The DA will elect or, more likely, re-elect a national leader at its federal congress on April 1.
John Steenhuisen, the incumbent, was first elected leader in an acting capacity, in late October 2019, after the DA cleared house following a poor 2019 national election. He was as then given a full term, with 79% of the vote, in November 2020.
Three years is not enough time to fully evaluate a leader’s contribution but it is enough time to get a good idea of who they are.
On April 1 he will face a challenge from former Johannesburg mayor Mpho Phalatse. Perhaps a few other stragglers might join the race late but, as far as high profile names go — or relatively high profile at any rate (35% of voters don’t know who Steenhuisen is at the last count) — that is as good as it gets.
“As good as it gets” would seem a fair description of the DA at the moment. It is the best of a bad bunch. And it is a rare example of a political party — in a country awash with Messiahs — the brand of which is stronger than that of the leader. On the back of a real and meaningful reputation in the Western Cape and Cape Town, “good, clean governance” remains the party’s primary calling card.
That is new for the DA. It has, in the recent past, had Messiahs of its own — Helen Zille and Mmusi Maimane both enjoyed in their heydays a reputation bigger than that of the party: charismatic exemplars for the party’s offer. Whatever their personal politics, they represented in people’s eyes something bigger than the DA. Steenhuisen does not. He is in many ways the living embodiment of a stock-standard DA media statement, and the result is a rather dull state of affairs.
Phalatse, you get the sense, is really just trying to get her name out there as a national contender, perhaps with something more serious in mind down the line. For the moment, however, her campaign seems to boil down to being highly critical of most of the DA leadership, from the leader to the federal chair to provincial leaders and the federal executive. A curious approach to an internal election, and given these are the very people one would want to win over.
But it plays well enough publicly and with a media cohort that love nothing more than the DA criticising itself, as it remains infatuated with a grand game of false moral equivalence between the DA and the ANC. In reality though, there will be no DA assassinations in the run up to this election. These subtle differences between the ANC and the DA seem lost on most of the media, however.
When Steenhuisen was first elected, he promised stability and cohesion. That seems to have been delivered on. The party speaks with more clarity and much of the endless malicious leaking that defined the run-up to the 2019 election has stopped — you can always tell how happy a party is by how much it leaks. There is a general sense of purpose and, perhaps more importantly, the meaningful prospect of some small growth in 2024: such a vital motivating force for unity in any party.
As far as the actual numbers go, the 2021 local government elections resulted in 21.7%. No dramatic turnaround but enough to claim the ship was no longer sinking. By-election results since have been a mixed bag and market research suggests the DA will improve on the 20.8% it managed in 2019. By how much, depends.
And it would seem to depend on the ANC more than anything else. The implosion of the ANC’s support base has resulted in something of a feeding frenzy among opposition parties. But the ANC’s lost support seems to be more or less splitting relative to each opposition parties size, as opposed to all moving in a consolidated fashion to one or maybe two new homes. Whatever way you cut it, it is the ANC driving people away more than the opposition winning people over; that seems to be the nature of the game.
In many respects, Steenhuisen and the DA have been the person standing in a raging fire with a sign saying “Fire is bad”. Hard to dispute that. But really it’s the fire doing the work for you, not the sign.
And that too would seem to sum up Steenhuisen’s leadership: he is a good man, trying to do the right thing but blindingly obvious and thus rather uninteresting. He doesn’t do originality or foresight; rather cliche and immediacy. A crisis will do that to anyone. It negates long-term vision. But even if there were no crisis, Steenhuisen is an open-goal kind of guy, and he specialises in kicking the ball into the vacant net from 5m away. It works more than it doesn’t. After all, the ANC goal keeper is too busy bribing the referee to care. Nevertheless, the spectators don’t always like the result.
Many favourable to the DA, including many within the party, are regularly dumbfounded by this riddle. If everyone agrees pyromaniacs are bad, why is the increase in membership of the anti-pyromaniac league so negligible?
The media have, as ever, a silver bullet answer: leadership. But given more voters know what the DA is, as opposed to whom its leader is, that doesn’t quite answer it. Although it plays a part. And given that almost everyone, including a significant number of ANC voters themselves, acknowledge the DA is best at governing, it suggests a range of other complex reasons at play.
The DA’s reputation, and that of Steenhuisen, are constantly held hostage to this. And it’s all a lie anyway. If the DA did suddenly achieve 40% in 2024, you can be sure all the DA hostility would just shift to some other criticism. The DA’s small growth in a feeding frenzy is just an excuse to berate more than understand. No-one really wants to the DA to solve the riddle. That would result in a national crisis of conscience.
The DA won’t get 40% in 2024, however. There is an argument to be made it will never get 40%. That it is just the lay of the land. Not everyone is open to every political offer. And that is okay. One day, when the SA commentariat matures, it might ask the question: what is the DA’s actual potential, and how is it doing in relation to that?
The point is that the DA has never existed in a reasonable context. The measure of it has always been 51%. And so it has always failed in the eyes of many.
There is a supplementary point worth making here: Western Cape premier Alan Winde and Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis currently enjoy much more praise than Steenhuisen. There is an important difference, however. No-one really cared about either Winde or Hill-Lewis when they were an MEC and DA finance spokesperson respectively. Power brought love, as it so often does (not without good reason); and power in a local environment where the DA enjoys a majority.
People like DA leaders in government; they don’t like DA leaders in opposition. Steenhuisen, unlike Winde and Hill-Lewis, speaks to an audience among whom he has no majority. He was brave to never to demand a dead-certain position in the Western Cape, it would have revolutionised his favourability and made his ambitions more realistic. That said, anyone who has national ambitions really should have experience in government as a matter of course.
Regardless, the ANC could well deliver the DA a chance at national governance in 2024. The party could fail and win at the same time. There is a scenario where John Steenhuisen is SA’s next president. Curiously, that possibility has not defined much of the analysis around this leadership race. Yet, even if it is an outlier scenario, it is one worth considering. It seems important.
Again it will be the ANC, not the DA, that will define the context here. Is John Steenhuisen presidential material? That is a hard sell. But then he is in a different league to Jacob Zuma. And that is inarguable. How is it that the best the DA — a national party with 4-million votes — can produce is Steenhuisen? And how is it that Steenhuisen stands apart from anything the ANC has to offer? Here the media has a point. Is this as good as it gets?
It is. These are options we have. And if you are vaguely interested in getting the basics right, the DA is a no brainer. That isn’t going to enthuse anyone, and it is unlikely to result in the DA doing some introspection about how it is that Steenhuisen is the best it can do at the moment.
Political leadership in SA is a game of limited options set against the backdrop of unrealistic expectations. And never shall the two meet. It’s a recipe for permanent disappointment. But then, we do love misery.
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