DA’s BEE stance may damage poll prospects

Just as the DA appeared to have settled its battle with Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille, the party is facing a fresh ideological row, which might damage its election prospects.

At the weekend, DA leaders clashed over its policy on broad-based BEE.

The party’s ideological direction is being challenged as it seeks to refine its policy before the 2019 elections.

With less than a year to go before the national and provincial polls, the disagreement spilled into the public domain at the weekend when DA leaders took each other to task publicly.

DA head of policy Gwen Ngwenya said the party had scrapped BEE from its economic policy.

Party leaders attempting to hold the DA to its liberal roots praised the decision, while others made it clear that this had not been decided.

DA federal council chairman James Selfe capitulated on Saturday and said that reports on the abandonment of BEE from the party’s economic policy were "untrue".

He said the DA still believed race was a proxy for disadvantage in SA.

Sources said on Monday that there was a group in the party that wanted the DA to scrap race as a "basis or proxy" for disadvantage.

DA MP Phumzile van Damme differed on BEE on social media, which prompted former DA leader Tony Leon to ask on social media on Saturday: "What on earth is going on here?"

The public disagreements prompted Ngwenya and Selfe to release a statement to "clarify" the DA’s stance.

They acknowledged the legacy of apartheid and its effect on society, and said that redress was both a "moral and economic imperative".

"Crucially, we have always said that we aim to achieve a society in which race is not a determinant of opportunity.

"We have argued that empowerment policies need to become less race-focused over time, as the policies begin to do their work in redressing the legacy of apartheid," the statement read.

"The only reason the ANC government has had to focus ever-increasingly on narrow racial categorisation is because their empowerment policy has failed so dismally.

"We believe that it is possible to design an empowerment framework that will deliver equality of opportunity for all South Africans over time."

Ngwenya and Selfe said the DA rejected the ANC’s narrow model of BEE, and their party would come up with an alternative proposal, announced before the election.

This decision was adopted without a fuss in July.

It was based on Ngwenya’s proposal that the DA’s empowerment policy will be alternative to the ANC’s one, and should be "nonracial".

The council gave her a mandate to develop alternative models of empowerment.

The mandate was only given after Ngwenya published an article on Businesslive, explaining the policy proposal that elicited a massive backlash from within the party.

The fact that the DA believes that race is a proxy for disadvantage — an issue at the heart of the debate — was absent from the statement by Selfe and Ngwenya.

"The DA is seeking ways to broaden economic inclusion for those that have been previously and deliberately excluded by virtue of race, but also gender and disability, to name but a few," the statement read.

"Our goal is to advance the empowerment of disadvantaged South Africans, the majority of whom are black.

"Therefore, the DA unequivocally supports the empowerment of black South Africans," they said.