In response to a recent column (The DA’s low-profile premier candidates, July 4), Ghaleb Cachalia, one of nine DA public representatives to contest for the position of DA Gauteng premier candidate, said on Facebook, "I’d be happy to do a no-holds-barred interview to show why I could deliver the goods." I took him up on his offer and sat down to discuss his candidature, the province and the DA’s prospects in it.
Cachalia joined the DA ahead of the April 2016 local government elections, when it was revealed that he would stand as the party’s mayoral candidate in Ekurhuleni. He said at the time, "I stand here today, not because I am leaving the ANC but because the ANC has left me." Yet, although both he and his family are steeped in ANC tradition, it would be a mistake to assume he shares the party’s ideological inclination towards socialism and racial nationalism. He is a liberal, and he wears his colours on his sleeve.
He brought with him a great deal of experience from the private sector, and he did well in Ekurhuleni, finishing on 34% and bringing the ANC below 50%. Last year, he stood for Gauteng provincial leadership, against the incumbent John Moodey. He gathered around him, and in support of his campaign, a number of liberal stalwarts.
There should be an "ideological divide between the ANC and the DA", Cachalia said in November, although in reality he argues that DA incoherence tends to muddy the waters rather than part them, a problem he describes as "terrifying". He said: "We’re not socialists, we are fundamentally liberals."
Although he would eventually lose the fight for the provincial leadership, he has become, in many respects, a liberal flag-bearer for these kinds of internal contests.
~ Ghaleb Cachalia
— I think he would probably be the best MEC for health in the whole bloody country. There would a template there second to none. I mean he would knock Aaron Motsoledi at national into a cocked hat. And I think that is what Jack [Bloom} should be doing. He would be amazing
The candidates
Thus, I started by asking Cachalia why he had put his name forward.
"Gauteng is terribly important in the scheme of things, for 2019 and the elections; the party I belong to is throwing, in large measure, a lot of its energy at this particular province, quite rightly so. I think that to have a hope of winning this we need the right candidate."
He identifies three things as defining the "right candidate". First, they need the right attributes, technically; second, they need to "understand the beast they are up against", so they can fashion the right kind of campaign; and third, they need the right kind of experience.
"If we don’t have those three things, then we don’t have a candidate", Cachalia says. Bolstered by internal encouragement, he believes he can deliver on all three. "There is an additional factor", he adds, "when I look at the other candidates … I am concerned. I am concerned because the candidates have to reflect the essence of the party, the values of the party, and if they are pandering to an expediency that is ‘ANC-lite’, that worries me profoundly."
Of course, Cachalia would not have known — outside of Makashule Gana, who has run an external campaign — who else intended to stand until the final list was revealed. But he says, "You hear rumours, you get intelligence … I kind of had an understanding."
Of the nine candidates, only four have any real standing in the party: Cachalia, Tshwane mayor Solly Msimanga; national spokesperson Refiloe Ntsekhe; and Gauteng MPL Gana. But of them all it is Msimanga that stands out as especially curious. Not two years into his tenure as Tshwane mayor, should he win the candidacy and the premiership, he would have to abandon that metro and the commitment he made to those voters. It would seem indicative of the DA’s lack of depth, that the party was forced to turn to him.
It is understood that the deadline for nominations was extended primarily to allow for Msimanga’s application. Why did Cachalia think Msimanga put his name forward — was it at the behest of DA federal leader Mmusi Maimane?
"I really don’t know. What I do know is that the national leadership was running round speaking to, I don’t know, Prince Mashele, Reuel Khoza and god knows who; Doris Day, BB King, Matt Busby, whoever you fancy, and then, not having any joy there, obviously looked internally. Whether they looked to Solly and had that conversation or not, I don’t know."
As for the others, Cachalia says, "I don’t know what makes the other candidates tick ideologically, 100%. It is almost about what I have not heard. I have not heard any robust stance in favour of liberalism. I have not heard any robust defence of individualism, as opposed to collectivism. I have not heard any robust defence of the free market, as opposed to what is called a developmental state. And when I think about what I have not heard, I get worried."
Both Msimanga and Cachalia did exceptionally well in 2016. In Tshwane, the DA grew from 38.7% in 2011 (or 280,288 votes on the PR ballot) to 43.1% (or 381,044 votes), while the ANC dropped from 56.5% in 2011 (408,413) to 41.5% (366,702). Across the way in Ekurhuleni, the DA grew from 30.1% (237,605) to 34.1% (306,709) while the ANC dropped from 62.2% (490,234) to 48.8% (438,961).
