Eusebius McKaiser shares his views on what kind of leader would be best for the DA’s prospects in the 2019 national polls.
We all now know that Helen Zille is stepping down and much of the rushed conversation since Sunday has been about two questions, ‘Why so suddenly?’ and ‘Who is the right person to take over?’
I am not massively interested in the first of these questions, whether Zille was pushed, jumped, or, surely also a possibility, to be fair on her, whether she just took a deeply personal decision after a moment of reflection while sipping her morning coffee. I would love a political reporter to dig up the back story – if there is one – and I would lap it up like every other political animal. But let’s be honest: our country has so many urgent crises to fix that it is important to prioritise the second question: Is there an ideal candidate to replace Zille as leader of the second biggest party in the country?
Because, whatever you think of the DA or Zille, the DA matters. Our democracy, to rehearse a tired but important truth, can only be strengthened by competitive politics, which, in turn, implies that we need the best possible opposition parties in place to keep the incumbent government on its weary liberation toes.
I don’t think there’s an ideal leader-in-waiting, so it really is a question of who the best candidate is rather than the ideal candidate. This isn’t a diss of anyone currently in the leadership; honestly, not even a Zille doppelganger would be ideal for the party right now. An ideal candidate does not exist simply because there are way too many of us to be pleased inside and outside the DA, and no one person could possibly embody all of the traits necessary to satisfy every DA supporter, let alone every voter. Such a person would be a site of contradictions.
I wanna sketch, very subjectively, of course, what kind of leader would in my view be best for the DA’s prospects in the 2019 national general elections. I will outline, briefly, what strategy and tactics the party should be guided by when it goes to the elective conference next month. Thereafter it’s worth reflecting on the content of the vision of a new leader – what should be in it? What would I put in that vision if I was running for Zille’s vacant post?
Strategy and tactics: look towards 2019
The 2016 local elections are really not that far away. In a year or so we will go to the polls again, and it is pointless to take into account, in a decisive way, whether the candidates for replacing Zille are the best ones to spearhead the local government elections. That would be a strategic error. The leader has to project themselves into the role of leader for up to ten years even. So, too, must voting delegates. So you have to choose a leader for the DA that is your best possible bet for fighting the ANC and EFF in the 2019 national elections.
It is at least conceivable that someone who could yet be developed and who might grow the most between now and 2019 may not be the best person to spearhead the 2016 local elections campaign. For example, I wonder if many readers would disagree – regardless whether you have an affinity for the DA or not – that Cape Town Mayor Patricia De Lille could probably better articulate local governance issues than, say, Maimane. So if you think about local government elections as a decisive worry in choosing the next leader, then someone like De Lille is suddenly more in play than, say, the governance-inexperienced Mmusi Maimane. That would be a mistake. I think the DA should not panic about next year, and focus instead on the 2019 national general elections when it decides a replacement for Zille next month.
I’m not suggesting the results of next year do not matter. It would be a gigantic boost for competitive politics if the DA managed to win metros outside the Western Cape – here in Gauteng, and maybe in the Eastern Cape. They could then build the party’s brand as a party ready for national governance if they succeeded in demonstrating an ability to govern in poorer municipalities and metros outside the Western Cape.
So next year’s local elections matter, sure. But, Zille is still around, and will be a strong campaigner in the local election regardless of who becomes leader next month, and so the party will, at any rate, put in a good fight in many cities and towns, such that it can afford to reframe the leadership succession question pointedly, ‘Who among these candidates will give us the best possible chance to drive the ANC below 60% in 2019?’ That question alone should be in the minds of voting delegates.
The competitive goal is to get the African National Congress below the psychological threshold of 60% which will really scare the living daylights out of them, because after that anyone can win a national general election. Voting delegates next month should therefore de-prioritise the 2016 elections and take a longer view when choosing a replacement for Zille. The focus on the 2016 elections can start in greater earnest after a new leader is chosen.
What about vision?
