RW Johnson’s evisceration of DA leader John Steenhuisen at the weekend, given a full page in the Sunday Times, has presented the party’s most loyal followers with a terrible choice.
On the one hand, gold star liberal Johnson cannot be wrong. On the other hand, neither can the DA leadership. It’s quite the pickle.
Whichever side they find themselves on, all will agree that Johnson came in hot, announcing his intention to take no prisoners with the headline “The rise and fall of a chancer”.
Readers younger than 80 might not be familiar with that last word — they tend to prefer more current synonyms like “CEO of an AI company” and “the president of the US” — but for many of Johnson’s peers, a chancer remains one of the lowest forms of life; someone who is not only an arriviste but probably didn’t even go to Oxford.
Of course, not all die-hard DA voters will feel crushed between the unstoppable force of Johnson’s disdain and the apparently immovable object that is Steenhuisen. On those occasions that I criticise the DA in this column, I invariably get at least one reader asking me if I’ve suffered some sort of psychological collapse, and I suspect a great many of those who have read Johnson’s piece will respond not with confusion or anger but rather with sadness and concern.
Both books have their advocates and detractors, but with respect to both, it does seem to be the case that when RW Johnson says you’re a goner, it looks like you’ve got between 10 and 50 years to get your affairs in order.
Certainly, when they read Johnson’s insistence that the DA is “not very good at choosing leaders” — illustrated by Helen Zille ignoring his advice not to anoint Mamphela Ramphele and then making the “equally absurd” decision to stick Mmusi Maimane in the hot seat, before completing the trifecta of mediocrity with Steenhuisen — many would have believed they’d just witnessed someone having a stroke.
And he’s not alone: right now I suspect quite a few local journalists are being diagnosed with all sorts of mental disorders as they begin to ask questions about Steenhuisen’s credit card debts, his role in sacking environment minister Dion George and replacing him with someone embedded in the hunting industry, and whether Steenhuisen or the DA had any hand in the deluge of bad press about George that followed his sacking.
Should any of those questions produce unpleasant answers in the next few months, nobody will be shocked. The true believers will ignore them as a witch hunt, while those who have been deeply unimpressed with Steenhuisen for years will simply file them away in the same place they filed Steenhuisen calling his ex-wife “road kill” on air in a ghastly attempt at a blokey joke or hiring and then failing to fire Roman Cabanac, the Temu Charlie Kirk.
Certainly, that second fiasco suggested that Steenhuisen is one of only two things: an admirer of the racist, misogynist far right, or catastrophically illiterate, unable to read either a room or a tweet. Still, as Steenhuisen begins to wonder if he should start looking for a new (and, according to Johnson, his first) job, there is one small consolation to hold on to, offered by Johnson himself.
In 1977 Johnson published a book titled How Long Will South Africa Survive? In 2015 he published another one with the same title, this time predicting that South Africa would collapse within two to five years.
Both books have their advocates and detractors, but with respect to both, it does seem to be the case that when RW Johnson says you’re a goner, it looks like you’ve got between 10 and 50 years to get your affairs in order.
So rest easy, Mr Steenhuisen. History is on your side, even if RW Johnson isn’t.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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