But one important difference worth noting is the amount of money the DA and ANC poured into Ekurhuleni. For the DA, Ekurhuleni was always really a "bonus" province and the bulk of the party’s money went into the Tshwane and Johannesburg campaigns. No doubt Ekurhuleni piggy-backed a bit on that but still, it surprised everyone when the ANC dropped below 50% in the metro.
Cachalia says, "The party gave me R400,000 and I raised [another] R1.6m and we brought the ANC, together with others, below 50% in Ekurhuleni, their heartland — when, in Tshwane and Johannesburg, they had budgets of R100m. And the ANC, I have it on absolute authority, threw R100m to fight me. They were given R40m, they complained about it, because the guy who ran their finances joined my campaign, and he said to me, they were given R40m, they complained it, so they were given R70m, when they heard it was me they threw another R30m — so they had R100m, against my R2m. And we brought them down below 50%. Not bad."
Noticeable in his absence from the list is Jack Bloom, who stood against Maimane for the position of DA Gauteng premier candidate in 2014. Bloom is legendary in Gauteng and by some considerable distance, the party’s best provincial spokesperson. It is difficult to understand his decision not to stand; it would be the natural culmination of his political career.
Asked for his thoughts on Bloom’s decision, Cachalia says in rather veiled terms, "For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, you know we live in a world, and the DA lives in this world too, where — the dynamics of the selection panel, all the scoring, and all that stuff — at the end of the day they are going to sit down and try to reach consensus; that is where the madness happens. That’s where, whether you [are] white, whether you [are] black, whether you [are] male, whether you [are] female, all those things come into play and that is where Jack gets thrown out at an early stage, and where I maybe get to a later stage, and someone else comes in at another stage, who maybe isn’t Jack or me."
But of Bloom’s credentials, although he says he does lack some charisma, Cachalia is unequivocal: "I think Jack could be enormously useful as the MEC for health. I think he would probably be the best MEC for health in the whole bloody country. There would a template there second to none. I mean he would knock Aaron Motsoledi at national into a cocked hat. And I think that is what Jack should be doing. He would be amazing."
The selection process
In typical DA fashion, the process to secure the nomination is fairly onerous. All candidates had to produce an "assignment", to be delivered by Sunday last week, in which they were each expected to identify three priorities for Gauteng then choose one of them, and illustrate how they would turn that problem around.
As far as his own submission goes, Cachalia says he conceptualised the problems as "procedural and substantive". Procedurally they are about co-operative governance; substantially they are about the economy, which was his main focus, "because, it’s the economy stupid". He also looked at the spend in provincial government, which he describes as "disproportional" in favour of things such as health and education, given how dire the outcomes are.
"Out of a current budget of about R120bn, it’s R80bn! Most of that goes to salaries. Most of those salaries are to people who don’t provide. We need to look at the spend, to see if you can spend it better, if you can make savings, if you can have economies of scale, if you can do all those good things, and within that what are the degrees of freedom you have to operate in, within the provincial confines, within the co-operative government confines, I don’t know yet."
On his Facebook page, Cachalia said of his assignment, given to each member only three days before it was due, "I feel like I’m back at university. It involved much thought, research, writing, and conversations; two long nights as well. It’s done now and I will submit later this afternoon after a final proofread. I hope the panel is as rigorous about their evaluation as I have been about my submission."
After submitting the assignment, it will be marked and given to the selection panel in about a fortnight. The panel comprises some 20 people, roughly half from the province and half from national [government], with a few ex-officio members. Each candidate will then be given five minutes to present their report "in headline" and take some questions on it, all of which will form part of a more substantive interview.
It is, then, essentially an internal process and for all the public fuss made by some candidates, at the end of the day, the selection of the final candidate will boil down to those 20-odd people on the selection panel.
In typical DA fashion, the process to secure the nomination is fairly onerous. All candidates had to produce an ‘assignment’ ... in which they were each expected to identify three priorities for Gauteng then choose one of them, and illustrate how they would turn that problem around
The hard realities
One of the hard realities the DA has had to come to terms with, whenever it takes over an ANC-run administration, is that whatever its policy ideals, they are all made subject to the abject state of the administration itself, inevitably rotten to the core, subservient to a rampant mediocrity and constructed upside down. Thus, the party needs to spend five years just getting the basics right, purging the diseased, establishing basic protocols and some common commitment to excellence and outcomes, long before it can actually start to deliver on its policy mandate.
