GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The DA’s Phoenix posters

Last week the DA erected a set of complementary posters in Phoenix, KwaZulu-Natal. The first read: “The ANC called you racist”; the second: “The DA calls you heroes”. They have been the source of much outrage.

The first thing you need to understand about them is that they were the consequence of an organisational failure. The posters were sanctioned only by the DA in KwaZulu-Natal, and even then, not properly communicated in the province itself.

News24 quotes a party insider as saying: “The provincial deputy leader did not know about the banners until late yesterday afternoon. Nobody knew. It was approved by one person only, the provincial chairperson, Dean Macpherson.”

This is important. In an election, you run a campaign around a singular theme. For the DA, it has been the message: “The DA gets things done”, a reference to the party’s service delivery record, and a good one. A lot of time, money and energy goes into determining that message and advertising it, and the trick is then instilling what is called “message discipline” — getting the organisation behind it and focused on it.

The best messages are clear and unambiguous, and for the DA, it’s front-line slogan does the job.

This is important, in turn, for its effectiveness. This election window in particular, is small. You cannot afford distractions. For a message to “penetrate the market” effectively, it needs to be relentlessly driven. It takes time for people to become familiar with it, and time is short. So the more easily understood it is, the better.

To have a rogue message — one that focuses on something else entirely — that is confused and ambiguous, thus open to misinterpretation, and which generates huge outrage, therefore represents a strategic failure of significant proportions. Because it is unclear, it requires time and resources to explain. Your core message suffers, and you lose days, maybe weeks “off message” and on the back foot.

There is a saying in politics that “explaining is losing”. And, whatever you make of the DA posters, this is currently what it is forced to do. 

The other negative consequence is that when the party itself is not briefed or consulted on a controversial message, you risk internal splintering. People don’t understand it, or how to defend it. This too, is exactly what has happened to the DA. The DA in KwaZulu-Natal feels blindsided, a number of DA public representatives have distanced themselves from the posters, and even the DA’s mayoral candidate in Johannesburg, has expressed public disapproval of them.

It is not just the public perception of division, but the decision binds all-comers. Many inside the DA will disagree with the posters. They have been trapped. That builds resentment.

So the rogue message does not just divide people externally, it divides the party internally, and internal problems are typically twice as hard to repair. And it is a particular problem for the DA, which is trying to emerge united from a divided period. Going rogue might seem fun, from a public perspective, if you enjoy drama, but it is deeply damaging to a party. You can be sure that those in charge of the DA’s national campaign messaging, are fuming at the way this was done.

There are a lot of amateur DA communications “experts” out there, some of whom think the DA Phoenix posters are brilliant. They are all about short-term tactics, and have zero strategic nous. They see only the poster, which they agree with, and none of the larger implications. This is a child’s attitude to communications.

And so we arrive at the external implications of the message on those posters. The first thing you have to understand is that, if you are a party “of all the people” (another core component of the DA’s brand) and you start group messaging, targeting particular communities — in particular, generally racially homogeneous communities such as Phoenix — that immediately undermines that brand too.

And when that community is under siege, racially and otherwise, it is nothing less than dangerous.

Faced with a profound internal communications and organisational failure, the DA had two options: admit to the failure, withdraw the poster and refocus on its core message; or double down and pretend it was all planned and made good sense. Also, blame the public and the media for misunderstanding it, and accuse them of bias.

The DA went with the latter. This is the second big organisational failure of leadership. That it was unplanned is plain to see. The DA is divided on the issue and is fooling no-one. That it is “off message” is also plain to see. It has nothing to do with service delivery, and the DA is fooling no-one on this front either. And that it is a poorly constructed message, open to misunderstanding, is also obvious. The DA is on the back foot, so its defence is a bit of a farce and the result of weakness, not strength.

The DA’s defence seems to rely on the assumption that South Africans are Vulcans, governed by pure logic (the DA’s logic), and that the real-world environment, profoundly influenced by raw emotion, should count for nothing. Indeed, it seems to imply that if anyone interprets the posters in anyway other than how the DA has post-rationalised its intent, they are biased or foolish themselves.

You can play that game if you want. It’s a recipe for the perception that you treat people like idiots if they, quite fairly, do not arrive at your conclusion.

The test of the DA posters is thus a simple one: if it had made a strategic decision to part with its core message, and enter the massively volatile universe of the KwaZulu-Natal looting, could it have conveyed its position differently and more effectively? Of course it could have.

There is nothing — absolutely nothing — stopping the party from setting out a strong message that it stands for the rule of law, private property and against the ANC’s failures on this front, other than the ambiguous piece of incoherent nonsense the party came up with in KwaZulu-Natal.  

Think about the Phoenix posters some more, and from another strategic perspective and ask yourself this: what will the effect of that poster be on black South Africans who, for whatever reason, experienced the killings in Phoenix as a racial incident? How will they feel about the DA’s use of the word “heroes”. Now, you can say they are wrong, or that they misunderstand, but what you can’t do is pretend those people don’t exist.

If you are a party for all the people, you need to talk to all the people. And if your response to this conundrum is: “We don’t want those people,” or “We don’t care what they think,” then fine — but then you are not a party for all the people.

And if your message is so ambiguous that you have to bend over backwards to explain it (and to do so in an entirely hostile way — as if you are the victim of some conspiracy), then you are not only losing, but actually compounding the problem.

This brings us to another important point, one perhaps best made in the form of a question:

What value-set — what worldview — leads to the production and erection of those posters? The problem here is not just about strategic and leadership failure; it’s about values. Do you see SA as a collection of race groups or a collection of individuals? Do you feel you need to promote group interests or feelings, or not?

Put another way: Values are both an emotional and intellectual attachment to ideas. What is the idea these posters reveal attachment to?

All of this, you feel, is lost on the DA. It has made its decision. Now, you need to watch on, as an obvious blunder is defended like it was some intentional stroke of genius. Like the man who trips on a banana skin and tells you it’s all part of his exercise routine. It’s embarrassing and weak, and the very opposite of leadership.

There is still time to change all this. Perhaps that will happen. The DA is not like the ANC, and is open to persuasion, if enough pressure is brought to bear on it. That will also come at a cost, however, and particularly for John Steenhuisen, who has offered a full-blooded public defence of the posters, for which he was entirely unapologetic. He will look doubly compromised. But it is the right thing to do.

And, if the DA is also a party of consequences, and given its track record of coming down like a tonne of bricks on the mildest social media controversies, there should be action taken against those who came up with the poster and unilaterally put the DA in such a difficult position. Let’s see.

Politics makes clever people say stupid things. That happens all the time, but the tortured arguments the DA has produced to justify such a clear and unarguable mistake are the most depressing of all. This was, undoubtably, to dabble in the world of race-driven politicking. That might be the consequence of a mistake, of ambiguity and poor strategic discipline, but it’s the doubling down on it that really gets you. The former might be understandable, the latter is not. 

Pride comes before the fall. In the DA’s case, pride comes before the well-planned, deliberate misstep, and we are all fools if we don’t see this as ballet, as opposed to fumbling disco-ordination.