EDITORIAL: Fixing the DA’s talent problem is easier than it thinks

The arrival of a controversial podcaster as chief of staff at the agriculture ministry has raised the temperature — if not the quality — of the discourse around political appointments and “cadre deployment”.

If the reports are to be believed, the individual in question, Roman Cabanac, appears to have espoused some highly offensive and unconstitutional ideas that surely would have been flagged during a basic due diligence process. It can only mean that the minister who hired him, DA leader John Steenhuisen, thinks that Cabanac’s talents make the PR fallout worth it. Time will tell whether he is right.

Amid the gleeful skandaal on some news sites, where presumably rather lonely people rummage through archives of screenshots they collect for moments such as these, there is actually an interesting story. It’s not about the man in question — and whether for example he still believes, as he appears to have written, that black people are incapable of liberalism. It is about the DA’s unresolved problem of scaling at speed without compromising the party’s core offering of clean and competent governance.

It isn’t a new problem. Federal chair Helen Zille has long spoken about it, specifically referring to the party’s inroads into the metros in Joburg and Tshwane over the past years. It is fair to say that the party’s difficulty in finding and retaining political and organisational talent has been apparent in its stuttering attempts to run cities brought to their knees by decades of theft and incompetence.

From its conduct, the party has taken a decision that inroads it makes outside base camp in Cape Town, be it in metros or in a coalition government, cannot come at a cost to the Western Cape or the City of Cape Town. The city’s mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, is absurdly popular and is a shoo-in for the leadership of the party in due course. But despite opportunities in the coalition, Hill-Lewis opted to remain where he is.

This is the context around political appointments in DA-run ministries. Last week Steenhuisen wrote to public service & administration minister Mzamo Buthelezi seeking a deviation from the professionalisation framework for a series of appointments in his office.

The DA needs to make new and different kinds of friends, to befriend Joburg’s gigantic and engaging black professional class.

This should have helped people discern the problem, but it has been lost amid lurid reporting on who said what on Twitter (where there are clicks, but no enlightenment).

The DA is struggling to find the talent it trusts.

Chiefs of staff need sharp elbows and thick skin, especially so in the circumstances at the agriculture ministry, which finds itself under the leadership of a new variety.

Cabanac certainly has those qualities but there are surely plenty of candidates with a less divisive background, and that is the kernel of the problem. The DA needs to make new and different kinds of friends, to befriend Joburg’s gigantic and engaging black professional class.

There is still plenty of gold in Jozi — and it is in its people. There is no burgher like a Joburger, and it is in Joburg that the DA will find liberal black talent. This is an urgent issue for the party. The ideas that Cabanac expressed on Twitter could become a self-reinforcing fallacy and risk the worst possible outcome of them all, which is that professional and middle-class black folk in Joburg won’t want to talk to you at all.

That is catastrophic for any organisation that wants a future in this country and is all strangely unnecessary and easy to fix. We are, after all, talking about the best people on earth; a Joburger will always take the call, have that coffee and hear out the pitch. This is why the DA needs to spend more time in Rosebank and Menlyn. The national ministries present a fleeting and golden opportunity for the party to do this.

If it can, a world of talent will reveal itself and — perhaps in a way nobody foresaw — the coalition government could be the DA’s transformative moment. That’s an exciting outcome and it would do SA a world of good.

While the ANC tries to work out what it is now that the hard left, the fascists and the ethnic nationalists have hived themselves off, voters of all hues seeking sanctity in liberal politics should feel welcome in the DA and the parts of the government it oversees.