So why not just run a campaign on the basics, on just getting the systems up and running?
"You have got to set out the headline news about your intent and what you will do in terms of policy. You have to do that because that is how you fire the imagination of people. You have got to say, we will do this rather than that. But you are absolutely right. There is this mad machinery that has to be changed, as various DA mayors have found out."
Cachalia then turns briefly to his private-sector jargon to explain how he conceptualises the problem. "If I look back to my private-sector experience, okay, we have an ‘OpsCo’ and we have a ‘StratCo’. So, StratCo says this is where we are going; OpsCo says this is what we are dealing with now. And let’s run those in parallel and let’s put bridges between the two and see how we work. And then in addition to that you have got ‘FinCo’, which speaks to your finances, and ‘HumanCo’, which deals with your human resources, so you can use all those experiences to come together, to say, how do we deal with this problem?"
Like Cachalia, Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba came into the DA primarily on the basis of his private-sector experience. I ask Cachalia how he thinks Mashaba is doing. "I think, given the magnitude of the task, the legacy, which is unenviable, he is not doing badly at all. I think he could have done a hell of a lot better, if he didn’t have the EFF breathing down his neck."
The other hard reality is coalition governments which, particularly where the EFF has been involved, along with other smaller party problems, have caused the DA no end of pain.
There has been some criticism from members of the DA Johannesburg caucus that Mashaba is too close to the EFF but Cachalia is fairly dismissive of this. "Well, I don’t know that Herman is ideologically necessarily close to the EFF, but he is politically beholden, in terms of where he goes and how he goes and why he goes, to the EFF — and that is a problem. Let me put it this way, thank god I did not win Ekurhuleni, because I would have been in a worse position than Herman is, because I would be even more beholden to the EFF. It is not a question of pandering to the EFF, it is the reality you have to face and how you navigate the waters."
Cachalia says if he had to form a coalition with the EFF to win control of Gauteng, he would insist on a written agreement beforehand. "If the EFF was [of a] mind to sit around a table and say, ‘Yes, we can talk about things’, then we can have this discussion upfront — and you need to have it upfront, not post-election, because then the tail wags the dog; then you are in a position where, ‘if I give you my 8%, I want this’ — No. Have those discussions upfront. I think that is far more important. I know the DA hasn’t done this in the past. I have been trying to do so. I have been trying to sit with every one of those in advance."
Of course, there is also the prospect of working together with Ekurhuleni, currently run by the ANC in a coalition with the African Independent Congress (AIC). Cachalia effectively says he would have to cross that bridge when he comes to it but does suggest things could change. "Assuming you control the province and you have two of the major municipalities under your wing, as it were, and the AIC, which has blown hot and cold for a long time, says, ‘Okay we will now blow your way because you are in the provincial government’, then things might change massively."
Cachalia thinks the "floating vote" will not go to what he calls "the mad people". "Conventional wisdom says the EFF won’t grow."
The DA’s prospects
All of this is well and good, but can the DA actually bring the ANC below 50% in Gauteng?
"I think, in concert with others, with the right strategy, with the right people and person who will spearhead the campaign, I think we have a chance. I think we have a good chance. I think it depends entirely on how we do it and what we throw at it. I know the DA is in a wee bit of a parlous place at the moment, in many people’s minds, in terms of what is happening in the Cape, in terms of some issues around our traditional support, which has flinched at some comments in the public forum of late, but those are not insurmountable things. And when you get momentum, it is huge. The question is how we build momentum."
The thing about the DA is that, as it has grown it has become more centralised. It is probably a bit unfair to put it in these terms but it is highly likely the party already has a Gauteng provincial campaign mapped down to the last detail, and is simply waiting for a face to put on a poster. Historically, most provincial and local DA campaigns have been largely subservient to the national message; to the extent that, in 2016 it caused some considerable internal friction, when, in places such as Tshwane, Maimane’s programme was often elevated above that of Msimanga’s in the metro.
Cachalia says he will be sure to stamp his mark though. "Hell, I will dig my heals in and do my damnedest. Because I have a view, and I will make sure that view is heard. By heard, I mean resources are thrown behind it." This kind of attitude is a risky one in the DA, which tends to value compliance more than independence. I ask Cachalia if the view is likely to strengthen or weaken his prospects before the panel. "Well, I think it weakens my prospects in terms of people who don’t think independently and out of the box, and I think it strengthens my prospect with people who can see the wood from the trees. We shall see." He gives a little chuckle.
