Mmusi Maimane should have made a clean break from the DA when he announced his resignation as leader on Wednesday.
In a bizarre turn, Maimane, dressed in black, stood alone at a podium, draped in a black cloth covering the DA logo, and announced that he no longer believed the DA was the vehicle to take his vision for the country forward. But he would stay on as the parliamentary leader until the end of 2019.
This was a clearly contradictory statement. If he does not believe in the DA, why did he not immediately resign from the party? It is no surprise that the parliamentary caucus was having none of it. As Business Day reported, caucus members were “furious” with the outgoing leader.
Less than 24 hours after announcing his resignation as leader, Maimane was forced to announce his resignation from the party and parliament as well.
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First thing on Thursday morning, not even 24 hours after Maimane announced his resignation as leader, the caucus was gearing itself up to boot him from parliament. “He cannot say such a thing about the party and expect to continue in his role in parliament. That’s madness,” one senior MP told this newspaper.
It was bad enough that Maimane attended the briefing at which Herman Mashaba resigned as Johannesburg mayor and delivered a blistering attack on the party. Maimane called Mashaba a hero. This angered his fellow DA members, who saw it as an endorsement of the outgoing mayor’s views.
In fact, the writing was on the wall long before Maimane took the decision to stand at Mashaba’s side. Under his leadership the party lost support for the first time in 2019 general elections, the DA started to flip-flop on policy, and factional fighting got out of control.
Much of the blame has been laid at the door of Helen Zille, who returned to the top echelons of the party last week as the federal council chair and whose election was the catalyst for everything that has happened this week. Yes, she played her part, but that DA federal council delegates were willing to bring her back shows there was a leadership deficit, and that they wanted decisiveness after years of dithering and a lack of direction and strategy.
Not everyone has the luxury, like Mashaba, of walking away from a job and the salary that goes with it. The momentum for change at the DA’s federal council came from public representatives, who were in the majority in the forum and who feared losing their jobs if the party keeps losing electoral support.
If trends seen in by-elections that have taken place since the May election continue, the DA faces the loss of 386 councillors in the 2021 election, according to its own calculations. Even Maimane was apparently not prepared to just walk away from the leadership position and sacrifice his MP salary.
But what now for the DA? The resignation of Maimane and his ally, former federal chair Athol Trollip, sends the party into more turmoil. This could be devastating for the DA, which was hoping to consolidate its position in the 2021 local government elections and win outright the metros it is governing through coalitions.
But that dream is looking unlikely. Perception is important, and after the resignations this week and comments about the party, the perception now is that the DA is anti-poor and anti-diversity.
It seems likely that the DA will regress to a party that only governs the Western Cape. Some analysts believe it could also lose support in the province and Cape Town, though given the weakness of the opposition in the city and province it is unlikely to suffer an outright loss.
Rumours are swirling that Maimane and Mashaba will join forces to start a new political party. If this happens, it will be a blow for the DA, not because a new party is likely to overtake it as the official opposition but because the opposition vote will be spread across even more parties. Black voters and urban voters who want a more diverse, social democratic party are unlikely to vote for a DA that has returned to its liberal roots.
The review panel report, tabled at the weekend federal council meeting, already showed that the DA had gone backwards after the May elections in a number of by-elections and was tracking below 20% in its internal polling.
With a little more than a year to go before the 2021 local government elections, if we see more resignations from the party it is unlikely that the DA will grow beyond this. Once again the opposition political landscape will change. In the end only the cunning and strong survive, and Maimane is neither of these. He said during his resignation speech on Wednesday that he was not a career politician and never planned to be one.
University of Stellenbosch professor Jonathan Jansen said it best in a Twitter post on Thursday: “I met Mmusi Maimane a few times. He really is a wonderful, decent human being whom I admire. Which is precisely why he would not survive in the cesspool of politics. For that job you need at least some attributes of a gangster.”
In the end, Maimane did not have the stomach to climb in the cage and fight to the end. He threw in the towel.
• Quintal is political editor
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