From now on almost every decision agriculture minister and DA leader John Steenhuisen makes is going to be measured by a fair-sized chunk of the voting population as the work of his new chief of staff at agriculture, Roman Cabanac, a polarising figure from the right, if not the far right, of our political spectrum.
I don’t know Cabanac, but I have watched his activity on social media, like many others of his persuasion, with a low-grade despair. I would normally quote some of his writings in an article like this but it’s impossible now.
Before Steenhuisen announced his appointment, Cabanac deleted all of his history on Twitter and, then, on X, including this beauty: “Bantu people, much like Arabs, are not democratic people. They are monarchists at heart.” The sweep of that sort of deprecation or judgment is just breathtaking.
Why would any South African who has nothing to hide do that? Obviously he doesn’t want anyone reading more of what he has said in the past because it might tell us who he is. His hurried deletions attack the transparency and candour the DA is supposed to bring to our politics, what it calls the “DA Difference”.
What the appointment brings home is that politics and prejudice still rules in SA, despite the election and despite the government of national unity (GNU). The campaign and jostling ahead of the local government elections in 2026 has begun, and everywhere already there is posing and pretence. Everywhere there is more of the same.
Obviously there is a dividend for President Cyril Ramaphosa forming a GNU, and for the relative calm inside it. The rand and stock market are suddenly strong and foreigners are buying our debt again, but it doesn’t take more than a cursory glance to appreciate how little our discourse and politics have changed. The ANC is still in charge and it makes a big thing of not changing any of the policies that saw it lose 17 percentage points of the vote between 2019 and 2024.
Corruption still yaps at Ramaphosa’s heels — his justice minister is exposed as having bought a coffee shop with funds her financial adviser allegedly stole from the infamous VBS Mutual Bank. Idiocy too — the new ANC mayor of Johannesburg has had to issue a humiliating apology for suggesting he might hire foreigners to join the fight against crime in the city because they speak the same languages as the supposed criminals ruining it.
Over on the far left the radical EFFs faces destructive internal division after the decision of its former deputy leader to join former president Jacob Zuma’s new and spectacularly successful MK party. But it is in the DA where the future of our politics may be being written. It should still be able to make or break the government after 2029.
Before the election and his elevation to cabinet Steenhuisen had told colleagues in the party he would not be seeking re-election as party leader when it votes in new leadership next year. It was not an unreasonable thing to do. He is not a particularly popular leader. Where in his former role as DA chief whip in parliament he had been feisty and combative, as leader he has lacked the personal qualities necessary for national leadership. Under him the DA fell well short of its electoral ambitions.
He is not a statesman, someone you could imagine addressing the UN on our behalf. Despite the state of the country as it went into the May 29 election, the DA managed only a paltry single percentage point increase in its share of the vote. It finds itself in government now not because its results thrust it there but because the ANC’s lamentable performance demanded it.
It is almost inevitable that ahead of the local elections in 2026 the DA will hold another federal congress, which among other things elects a leader. Next year sounds more likely. Holding the congress in an election year risks carrying any divisions that might emerge into the campaign itself.
And divisions there are. Many DA activists will be dismayed by Steenhuisen’s choice of a chief of staff. Could he not find anyone in the party? Gareth van Onselen, a former DA strategist turned successful pollster, tweeted after the appointment that he could “not tell you how absolutely and fundamentally I disagree with this appointment”. That sentiment will be the tip of an iceberg in the party.
I’m sure Steenhuisen makes mature judgments about his career. If he ignores the hostile response to his appointment of Cabanac it may be that he calculates that he would rather continue in his cabinet post and perhaps chalk up some political wins in the job until 2029 than lead the party again. There is fruit to be picked, as it were — increasing agricultural exports, rescuing Onderstepoort, sorting out the impasse with the EU over SA oranges or settling more black farmers on land they own. And if the DA finds itself out of government after 2029 he would at least retire from politics on a ministerial pension with, probably, an ambassadorship somewhere exotic for further comfort.
That call would make a sort of sense. DA activists must know that despite the party’s clear lead over the rest of the political pack as an urban administrator, under Steenhuisen it is going to struggle to make electoral headway. Helen Zille, chair of the party’s executive, may also move on but she brings an organisational discipline to the DA it would really struggle to replace.
The next party leader, surely before the 2029 general election, must be Geordin Hill-Lewis, now Cape Town mayor. He is a natural leader — popular, attractive, smart, inclusive — and he understands the importance of getting things done. And he is still in his 30s.
The DA needs direction, and I honestly cannot write down here with any confidence what its strategy is going to be over the next few years. I understand that everything is complex — in local government in the Western Cape it is hammering back at Gayton McKenzie’s PA in by-elections, but faces rebellions from former electoral pact partners ActionSA, a breakaway, and the FF+.
Surely the least it could do is elect a leader who can unite more voters behind it than Steenhuisen and Zille have been able to manage? How hard can that be? The waiting is exhausting.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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