Cape Town - The Democratic Alliance’s likely next leader Mmusi Maimane on Tuesday said he would not resort to populism to retain or build the party’s support base beyond its current four million voters.
“That is the job … but the function now is to ensure that the South Africans who share our message come on board. It is not about making sure that every South African votes for you because of course you are not going to get that,” he said in an interview at his parliamentary office.
“There are people who support nationalisation and they should go and vote for the EFF quite frankly.”
Still choosing to speak of his candidacy as a hypothesis two days after Helen Zille announced she would step down next month, the 34-year-old Maimane suggested that he was similarly philosophical about the reception it might see among the party’s traditional support base.
“Let us assume I went into any community and I saw a racist there, they must just know that this party is not a party for racists. That is just a fact and if someone wants to be racist I am not going to be populist to speak to that and assure them that their racial prejudice must be upheld.”
He said his message to privileged DA voters would simply be that rebuilding poor communities was the only route to creating a sustainable society.
“I must go into any community and say: ‘Look our policies are about building an inclusive South Africa and … that means that we have to invest in communities that didn’t have infrastructure. Those same people must be able to say ‘I see that that is important’ for my own sustainibility even if they themselves might be wealthy.”
He offered that the split in Cosatu showed that the ANC alliance was fracturing on more than one front because it was impossible to contain several opposing ideologies in a single party and said the DA would not make the same mistake.
Ignoring the consensus among commentators, Maimane politely insisted that it was not imperative that the DA elect its first black party leader at its May congress to replace Zille.
He added: “The party’s appeal is broadening” and said this had the advantage that growth was not reliant solely on the mass appeal of the future leader.
If black rural voters did not relate to his urban persona, he believed they had other reasons to see the value of the organisation.
“Even the rural person appreciates that they are under a working local government that delivers decent sanitation.”
After one year as parliamentary leader, Maimane indicated that it was a foregone conclusion that should he stand and win, the party would go back to having a single parliamentary and national leader
“The role would become the same. The advantage is that the discussion of the two centre of powers is minimised, you can keep the message disciplined.”
Maimane, who said he would have been surprised if Lindiwe Mazibuko had returned to South Africa to contest the leadership, reached for the example of her public spat with Zille about affirmative action in the run-up to the last election as case in point of the conflict that will be avoided when the roles again become one for the first time in eight years.
“To use a very terrible example, thinking about Lindiwe, you don’t have to have her taking a decision on one thing and another player is taking another decision
“You will have one centre of power taking one decision on an issue and have discipline on that issue.”
Maimane said he had side-stepped or been spared a similar clash with Zille, conceding only that there had been “long discussions about how we approach the state of the nation address” this year when the DA was faced beforehand with the certainty of the Economic Freedom Fighters dominating the event and Parliament calling in the police to remove opposition MPs.
He said in his relationship with Zille, after he went from unsuccessful Gauteng premier candidate to parliamentary leader, “the potential was there, but the conflict wasn’t.”
Zille gave him “licence to do what you need to do,” he added and denied it was under duress from the party leadership that he distanced the DA caucus from the EFF’s protest agenda in Parliament this year after joining in when Julius Malema and his MPs heckled from the floor in the National Assembly on more than one occasion in 2014.
“I think their agenda is actually quite dangerous,” he said, denying any about-turn as he had in December.
“We want to stand for institutions and if their sole objection is to destroy the institution we cannot be part of that. Destroying Parliament will benefit only one man - Jacob Zuma.
“Apart from the slogan ‘pay back the money’ I am uncertain what single issue the EFF has brought to the table. I think everything else they stand for has been taken from elsewhere. It is pretty much an ANC in drag.”
At the weekend, DA chief whip John Steenhuisen became the first senior party official to publicly back Maimane for leader.
Maimane said he had a valuable colleague in Steenhuisen and believed he had managed to unite the caucus, which still counts many loyal to Mazibuko, behind him.
“There were some people Lindiwe had led and therefore were still supportive of her and would have felt that my coming in would alienate them, but I was very deliberate never to alienate anybody.”
If commentators insisted on pointing out how rapid his rise through the DA ranks had been this far, he said there would be nothing glib about going for the top job.
“The consideration is not just light. It is a massive job, I will inherit, well let’s put it this way, whoever leads the DA, will inherit a very massive organisation, it is a big machine, a very expensive machine at that.”
ANA