I fear that whoever becomes the DA’s next leader is going to feed us more of the same: In other words a diet of rainbow nation myth-making, colour-blindness, ahistoricism and sounding like you are above the fray – emotion is so last year; racism really is as old and dead as Cecil John Rhodes unless you have racism receipts to be carefully checked over by De Lille; and if only we grew the economy and gave everyone – what’s the catch phrase again that only the hacks remembers? – equal opportunities... Uhm... Equal... Open... Eish… I don’t know but you recall that equality idea that is blind to circumstances and pretends that justice is only about being in the race (no pun possible on ‘race’ in the DA, ever), and it just means no one being excluded from the race. Oh, and don’t mention awkward things like ‘unearned privileges’ and stuff. Just accept being in the race means equality is upon us. For good measure take a selfie that shows how ‘diverse’ we look in Port Elizabeth and Bob – or Mmusi – is your uncle!
And cue the diverse choir: Kumbayaaaa my Lord, Kumbayaaaaa! Kumbayaaa my Lord, Kymbayaaay! …. Someone’s singing Lord, Kumbayaaa! … Oh Mandela, Kumbayaaa!
This rainbow nation diet will be tempting to serve voting delegates in Port Elizabeth even if you are the only candidate running for the top position. This is because more of the same will mean no one is likely to pelt you from the establishment. No old white male is going to write letters to the newspapers bemoaning the ‘trade-off between liberalism and pragmatism.’ No white person is going to leave for Australia if you give them more of the same. And, worse than running off to Australia, no white person is going to join the Freedom Front Plus if you continue to talk about the poisonous nature of race categories and take some Zille-slogans – ‘The ANC are a bunch of racial nationalists!’ – and rehash them to show, uhm, continuity. And you then just need to hope that patient black supporters remain too disillusioned with the ANC to swim away from the blue wave now.
But let’s get real and serious here about how to actually challenge the ANC’s grip on power. More of the same won’t cut it, even if it wins you the top spot in the party. If I was running for the DA’s leadership post I would do two things in a speech in Port Elizabeth when it comes to this question of what the content of a new leader’s vision would be.
First, I would embrace, and explicitly call myself, a full-blooded liberal. I would take this identity fight to every person thinking, wrongly, that liberals must be colour-blind, obsess with non-racialism, roll their eyes at historical analysis, and talk diversity while actually just reproducing old exclusionary identities.
I would, in simple language, sketch a new political philosophy for the party, moving from old school liberalism to a kind of liberalism that recognises that group-identities matter, and that society does not just consist of individuals. Coin a new phrase, something less complicated than academic studies of liberalism would give you. That would be the speechwriters’ task, but the instruction to them should be clear: Write me a speech that makes sense of, and explains and affirms, a kind of liberalism appropriate for democratic South Africa, a strand of liberalism in which individuals’ interests remain a crucial focal point of our political identity as a party but we are not shy to admit that individuals value social structures such as the family, church, and even associations ranging from football clubs to political parties.
We are not atoms. In fact, some of us even choose, as individuals, values like Ubuntu that affirm the relations between individuals. But so long as these are freely chosen values, you are a liberal and the DA can be your liberal home as a champion of Ubuntu, family, church, Kaizer Chiefs and the DA itself. Lock yourself up, speechwriters, and show me a draft by the end of the week, I’d bark, and get back to secret meetings with my strategists and lobbyists.
The individual, and especially the individual’s freedom, must still be recognised as being of paramount importance. I would find familiar stories and examples to reassure everyone that I envision a South Africa in which the individual can flourish, and by “flourish” I would mean that the aim of the state is to enable each of us to successfully and freely choose our own projects and goals and interests and pursue these without any undue pressures on our freedom and individuality.
I tell you why this matters. For one, there really are many DA supporters, especially more conservative ones or, if you will, conservative liberals, even, who think about ideology. I am not convinced that ideology or political philosophy does not matter in our country. Ideology defines the very point of your political existence as a party, and gives you an identity from which you can then engage debates on more specific policy questions, tactics for elections, etc. Without a clear political philosophy guiding you, you will simply be reacting to issues in the news cycle on an ad hoc basis, rather than with some degree of consistency, and principle.
More importantly though, if I was a candidate, I would want to show up anyone who has left or threatened to leave the party based on claims that the party isn’t liberal anymore or is eroding its liberal identity. That is nonsense. And the person worthy of leading the DA actually needs to be clearer than Zille on this question of what, precisely, liberalism means for the DA in the year 2015.
