One of the challenges facing the DA in the upcoming local elections are a swathe of smaller parties, each of which, though ostensibly focused on the ANC, in reality have the DA vote share in their sights.
It is an oddity only SA could throw up: in a country governed for 27 years by a fundamentally corrupt and profoundly incompetent government, the primary target for so many smaller parties is, instead, the official opposition, which, while not perfect, represents the general benchmark for good and clean governance.
In 2019, a number of those parties, on the back of a slide into ambiguity and uncertainty by the DA in 2019, capitalised on the party’s losses, on the margins. In 2021, there are so many more of them.
There are the old and established: the IFP, ACDP, COPE and the UDM. And there are the new and the hungry: the Good Party, ActionSA, the Cape Coloured Congress, and independent candidates. In the background, there is the EFF, which, though the most successful and arguably focused opposition party on hurting the ANC directly, competes with the DA for the alienated and unhappy — the ANC protest vote.
They might all compete with the DA on the margins. But add up all those margins and there is a good 5% to 10% of the vote on the table. It’s a death by a thousand cuts scenario for the DA, and incredibly enervating when it comes to generating positive momentum, the life blood of any successful, growing party.
One is forced to disperse resources, which detracts from your core target — the ANC. At the same time, you must diversify your message, position yourself properly in a hundred different factional battles.
There is a strong argument to be made that, in this way, these smaller parties are, despite their inevitable protestations, the ANC’s greatest potential allies in the next election. They will do so much of the ANC’s work for it: chipping away at the DA, demanding it fight on a variety of fronts, and stretching its ability to take the ANC head on in a focused and unconstrained way.
As a political party, there are different ways you can fight this sort of affront. One is, as above, to take on all comers. Another is to attempt to rise above it all — to own key SA issues, which have a universal appeal, and thus dictate the battle of ideas on your own terms. It is a universal political truth that, if you set the agenda, you become inexorably associated with it.
That is easier than it sounds. From a communications perspective, issues — things such as unemployment, crime or education — are stories, and you can either tell them, or react to them. Power and influence, however, lies in the hands of those who do the telling, on their own terms, not the responding. On this front, it is difficult to point to a single substantive issue — or story — the DA owns in a compelling, and sustained fashion.
Enormous time, energy, passion and resources are poured into fighting minor issues, that pale in comparison to the greater threats. The smaller parties have the DA dancing to their tune. And the ANC is the ultimate winner
Driving issues (the in-house phrase parties such as the DA use to describe how well they own an issue) is an art the DA seems to have lost. Not just lost, but forgotten. To the extent that it no longer knows what it is missing. The relevant institutional knowledge is gone. It can no longer tell stories.
How exactly it lost this skill is difficult to say. On one hand, it lost a great deal of expertise, people driven out or alienated from the party over a significant period of time. On the other, the age of Jacob Zuma — a single-story epoch — saw the DA abandon all other issues for the singular grand narrative: Zuma must go. In doing so it relinquished not just any hold it had on other issues, but the ability to drive them. It became a giant moral reaction machine, a disposition that defines it to this day.
There is, of course, an important place for on-the-record reactions in politics; it is often a necessary matter of principle. But it is not how you win hearts and minds. You do that by “breaking news”, defining a narrative and by telling stories about things that matter to people, that show you care and have a solution, in a way that carries the most people possible with you.
It’s simple maths really: tell small stories to a small group of people, and you will influence a small number of people. Tell big stories to a big audience, and you will carry so many more.
There are flashes in the DA issue pan, it is true. Typically, they involve corruption or maladministration — a revelation in the form of the answer to a parliamentary question or the exposé of a scandalous document or report. But these all speak to the DA’s brand on oversight, which no-one really doubts. What it needs are issues of governance or policy, and to be able to demonstrate the real life impact on people, of the ANC failures that result.
If you are unemployed, if you are poorly treated at a hospital, if your child is receiving a poor education or you are a victim of crime, you need to be able to say: the DA understands the problem and has an answer. No doubt, the DA does understand the problem, and it has many answers. What it doesn’t seem to have is a compelling way to convey it all.
One of the last great issue-drivers in the DA, Jack Bloom, makes the point. On health in Gauteng he is without parallel. He does it by focusing on an issue and relentlessly driving it over time: Life Esidimeni, poor hospital infrastructure, poverty (Jack in a shack). He puts himself at the heart of people’s biggest problems and tells their story to those in power. The DA needs a hundred Jack Blooms. It has only one.
Which brings us back to all those smaller parties. Where the DA does show some semblance of issue-driving — on matters such as Afrikaans at Stellenbosch or farm murders — it is a consequence of its firefighting approach on the margins. Enormous time, energy, passion and resources are poured into fighting minor issues, that pale in comparison to the greater threats. The smaller parties have the DA dancing to their tune. And the ANC is the ultimate winner.
It tells you something about the DA’s mindset at the moment. It is besieged. It takes a lot of self-belief and clear strategic discipline to rise above that and to say: we will tell the stories that matter most, with all the energy and passion we currently pour into our firefighting. We want the unemployed, the sick, victims of crime, students and the poorly educated to be able to say: “The DA is telling our story.”
It’s hard to believe the DA has the necessary conviction, expertise and strategic nous to pull that off at the moment. It just doesn’t feel like a big party, focused on the big issues.
These are tough criticisms to make. Not too long ago, the DA’s problem was its nebulous ambiguity. It needed to rediscover clarity and a develop a harder edge. But it has that now. The next step is to develop a bigger repertoire. If it doesn’t do that, the next five months will be spent on the margins. In the end, you can try to fend off a thousand cuts, or you can refine the battle. But you can’t do both. At least the DA of 2021 can’t.
Momentum, as with professional sport, underpins so much political success. In sport, they say the best offence is a good defence. It is not true for politics. In politics there is only offence. Explaining is losing. To build momentum, you must define the world, or the world will define you.
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