SA’s transition from racial autocracy to constitutional democracy has presented liberalism with a number of challenges. For the DA, traditionally the political flag-bearer for liberal thought, a primary obstacle has been to expand into a party with mass appeal and away from its historically narrow constituency, without compromising its bottom line.
Its response has often been worrying, as it tends to indulge expediency at the expense of principle in the pursuit. But the challenge has manifested other problems, often overlooked in debate over position and strategy. Take its leadership, for example. The party, desperate to grow, has come to sacrifice such things as time and experience, just as it has principle and political philosophy, as it seeks out messiahs rather than leaders.
The result has been a great many leaders, sometimes parachuted directed into the party, sometimes elevated far above their station, generally backed more on the basis of popular appeal and emotion, than their intellectual fortitude, vision and political conviction. There are exceptions of course, but they are rare and this is the trend.
Many of these things are innate, to one degree or another, to a true leader, but all of them are otherwise learned and fashioned with time and experience. However, time, it would seem, is something the DA does not appear to have.
Compare, for example, the tale of Tony Leon’s and Mmusi Maimane’s respective time in the DA.
Leon would work hard for 20 years to become leader — for 10 years to be councilor, five to be an MP, and a further five to become leader ... his trajectory was typical of the grind and determination talented career politicians exude
Leon’s slow steady climb
Mapping Tony Leon’s political career — which ran from 1974 to 2007 — is actually a fairly simple exercise. His progression through the Progressive Federal Party (PFP), then the Democratic Party (DP) and then, finally, the DA, was linear and focused. And built on the back of much hard work.
All-in-all, he served the liberal cause for 33 years. He started as an organiser for the PFP, back in 1974 and for just more than a decade, he worked hard to establish himself in the party. In 1986 he was elected as a councilor in Johannesburg then as leader of the opposition in the Johannesburg City Council.
In 1989 he was elected as a DP MP and served the party faithfully for five years in parliament, as its spokesperson on justice. Five years later, in 1994, he was elected party leader and, simultaneously, parliamentary leader — two positions he held for 13 years, until 2007, when he retired.
And that, really, is that.
Leon would work hard for 20 years to become leader — for 10 years to be councilor, five to be an MP, and a further five to become leader. But, if his trajectory was typical of the grind and determination talented career politicians exude, it cuts a stark contrast to the fireworks display that is the short career of Mmusi Maimane, the current DA leader.
Maimane’s grounding was not in any liberal predecessor or constitutional committee, but church. And his particular church is a recalcitrant throwback to the days when evolution was considered a myth and homosexuals born of sin
Maimane’s meteoric rise
Plucked from obscurity in 2010, with no experience, Maimane was immediately given a leadership role: as the DA’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg in March 2011. When he lost, he would serve as leader of the opposition in the council, a relatively unhappy period, marked by much inner-caucus turmoil.
It mattered not. In December 2011, he was elevated again, this time to national spokesperson, a position once used to groom future leaders. Less than a year later, in November 2012, he was elected a deputy federal chair. But there was more to come, still.
In August 2013, 10 months later, he was chosen as the party’s premier candidate for Gauteng, ahead of the 2014 elections. When he lost, having covered his bases by standing on both the provincial and national list, he would leave the DA in the province to fend for itself and, again, pursue bigger and better things.
He was immediately elected parliamentary leader in May 2014 and, again just a year later, he was elected national leader in May 2015.
In eight short years, he climbed like a rocket through the party. Never once has he had to earn his stripes. It took a decade for Leon just to be elected as a councilor. In less time, Maimane went from lay preacher to federal leader. And at every single new explosion, the DA would guarantee the party and the public, Maimane was without doubt, the best man for the job. And he does not lack for self-belief, he has never turned down an opportunity either.
If the two careers are held up to each other, Leon is a but a flickering flame to the blinding light that has been Maimane’s ascension.
And remember, the PFP and DP, even the DA in Leon’s time, were far smaller parties, tiny in some respects. If you were talented, if you did demonstrate natural leadership abilities, there was no shortage of positions to choose from, less completion, too. But Leon was never a mayoral or premier candidate. He never held a federal position outside of leader.
Two different schools
Maimane, who now sits astride a relative behemoth, has much, much more competition. And yet, time and time again, he defeats all-comers. He has never lost an internal election or been denied a promotion.
After he was elected to parliament, from 1990 to 1994, Leon cut his national teeth by serving as chair of the DP’s Bill of Rights Commission. His biography says he was an advisor to the Convention for a Democratic SA (Codesa). Simultaneously, a delegate to the multi-party negotiations that led to the end of apartheid and the establishment of a non-racial democracy in 1994.
For four years, Leon helped shape SA’s constitution and Bill of Human Rights. It was odd then, that one of Maimane’s first suggestions, as he fought for the DA leadership, was support for a referendum on the death penalty and "gay marriage". In effect, an attack on the very rights Leon had help define. It was irrelevant to the party: Maimane won 90% of the vote at the party congress that elected him.