And, since you will have a diverse range of delegates there, and everyone else watching this elective conference closely, the broadest appeal is the smartest one: Choosing a new political philosophy that is distinctively liberal still – because it values freedom and it values the individual – but you should insist that individuals can and should be allowed, without being erroneously labelled illiberal, to choose values for themselves in their private lives that may include group-identities and connections that stem from social structures.
The DA’s new values framework, to be unveiled soon, references the family, for example, which is a good start, but there is no hint of a liberal justification for valuing the family or recognising the individual can be oppressed in the family. You can’t just talk about social structures without making clear the link with individualism and freedom.
In other words, this is the speech that should, as I also argued in the first two chapters of Could I Vote DA? explain precisely how one can both be a liberal and value Ubuntu. It can be done. Just a pity Zille left only a few weeks for this message crafting to be perfected. Still, it is feasible.
I would then do a second thing. I would leave the political philosophy stuff, and allow it to sink in, and prepare for the weeks and months after the elective conference having to explain, and re-explain it, and defend it in healthy debate inside and outside the party, on social media platforms, broadcast media, opinion pieces, and in communities as I travel around the country to meet the grassroots base of the part. The aim wouldn’t be to be immediately be fully understood – ideology is dull stuff for many - but rather to be taken seriously as a liberal, and thinking leader, when speaking to political ideology and party identity in Port Elizabeth.
But you also have to keep it simple at big political events, including elective conferences. So I would balance the ideological stuff by bringing the speech back to the ground, with a very hard landing: Talking inequality and race, and tackling them head-on. These would not be random theme-choices. The aim would be to show your audience that you can move comfortably between ideology and everyone’s daily reality. So pick two hot, uncomfortable issues the country is grappling with, and show how you will handle them differently to any other leader. It is shocking, for example, that the new values document of the DA doesn’t mention the words “race”, “racism”, “black”, “white”, or “inequality” - or less jarring phrases like “unearned privilege”. It was written to avoid talking race and inequality; I would suggest, right there and then, as a candidate, we change it to be blunter about the obstacles to a fair society, which includes eliminating structural and interpersonal racism, and in particular anti-black racism.
Take inequality first. The next leader has an advantage here. Until now the DA has obsessed about economic growth and shied away from talking directly about inequality. It simply assumes that if we all have good education, and the economy grows around 7% or thereabouts that magically two things will happen: jobs will be created, and inequality will disappear. That’s not guaranteed. Under the presidency of Thabo Mbeki we had jobless growth, and inequality remains stubborn. A pie can be huge, and can be growing as you take it from the oven to the dining table, but that doesn’t guarantee it will be shared equally between your guests.
In the best case scenario the smallest piece will be big enough to ensure no one is hungry (translation: reducing poverty), but the distribution could still be unfair, massively unequal and therefore unjust (translation: economic growth is necessary but not sufficient to reduce gross inequality).
I would look the delegates and the country in the eye and concede: inequality is the single biggest threat to our democracy; frankly, a bigger threat than poverty, low economic growth and unemployment. Yes, yes; they are all evils, and interrelated evils at that. But the key here is to be the first DA leader to confront wealthy South Africans who vote for you, including, and in particular, middle class white South Africans, and tell them that their wealth, compared to the poverty of the black African majority, means we live in a country with an economy that is morally stained. It is untenable; it is imprudent; it is unjust, and every single person who is relatively wealthy needs to confront the uncomfortable truth that they are better off, for the most part, because of unearned privileges that got them there rather than because of sheer hard work.
The most difficult part of the speech, and its final component thematically, would be to now connect the inequality analysis with the history of colonialism and apartheid. I know, I know: NO one in the DA would risk this kind of analysis in Port Elizabeth. But they should, because it is sound. Recognising the countless missed opportunities over the past twenty years or so, due to ANC bungling, poor leadership, an ailing state and corruption, is compatible with not letting private citizens and corporate South Africa be let off the hook either.
And here the reality of how race and inequality coincides is important. The new DA leader must be frank about race. It is mostly black South Africans who still suffer the vestiges of our racist past, and I would say so to voting delegates, and urge them to endorse redress policies on the basis of race, and not just on the basis of need, and I would acknowledge that the millions of South Africans who never voted for us as an opposition party experience poverty, inequality and lack of opportunties racially. They do not just want the ANC’s crony capitalism to disappear; they want to be understood and empathised with for being victims of anti-black racism in all of society’s institutions in addition to wanting opportunities to escape the poverty cycle.
