This election was supposed to be about the ANC’s integrity as an institution. It was supposed to reveal an organisation denuded of intellectual authority, wrapped up in denial and strategically compromised by internal contradiction. Perhaps it did. But less expected was that it revealed all of that applies equally to the DA. With a dire result, which portends dangerous consequences if unchecked, the party’s true nature has been laid bare for all to see: a hollow institution, the product of a hollow leader.
If your assessment of Mmusi Maimane is that he is the hollow man, lacking both the political IQ and EQ needed to lead a party and project as complex as that of the DA, then the DA’s hollowing out was always to be expected, just as night follows day. If your assessment of Maimane is that he is the very embodiment of the “right stuff”, then it is some other key individuals inside the organisation who have failed fundamentally.
It is likely a bit of both. And you can throw into the mix the general DA zeitgeist too: a kind of fantasy which has the party on the path to the promised land — the path being an unthinking, anti-intellectual and outsized bureaucracy, generally defined by the ANC’s hegemonic view of the world and which many inside the DA blindly run down every day.
The tale of two tales
There are two explanations offered by the DA for its performance, post-election, one public and one private. And they each tell a story.
After what must have been a grueling federal executive to discuss the election outcome on Monday, party chair Athol Trollip read out a poorly written, and weak statement — symptomatic of the DA’s intellectual shallowness — while behind him, DA provincial leaders lined up. Their faces were marked more by the dread panic that grips one before a firing squad pulls the trigger than they did resolve or conviction.
“We take collective responsibility,” Trollip said, before rattling off a thousand non-specific clichés designed to basically shirk responsibility. As Trollip would suggest, it was the rise of racial nationalism that hampered the DA, a more diluted version of what he told the Sunday Times: “I think SA voters need to do some soul-searching.”
Meanwhile, in the background, Maimane would send to the party a personal letter, in which he said he accepts “full responsibility” for the result. It was far better written, more specific and generally underpinned by some kind of conviction. So, you can tell Maimane didn’t write it himself.
That’s the DA for you. Different messages for different audiences, put together by people behind the scenes, in an attempt to be all things to all people, and to itself. Tap the DA with any well-founded criticism and you will hear the echoes reverberate inside the party, as they bounce off walls separated by nothing more than a vast platitudinous vacuum.
The DA’s election review
There is one sentence in Maimane’s letter that rings true: “I can honestly and in good conscience state that I did my very best and gave everything of myself in the run-up to this election.” That he undoubtedly did. Few people work harder than Maimane.
The problem is this: if he gave it his all — his “very best” — and the result was 20.77%, then really that is at as good as it gets. But this is the DA we are talking about. The party is always one adjective away from fixing any problem. In future Maimane will no doubt give his “very, very best”. That is all good and well, but work ethic is not the problem.
The problem, when all is said and done, is a simple one: the DA does not appear to know what it stands for, and so it cannot present itself publicly with conviction
The DA will commission an independent review of its election performance. That’s a worthwhile and necessary response. The nature of that review will be all-important. Publicly, Trollip suggested it will focus on “the organisational structure of the party”. Privately, Maimane said it will, “properly evaluate the reasons behind the result” and “all aspects of the campaign will be honestly assessed”.
You’d expect the federal leader and the federal chair to have more clarity between them. Perhaps that will come when they work out the details.
Either which way, it’s a tough job. It will have to assess both systems and ideas. Systems are the easier of the two; one can measure a desired outcome against the actual result. Ideas are harder; you enter the world of subjectivity, of emphasis and strategy. Both things have gone wrong to one degree or another, in the DA.
The former has implications for the organisation — its staff and structures. And they have little power to resist any adverse finding. The latter is the responsibility of the political leadership, and they have all the power in the world. The DA’s leadership has proved absolutely immune to criticism, stubbornly stampeding into ideological oblivion for years now.
The problem, when all is said and done, is a simple one: the DA does not appear to know what it stands for, and so it cannot present itself publicly with conviction. It thinks it knows, it takes refuge in amorphous ideas such as “One SA for all”, but that is a sentiment, not a strategy. And it certainly says nothing about principle. It is true, as the DA states, the rise of racial populism is a threat and a middle ground essential, but one cannot occupy the middle ground simply by rejecting the extreme, it requires a clearer understanding than that. And its boundaries need to be carefully identified and protected. They cannot be porous. Key to that is principle, and that flows from political philosophy.
The words “principle” and “liberal” don’t appear once in Maimane’s letter. Nor in Trollip’s. They are at least united on that.
