken in both instances, meant it was subservient to forces it could not control.

Maimane alone cannot be blamed for this. He was elected not because of his vision or intellectual fortitude, but because he was a surrogate for the DA’s brand. Indeed, he was deemed the perfect embodiment of it. That worked well enough for the first few years. But parties, the electoral market and the political landscape is constantly changing. This is why you must have a vision you can call your own. So that you can guide a party through these changes. Because Maimane has none, he cannot. And because those who elected him seem capable only of offering up the basis on which he was elected as the rationale for all behaviour, the DA is now floundering, with only its internal polling, learnt behaviour and standard practice to fall back on.

As the political landscape cares nothing for the DA’s internal universe, it seems almost trapped in time. Repeating the mantra it has learnt by heart, but which increasingly rings hollow. And, at the very top of the party, with regard to the small cohort that comprise the core leadership, hypercircumspection also defines decision-making. There is no clarity and the DA tends to practise caution, not conviction. They all are culpable.

The history of political leadership in any party tends to be complementary. Take the ANC, for example. Thabo Mbeki was experienced as aloof, a philosopher king, thus alienating and detached.

Therefore, the party overcompensated in the other direction. With Jacob Zuma came a wild populist, a man of the people but also a demagogue and divisive. And so, today, we have Cyril Ramaphosa, supposedly the great reconciler, elected primarily on a unity ticket but quite likely profoundly compromised as a result.

The DA response to Helen Zille, a person whose IQ has always trumped her EQ, was to elect the opposite: Mmusi Maimane, a man of the people, born of the people, representing the people. It is not a mutually exclusive comparison, Maimane is no fool. But whereas Zille led through ideas and conviction, Maimane leads through sentiment and compromise.

Unless this situation is reversed, and the DA is able to return to the front foot — the only posture in which Maimane is capable of thriving — sooner or later the DA is going to turn on him.

At this rate, the 2019 election could well be the moment when all these various problems come to a head. As the drought continues and the De Lille saga painfully plays out, the two core components of the DA’s brand are under assault: good governance and clean administration.

As those are the only two things the DA has been able to offer for the past five years, without them it is going to be in serious trouble at the polls. If the DA does badly in 2019, or even if it is merely perceived to have done badly, the party will instinctively turn to those who had led it into this cul-de-sac.

History suggests what happens then is that the institution compensates by seeking out those types of leaders who embody the opposite of what the previous regime stood for. There are slim pickings for the DA, but one name does seem to stand out: Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba.

While it is perhaps difficult to say exactly what Mashaba stands for, he is everything Maimane is not: bold, decisive, filled with self-belief, and for good reason, because he is self-made. He exudes the kind of confidence, purpose and conviction Maimane lacks. His favourability is through the roof at the moment and, depending on who you talk to, some research even has him ahead of his own leader.

As such, he would seem a strong contender for the DA’s Gauteng premier candidature. But even if that does not happen, don’t be surprised if sooner or later, either the public or the party faithful themselves start whispering about him as a future DA leader. Listen closely enough and you can almost hear the first murmuring.

Maimane is young but growing in experience fast. Certainly 2017 was as steep a learning curve as you could wish to put any political leader through. He emerged, battered and bruised on the other side, and that is to his credit. But he simply cannot afford to carry on "surviving". He needs to start leading. And fast. Not every decision in politics can be stage-managed to produce the perfect, inoffensive outcome. Sometimes you just have to back yourself, for the sake of the cause. That, however, requires that you have a crystal-clear sense of what the cause is, and how to go about enacting it.

Until then, Helen Zille’s newsletters are going to be the thing everyone talks about.

• Gareth van Onselen is the Head of Politics and Governance at the Institute of Race Relations.