Will this kind of speech be delivered by anyone? Nah, there is a better chance of me winning the lottery this year than anyone stepping up to the podium in Port Elizabeth and effectively telling delegates to wake up and smell the black coffee. So what is more likely to happen are safe speeches that rehash the ANC’s known sins of incumbency, attack president Zuma for laughing more than he governs, warn against racial categories taking us back to the past, emphasise the vague idea of shared economic growth and ignore inequality, cite an Ode to the unread National Development Plan, brag about the DA already being so diverse that it is offensive to even ask it to talk about race, and emphasise class analysis as the next best thing in policy debates.
It will not be jarring, and a show of unity behind the leader will be comfortable for all. But here is the cost that will come with this scenario: Come 2019, if that kind of message is kept up it will play into the hands of not just the ANC but especially the EFF.
The ANC, firstly, would breathe more easily if the DA remains averse to structural analysis of the material conditions of present day South Africa. And the EFF will be happy to be the only opposition party to radically critique the ANC’s centralism as not taking black poverty, inequality and economic injustice seriously.
In other words, that which is safest in Port Elizabeth will comfort DA delegates but allow the ANC to remain complacent. Competitive politics will be the real loser. Will a new leader, or candidate for new leader, have the guts to think long-term and not anxiously seek an immediate standing ovation?
Concluding thoughts
You might wonder why on earth, If I was a political strategist in the DA, I would want to tell someone to potentially piss off DA delegates with a new brand of liberalism that sounds to a careless listener like it condones a bit of socialism, or advising a candidate to tell white supporters they have unearned privileges and, worse, admitting that we all see race, and that race matters deeply still.
No, this would not be to set up a candidate for failure. I would see it as advice based on two undeniable realities: politics is a numbers game; and anyone who cares about social justice must be historically minded and drill down into structural analysis.
White voters will decrease as a slice of the population over time; and, at any rate, we really should stop assuming white voters, and white DA supporters in particular, all look and think the same, and are racists who will run away if, for example, a black leader is chosen. Some might be pissed off; and even then I suspect the disappointment may not always be race-related. It could be a sincere but misplaced intuition that blacks cannot be faithful liberals, for example, or a sincere worry about a black candidate’s experience or competency. But whatever the concerns of some of the ‘core constituency’ of the party, you have to be a DA leader who can, by the time we get to 2019, potentially appeal to the majority of South Africans. It is irrational to worry about five old white enthusiastic trolls on Twitter, or three obsessive letter writers to a business daily.
Focus, new DA leader: the future is black, and not bleak. The rainbow never existed. And differences aren’t inherently divisive. Keep it real. And if you can’t appease everyone, focus on black voters who are annoyed with the ANC, and persuade them that you get them. But demonstrate that you do. They owe you no historical loyalty so will set the bar higher than they do for liberation heroes.
And that is why, also, the next leader must be excellent and black, and not just excellent. Being excellent is crucial, but not enough. Being black is crucial, but not enough either (which is why leaders like Mangosuthu Buthulezi and Bantu Holomisa are less popular than Helen Zille). So it is not just about race, but it is undeniably “also” about race, and not only about “excellence”, whatever excellence might mean. I am not sure if an excellent black candidate exists, but a black candidate will probably be chosen. I hope for their sake they become excellent.
Finally, the kind of vision I sketched here, if properly articulated, cannot be reduced to populism or racialism. It is a vision or philosophy that is defensible morally and politically: If a numerical majority of citizens have a collective memory of anti-black racism having defined so much of their lives, and experiences of that history still haunt us, how can I be a leader of a major party in the opposition, and hope to beat the ANC in 2019 or 2024, if I deliver speeches that ignore the lived experiences, and personal truths, of the vast majority? That would be, not just imprudent, but justice-insensitive.
So ignore the noisy critics, I would tell a candidate asking my advice, and remember the prize is to govern, if not in 2019 – that is unlikely – then in 2024. That means being prepared to leave behind old goats. And it means ignoring the bleating of the old goats as you craft and sell a new, inclusive liberal vision to take the party into the driving seat of power.
* Eusebius McKaiser is the author of A Bantu in My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s dilemma.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.