The best thing about the new format of the print edition of Business Day is that letters to the editor are back every day. The past eight years saw long and worthy articles appear below the cartoon every second day because there weren’t enough letters to fill the space and the editors didn’t know what else to do.
The tighter new size shrinks the space allotted to letters and solves the problem. Call me old-fashioned, but people who take the trouble to sit down and write to a newspaper, to praise or complain, are gold-dust in this business now. Online you can flick away something you dislike with an abbreviation. Here we expect a little more.
Sadly my column, which I began here 25 years ago, is now reduced by a third and it can be tricky to tackle anything complex in it. But I was grateful for letters last Friday criticising me because I find fault with the DA for not doing more to exploit the ANC’s breathtaking mismanagement of the economy in general, and of empowerment in particular.
I believe the DA’s decision after it removed Mmusi Maimane as leader in 2019 to drop all reference to race in its policy programme was dead wrong. It had been stung by teasing that it become an “ANC Lite” under Maimane, and by Helen Zille’s endeavours to find — and parachute into the leadership after she stood aside — a black, African replacement.
She first tried Mamphela Ramphele, which went comically awry, before alighting on Maimane. By Zille’s design Maimane’s first day as leader of the party in parliament was also his first day in parliament. She then clashed with Maimane, but could not undo him until he made a mess of the 2019 election and a DA panel recommended he should go.
The party then elected her leader of its federal council and John Steenhuisen as party leader, and declared it was done with race-based thinking. Being black was no longer a “proxy” for disadvantage. Instead of examining ideas to directly counter BEE, the DA created an “economic justice” policy by cutting and pasting the 17 UN sustainable development goals as its “framework for redress”.
It is these that the DA turns to on the rare occasion any top leader talks about economic policy beyond promising “more jobs”. A letter last week credited the current push for growth to the DA, but in fact a knot of dogged economists has been making the case for decades. Neither of the two DA leaders could stitch more than a few sentences together about the economy if they tried.
It’s not good enough. I’m terrified by the thought that the DA might actually believe it can move from 20% to 30% of the vote by merely promising “jobs” or “where we govern”, and no race in policy as enticements. I may be wrong but the DA must, surely, try soon to talk about how smart it is to ignore race, of all things, in political messaging in SA.
From 1652 to just yesterday race was the primary anvil on which every fragment of life here was hammered out, and because Zille embarrassed herself trying to make it happen for the DA overnight we now throw the baby out with the bathwater?
I want a DA strong enough to defend the constitution on its own, and it can get there. It doesn’t need to copy or paste anything, least of all anything from the ANC. But it has got to be able to appeal directly to black voters and to do it because they are black. It just has to find a way, and it’s nothing to run away from. We will not be safe until the DA gets race right.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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