The DA seems scared to be liberal, scared of the word liberal, of what it means and what it requires. And unsure how to balance its beliefs with practical action in a way that does not compromise either. One must have some sympathy for that. It is no easy task. But that is how it is experienced by many. It hides difficult decisions away or smothers them in polling data and talks of “transformation”, “the capable state”, of “race-based BEE”, and a thousand other ideas drawn from the ANC’s lexicon, in a desperate bid to pretend it is something it is not.
Rewarding the wrong ideas and people
Take free speech, for example. It is a cornerstone of liberal thought — the idea from which most all liberal ideas flow. But it has been locked away in a closet somewhere. Rarely does the DA defend it in the manner it should.
Not only does the party not defend free speech, but it indulges populism — the brash, race-driven expediencies of the DA Youth Leader (who played a significant role in decimating the DA’s support in the North West), and the wild, unhinged social media rants of its former national spokesperson.
And there is hypocrisy. For some, you can say what you want, when you want, whatever the cost to the party. If you are Herman Mashaba, you can suggest illegal immigrants are an Ebola-carrying plague, no problem. If you Helen Zille, however, sanctions will be swift and profound.
Race seems, in part, to determine the legal or disciplinary consequences for your views inside and outside the DA. It plays too much of a role in determining your prospects as well. Dan Plato is the mayor of Cape Town. Stevens Mokgalapa replaced Solly Msimanga in Tshwane. These were bottom-of-the-barrel appointments and the only explanation can be that they served some purpose other than merit or excellence.
There is a values problem. Mabine Seabe, for example, is the national director of communications. Seabe spent much of 2011 and 2012 bashing the DA on social media (Jack Bloom “must go” — “he is another Tony Leon”, “Zille puts me to sleep”, “I just cringe at the thought [of Zille being president]”, “Zille should reform her own party before she tells the nation not to vote for parties and candidates based on race”).
He follows the likes of former national spokesperson Marius Redelinghuys, who was of the same school of thought in 2009. The DA seems to reward its enemies far more readily than it does those who have always had its back.
It is difficult to understand why the DA is so weak on the right ideas. What is wrong with having a reputation as policy giants, with great and distinctive ideas that define debate? What is the downside? Why just refashion ANC ideas?
How they must have winced as the DA rolled out Zille and Leon to try and undo the damage the DA’s brand of “progressive” politics had done. But they won in the end. Many left the DA regardless, many more would have had those former leaders not stemmed the tide. “Good riddance” the “progressives” said. Victory.
It was an attitude born of the Trollip-school of thought, that the problem lay with the voters, not the DA. Arrogant.
And they have won other battles too. The list of heavyweight liberal thinkers to have left the DA in the last five years or so is long and profound.
It is difficult to understand why the DA is so weak on the right ideas.
What is wrong with having a reputation as policy giants, with great and distinctive ideas that define debate? What is the downside? Why just refashion ANC ideas (as the DA manifesto does on free higher education, BEE and a minimum wage). The answer is: the DA authentically does care about such things. Leaders play a big role in defining an organisational culture, but even they must bow before internal pressure. On policy, there is none. Ideas are for chumps. Political philosophy is for the birds. What is more important, is telling people what they want to hear, and the DA has the ANC and polling for that.
Perfectly cornered, with limited options
It is little wonder the DA is of the view that Maimane enjoys the party’s full support. Who else is there? What else is there? The organisational and ideological leadership is threadbare. It’s Maimane or bust, and the DA knows it.
You reap what you sow in politics. The DA has rewarded compromise, cowardice, anti-intellectualism and pragmatism, over conviction, ideas, excellence and principle. And so that is what it now has. It has perfectly cornered itself. Constrained by circumstance, it has to work with what it has got. And those options are very limited.
If the DA is serious about this review, and the review is serious about the DA, it will say all this, in one form or another. Then we will have to see what the DA leadership does. There is a school of thought inside the DA that Maimane is a well-meaning but poorly guided missile. If he has the right guidance system, he will perform much better. And so, there will no doubt be some plan to make sure there are better people at the controls.
It is a product of its now well-ingrained internal logic: you can “manage” people and ideas into whatever you want them to be. Let’s see what the DA can do with the hand it has played itself; it will need all the support it can get, and some understanding too, because what it can do in the coming months and years is limited by its own condition.
There are good people in the DA, trying to do the right thing. Really, that is all you can ask for in politics.
Look, you can’t fix the DA overnight. These problems are profound and deeply set. The party’s very institutional culture is tainted. And that takes years to turn around. But if the party wants to start valuing the right things: internally and externally, it needs to live and breathe them, to genuinely care about them. Any organisation is the people that comprise it. To fix that, you need the right people. Problem is, the most important of them all is the leader.
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the SA Institute of Race Relations.
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