Johannesburg – Eusebius McKaiser may have left the airwaves, but he still sounds like a broken record when it comes to the DA.
McKaiser has been singing the same tune about the official opposition for well over a decade.
The official opposition is too oppositional, he says, even though the role of the opposition is – as the word suggests – to oppose what the governing party gets wrong.
The DA must differentiate itself from the ANC, McKaiser writes, by clarifying its identity and giving voters an alternative policy offer.
But his solution is for the DA to be more like the ANC, by copying the governing party’s racebased policies.
In reality, McKaiser wants the DA to be a more palatable version of the ANC; a sort of ANC-lite, minus the corruption.
Have you read: Lax policies, a muddled identity: Why would anyone trust the DA?
The problem is that the DA has been down this road.
We found that when you try to be ANC-lite, voters don’t regard you as a hero; instead they treat you like ANC-zero.
That is why the DA lost 470 000 votes between 2014 and 2019.
None of this matters to McKaiser.
He is still making the same criticisms of the DA as he did just before the 2014 election, when he published his book, “Could I Vote DA?” Ironically, the DA delivered its best performance ever in that election, winning over more than 4-million votes.
So why did the electorate punish the DA in 2019? The report by the review panel that McKaiser refers to asked that very question and came up with the following answers. In the three years before the 2019 election, there was a lack of clarity about the party’s vision and direction.
There was confusion about the DA’s position on key issues.
And the party’s unity of purpose had begun to crumble.
The single most important cause was the failure of effective leadership.
Since the report was released, the DA has tried to address these issues. We held our leaders accountable and elected new leadership.
We convened a policy conference where we recommitted to our core values and principles, and we adopted a new policy on economic justice. One of the biggest falsehoods spread by McKaiser is that the DA is “ahistorical” and that it doesn’t want to confront the legacy of apartheid. But our values and principles document does precisely that. Under a section entitled “redress”, it talks about the injustices of apartheid, including forced removals, job reservation and educational disparities.
The whole point of the DA’s economic justice policy is to tackle the legacy of apartheid. We do this by identifying the drivers of disadvantage and focusing our efforts on getting rid of them.
That is why we put forward bold ideas on how to overcome poverty, unemployment, educational and health inequalities, low savings, childhood stunting, the breakdown of family structures caused by the migrant labour system, and deep-rooted patterns of spatial inequality. We support steps that would make millions of black South Africans property owners or holders of recorded land rights.
McKaiser claims that what South Africa needs is a “social democratic offering” that recognises and confronts the legacy of the past.
That’s exactly what the DA’s economic justice policy is. For commentators like McKaiser, however, social democracy can only be achieved through race-based policies like black economic empowerment (BEE).
In the past 27 years of ANC rule, BEE has shown only to benefit a small, privileged elite in the name of racial transformation. It does nothing for poor and unemployed black South Africans, or black women in rural areas who carry the heaviest burden of the past.
It does nothing to promote social justice. Race-based policies are a blunt instrument. They don’t target the most disadvantaged.
That’s why 11-million South Africans are unemployed and half the nation lives in poverty. The trends are getting worse. It’s time for McKaiser to let go of his megaphone, blow the dust off his stuck record and give the DA a chance.
By Michael Cardo.
• Cardo is a DA MP
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