As part of the DA’s 2019 campaign, it was recently reported that the party had acquired the services of Lynton Crosby, the high-profile, centre-right Australian political strategist who has helped conceptualise various international campaigns, possibly most famously for the Conservative Party in the UK, with varying degrees of success. Cachalia is not too enamoured with him.
"I think Lynton Crosby, if you tot up what he has done successfully and what he has done unsuccessfully, I think he has been a failure rather than a success. I think he plays to expediency, which can win elections but is not sustainable, and it also has enormous dangers. I think we have enough native intelligence rather than having to go out and get some fellow at huge cost who may or may not add value, and whose sole contribution seems to be to be hard on immigration."
As it so happens, perhaps signs of Crosby’s influence — although by no means incompatible with the DA’s current populist streak — the party is currently running a mini-campaign on illegal immigration. It’s an odd decision, given how low down on the list illegal immigration is as a problem in SA, behind such monumental issues as the economy, education, health, service delivery and corruption, and so, you feel it is a drive born more of polling than principle.
Cachalia is particularly passionate on the subject. "You know, you wake up at 4am and see the number of people on the roads, dealing with this spacial madness that apartheid has left us with, spending more time to travel to work than anywhere else in the world, and that is a fact, and then look at the so-called ‘illegal immigration problem’ and how it effects our society and turn it on its head and say: those are opportunities, not problems!"
"What we need to do it use these under-utilised assets in the best possible way … We are never going to seal our borders. Even if the Red Army in China was able to put one solider on every little space across our borders, to form a human wall, so to speak, we would still have the problem of corruption, of people flying over it or digging under it. Of all those madnesses that occur, this is just nonsense. It is smoke and bloody mirrors. You have to deal with the issues at hand: deal with the corruption, the issues that govern border personnel, with the documentation of people coming in and who are here, turning that into an asset rather than a liability. I mean the cost. Just look at the cost, of taking people and throwing them out, knowing they are just going to come back. And the costs are then repeated, all over again. I mean, get wise about this stuff. There are ways of doing it. There are lessons to be learnt. To talk about sealing borders and populist nonsense. Dit laat my koud."
~ Ghaleb Cachalia
— I think, given the magnitude of the task, the legacy, which is unenviable, [Herman Mashaba] is not doing badly at all. I think he could have done a hell of a lot better, if he didn’t have the EFF breathing down his neck
A man apart
The inclusion of Msimanga in the DA’s final list would seem to suggest the final outcome of this whole process is already determined. Reading into what Cachalia has said, the story would seem to go like this: without any real faith in its own stock, already committed and otherwise threadbare when it comes to experience and the necessary gravitas, the DA went on the search for a high-profile, external candidate — the likes of Mashele or Khoza — that it could use to replicate the Mashaba model that had worked so well in Johannesburg.
With no takers, it was forced to look internally and Msimanga was deemed the next best prospect. You wonder what Msimanga makes of all this. This, no doubt, was a contributing factor for Bloom not standing. He had done the maths and, after losing to Maimane in 2014, understood that the same kind of game was afoot. Cachalia suggests, whatever Bloom’s expertise, demographics do matter to the DA and, he would seem to be saying, being black is at the top of the pecking order.
All of which makes you wonder why Cachalia is standing at all. But he seems to have thought all that through, and decided to stand anyway. And there is something to admire about that. Likewise, about Cachalia’s forthright nature and firm ideological stand. He is not, like the party more generally, an amorphous vessel into which the national powers that be can inject a suitably pliable spirit. He has ideas of his own. Much like Mashaba.
Ironically, he has an authentic ANC background too, something the DA values more than gold dust these days. But when the counter-value is independence, that sort of pedigree seems to lose much of its worth. In many ways, Cachalia’s candidacy is a comment on Mashaba, and how the DA have experienced him. He is independent in the same kind of way Cachalia is, and it causes the DA no end of headaches. And that is before you mention Patrica de Lille. The name alone can induce a seizure.
In the final analysis, it is great that there is so much competition for DA’s Gauteng premier candidacy, but really, when you look at the actual names on the table, only two — Msimanga and Cachalia — have any real world experience running things. And of those two, one is tried and tested, the other independent-minded and fiercely ideological. Neither is a top-tier candidate, but both would seem to be able to serve the DA well enough in government, just as they would both rely on the DA to help them. But then one of them is already leading a government, which tells you everything.
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and government at the South African Institute of Race Relations
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