I suppose what the DA is really looking for is a Kemi Badenoch — the newly elected leader of the UK Tories.
The DA, minority positioning apart, is avowedly a party that values individuality and the freedom of association and expression among other freedoms. Badenoch’s views, like those of Margaret Thatcher, champion free trade, chimes with those who see historical economic progress as being predicated on the rule of law and other constitutional constraints rather than colonialism and privilege, vehemently opposes socialism and decries critical race theory and the “segregated identities of victims and oppressors”.
The DA is supported in no small measure by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, whose trustee and board member, Christian Lindner, lauds the work of the foundation across ideological and national borders with its efforts for democracy and against populism.
Lindner, who had brought his Free Democratic Party into coalition in Germany, was recently fired from his post as finance minister by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, leaving his “traffic light” coalition government teetering on the brink of collapse. The fallout among members of the coalition — the “traffic light” referring to colours of the centre-left coalition — was triggered by competing views on the future of Germany’s economy among its partners.
By comparison, in SA, the government of national unity is in a honeymoon period, unaffected yet by what caused the collapse of the traffic light coalition — demands by Linder for changes to tax, social and climate policy.
These will inevitably raise their heads in the fullness of time or result in an unlikely fusion of parties, driven by the DA’s values and principles and, perhaps by their historical inability to find someone of Badenoch’s hue to lead the party — not that such leadership delivered stellar electoral results in the past.
In any event, the white leadership in the DA is set to continue, as DA leader John Steenhuisen, perhaps unwittingly alluded to, when he said on being elected leader: “The new leadership will lead the DA into the election and beyond ... the new DA leadership elected [in March 2023] will play a central role in achieving the best possible coalition outcome.”
What the “best possible coalition outcome” means is yet to be put through its paces. What is clear is that the DA, in coalition, reflects an essentially “conservative” stance that will always be at loggerheads with the ANC’s self-styled “progressive” bearing evinced by the fundamentals of, even, a Cyril Ramaphosa.
For the moment though, the honeymoon holds. The issues around Brics, foreign policy, education, health and the economy are yet to be tested. All of this looms while the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which provides duty-free access to the US market for almost all products exported from eligible sub-Saharan African countries, including SA, hangs in the balance with the ascension by Donald Trump to the US presidency.
Traffic lights in SA are invariably faulty, their wiring often challenged by the vagaries of weather, electricity, vandalism and theft. With this metaphor in mind, it would be wise to take a deep breath, enjoy the honeymoon and hope against hope that it holds.
The lessons of Germany foretell a different story though, and the apparent inability by the DA to find a Badenoch, poised to sustainably embrace the unfettered “wisdom” of Thomas Sowell — a well-known voice in the US conservative movement as a prominent black conservative — that resonates with a populace split electorally between the Scylla of the splintering ANC and the Charybdis of the Zuma’s MK party, points in the direction of a traffic lighthouse breakdown. Is the DA poised to traverse the narrow waters as described in Homer’s Odyssey?
If the past is anything to go by, it appears unlikely; coalition governments, in the long run, are almost always unpopular and seldom last long. But then, who knows, a black Odysseus may lead the way? Let’s see what holds.
• Cachalia is a former DA MP and public enterprises spokesperson.
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