Great, John Steenhuisen has done the right thing and announced he will not stand again for leadership of the DA. The decision was inevitable, and it was probably also inevitable that in leaving the race he happily distorted his political journey of the past three years.
Distortion, deliberate or accidental, is common in politics and it survives best when wound around a little truth. So, as he claimed in his announcement yesterday, he did indeed say after his re-election in 2023 and at the launch of his “Moonshot Pact” with like-minded parties such as the FF+, that “Yes! I will work with each and every one of you to lead the DA into national government in 2024”.
But it is a cheap political trick to fabricate prediction from ambition after the fact. Steenhuisen’s DA did poorly a year later in 2024, winning just over one percentage point more of the vote than Mmusi Maimane had in 2019, and with a full 100,000 fewer votes despite the mess the country was in. Had it not been for Jacob Zuma splitting his MK off from the ANC seven months after Steenhuisen’s re-election, the DA would have once again been well and truly sunk.
Listening to Steenhuisen yesterday it was as if a coalition with the ANC was the plan all along. But that’s not true. So unexpected was MK’s success that the DA was barely able to scrape together a rough arrangement when President Cyril Ramaphosa invited them to join a government of national unity (GNU). Seconds before parliament voted Ramaphosa back into the presidency in 2024, two weeks after the election, Helen Zille was still frantically texting coalition terms with Fikile Mbalula.
Read: Steenhuisen exits DA leadership, cites ‘mission accomplished’
So spare me the soaring farewell rhetoric. Steenhuisen’s decision to enter the GNU was probably correct, but the DA has between now and its congress in April to reconsider some of the poor decisions it made after the 2019 election. How did it ever come to decide, for instance, that race would no longer figure in its thinking? Race, it declared, would no longer be a proxy for disadvantage.
To win north of 25% of the national vote he or she will need to place a robust and reshaped DA economic policy front and centre of everything they do and challenge the ANC’s catastrophic nationalist orthodoxy at every turn.
This was always mad. South Africa is soaked in race and to ignore it is to confine yourself to a fringe of our politics where DA opponents like the FF+ and the Patriotic Alliance, and other rats and mice, happily feast on your satisfied reverie.
A new leader — Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis is the frontrunner, but both he and the party would benefit from a contest — is going to have to have real steel in their heart.
To win north of 25% of the national vote he or she will need to place a robust and reshaped DA economic policy front and centre of everything they do and challenge the ANC’s catastrophic nationalist orthodoxy at every turn. The DA has run from the economy for 30 years, but that must end now. It must tell itself no more lies.
It is perfectly possible to fashion a viable economic vision for this country around a commitment to our common rights, enterprise and redress. People who work for themselves should be treasured. Barriers to greenfield investment should be swept aside and barriers to exports removed. The backsliding we see on reforms in energy, rail and ports must be fiercely resisted. If the DA is to remain in the GNU the ANC needs to understand it is in a cage with a tiger.
In a world lurching into nationalist division and even war, a robust, liberal DA needs to clench its fists. It needs a minister in foreign affairs, and if we are going to be truly nonaligned then let’s do it properly and not take sides whenever it suits the feeble romanticism of the old ANC.
With Steenhuisen going and Helen Zille probably the next mayor of Johannesburg, the DA finally has a chance to be in national government by design and not by accident.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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