Maimane’s grounding was not in any liberal predecessor or constitutional committee, but church. And his particular church is a recalcitrant throwback to the days when evolution was considered a myth and homosexuals born of sin, to be lovingly helped overcome the sickness that afflicts them. Before that, his loyalty was to the ANC and Thabo Mbeki.
These are the modern-day credentials that play well in the DA. It is not experience or ideology the party seeks out and rewards, but emotion and goodwill. And Maimane went to the best of schools for that kind of thing.
Legitimacy and experience
Leon’s time at the helm was not without its problems. The New National Party (NNP), with which the DP had merged to form the DA in 2000, proved as treacherous as one might have expected. But he held firm. The party grew and, by the end of his time, he delivered to his successor, Helen Zille, the second-largest party in SA and a government in Cape Town. It was the foundation on which the DA’s legitimacy today rests.
Maimane has never had a legitimacy problem. He has never had to fight in any real sense for column inches. His every word is replicated. He can trend worldwide on social media. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. And, accompanying him, a mammoth party machinery — largely established under Leon — so complex and well-developed he really just needs to run on auto-pilot, what semblance of a strategy there is, outsourced to polling; and leadership to committee, compromise and consensus.
By the time Maimane’s turn to lead arrived, he had inherited an ANC decimated by an insatiable power-lust and fundamentally corrupted by its own poisoned heart
The DA under Maimane, is a church of its own sort, and in Maimane, it has its pastor. He is there to look after the flock, rather than to lead it to the promised land.
Maimane has had his own problems. The EFF is treacherous and untrustworthy in much the same way the NNP was, but he has never had to fight in the trenches in the way Leon did. From 1994 to 2007, the ANC was at its hegemonic zenith. First under Mandela, then Mbeki, it dominated every aspect of South African political life. The crack, that would later split wide open before fracturing completely, would first manifest just after Leon left, at Polokwane, in 2007.
By the time Maimane’s turn to lead arrived, he had inherited an ANC decimated by an insatiable power-lust and fundamentally corrupted by its own poisoned heart. And yet, for all the DA’s success in 2016, built primarily on the back of Helen Zille’s hard work (Maimane had only be leader for 16 months by the time it arrived) his first real test will be the national and provincial elections in 2019. National elections are the benchmark for any political leader, and by then he will have been at the helm for four years.
Things don’t look good on this front. All indications are the DA is hovering at around 24% — precious little growth to show after five years and the 22% it secured in 2014. Most likely, in much the same way coalition governments helped mask the DA’s failure to grow significantly among black voters in 2016, Gauteng will be the card Maimane will be relying on to help mask the DA’s national performance in 2019. If the DA can help bring the ANC below 50% in that province, the Maimane fireworks display can continue to explode away, in all the colours of the rainbow.
The Western Cape Premiership
So it makes a certain amount of sense then, at least so far as Maimane’s personal ambitions go, that he thought to stand as DA Western Cape premier, yet another position to add to his ever growing CV, the greatest the DA has ever seen. And it makes sense that it is the Western Cape, the DA’s flagship province where he wanted to stand. Maimane has never had to prove himself in any other capacity, why should he have to prove himself in government, as an MEC, say? To the king go all things.
It didn’t work out that way. Yesterday, after much internal consternation, Maimane announced that he would no longer put his name forward.
It is the first time he has not got his way, so far as his own trajectory is concerned. Perhaps he was encouraged to stand, perhaps it was his own design. Either way, it is the first time the party has said, so far and no further. That is quite a moment. They say, when you start off as a political leader, you have a certain amount of political capital, which you gradually but inevitably burn away. It will have come as something of a shock to the system for the DA leader, and it will have cost quite a bit too.
If you could project Maimane’s trajectory inside the DA into the future, where does it go from here? Ever upwards? Or is this what they call, a tipping point?
Under different circumstances, were this, say, to happen to Maimane before he had taken on the mantel of federal leader — were he just another promising talent working his way through the DA, experiencing the ups and downs of party politics — you might call it a valuable lesson, from which he might grow. Unfortunately, the price you pay for losing such battles as leader is far greater than it is for the rank and file. Instead of a lesson it becomes a black mark against your name. Instead of aspiration, people talk of ambition, and not the benevolent kind.
There will be those who blame Maimane for all this unnecessary messiness. They would, however, be wrong. The DA has taught Maimane that he can do anything and that such things as experience and time are irrelevant to his fortunes. All he was doing, in putting his name forward, was acting just as he has at every other juncture of his short career.
And the party has done this because the idea of leadership has changed within it. Gone are the days of Leon, of earning and rewarding time on the job. What a slog they were. This is the age of instant success and endless elevation. It is not the age of expertise or experience, of time and dedication, learning and growing. Rather of reward for reward’s sake. Of a leader, manufactured from thin air, whose reputation alone has become the basis for any further promotion. And, with no time in any one place, it is a reputation carefully managed and manipulated to ensure he is never there long enough to encounter the kinds of things that makes one a leader.
Perhaps the DA is coming to its senses. Perhaps that is no bad thing. This was a big loss for Maimane, rejected by his own party. You could say he should chalk it up to experience, but then the DA doesn’t seem to do that anymore.
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and government at the South African Institute of Race Relations.
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