The DA’s many wrong turns

8 December 2019

Horror of DA’s collapsing pillars will continue to unfold for party until 2021

Beryl Markham is, to some, an ob­scure writer whose rise to fame is being the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. But her New York Times bestseller – West with the Night – makes a poignant statement about our relationship with life, death and missed opportunities.

“That’s what makes death so hard – un­satisfied curiosity,” she writes. Many of us go about life wondering if we are on the right path – regretting major, life-chang­ing decisions we took or simply wonder­ing what life could have been like if we decided differently.

The message is most apt for the DA, giv­en the apoplexy that followed its ruinous week. The DA finds itself in a dark place this week. It is stripped of the mayoral chain in Joburg. It is holding on for dear life in Tshwane. It is unsure if MEC Leb­ogang Maile has already placed the city under administration. It must be won­dering if, in the end, it is worth fighting to hold on to the remaining outpost giv­en that municipal elections are less than two years away.

But, importantly, what makes life so hard for the DA is that in 2016 it won three metros, but didn’t really win them, so to say. The creative stitch-up in the Nelson Mandela metro was the first to come undone, followed early this week by Joburg in the wake of the resignation of South Africa’s Donald Trump-lite – Her­man Mashaba. If the capital falls before the end of the year – and it looks certain to fall – it will leave the DA not just with Markham’s unsatisfied curiosity about its mismanagement of its relationship with coalition partners, but, importantly, about what the DA of 2020 must be like and if that DA will be appealing to the majority of voters in these metros in 2021.

Surely, apoplectic is what 2019 means to the DA. Reduced national election per­formance in May. Mass exodus of top leaders a few months later. The collapse of leadership in the metros and, along with it, the sudden release from employ­ment of many in the private offices of not just the mayors, but MMCs.

It’s a bloodbath. It’s a sad story of tears and question marks. What was the DA doing with Mashaba in 2016 in the first place? He now stands to steal votes from the DA in 2021. It’s worse for Hellen Zille, the party’s federal chairwoman. She re­cruited him to stand for mayor of Joburg, yet his reason for leaving is her return to the party to which she recruited him. His departure, aided by Stephen “junior tiger” Mokgalapa’s zip, unleashed an un­stoppable chain of events.

There is, to go back to Markham again, an unsatisfied curiosity about how the DA’s tenure will be remembered. More so because any limited success by Mash­aba can’t wholly be considered the DA’s legacy. Mashaba wants to appropriate whatever modicum of success to himself in lieu of his anticipated second attempt at being mayor in 2021, contradicting and somewhat rubbishing the DA itself.

Those of us who know that the city remains dirty in spite of his ill-fated A Re Sebetseng clean-up campaign will remember Rene Descartes wrote about “how very liable we are to delusion in what relates to ourselves”. We can all look at the filth in the CBD and see wholly dif­ferent things.

The ANC, meanwhile, will use the re­mainder of the term to correct the DA’s misguided notions of development in Joburg by bringing back Jozi@Work, Corridors of Freedom, reinstating 6kiloli­tres of free water to residents taken away by Mashaba and the DA, as new mayor Geoff Makhubo has already promised. The ANC will further investigate Mash­aba’s major tenders with a view to show­ing that the DA speaks about clean gov­ernance but practises the worst form of cronyism and corruption. The period be­tween now and the next election will be like a slow death for the DA – with regrets and naked contempt for the EFF.

A tweet by Gwen Ngwenya, the return­ing policy chief of the DA, lambasting Mashaba for cosying up to VBS looters (read EFF), is a giveaway. When did the DA develop such naked antipathy toward the EFF? When Mashaba stitched to­gether the coalition arrangements in Joburg with the EFF, keeping the DA in power, the DA leadership was happy with the EFF. Today they are VBS loot­ers. In Tshwane, the fate of Mokgalapa is as good as sealed. Without the ANC and EFF, the DA can never run Tshwane. And the EFF is desperate to show that it can lead. This is necessary for their 2021 municipal election campaign.

But the DA rejection of the EFF seems to have cut deep, with Malema saying the DA must be taught a lesson. What this means, though, is that the EFF and the ANC will be forced into very difficult negotiations. With the DA out, the ANC must agree to gift the EFF Tshwane so it could properly run Joburg. This will al­so require the EFF to accept Makhubo’s leadership. If this fails, the metros will be surrendered to Maile, who will put them under administration. In this scenario, all parties (and voters) lose.

The DA has made a wrong turn – and the horror movie of its collapsing pil­lars will continue to unfold until 2021. Its leaders will look back and wonder whether they’re on the right path and live to regret major decisions they didn’t take and turns they didn’t make. The de­mise will be painful.