If I am elected leader of the DA, I will work to get the party challenging for power at a national level, says Mmusi Maimane.
Pretoria - In 1994, former Leader of the DA Tony Leon turned down Nelson Mandela’s offer of a Cabinet seat in the Government of National Unity.
This was a profound moment in our nation’s history.
Many accused Tony of being unpatriotic when, in fact, the opposite was true.
He knew that South Africa had no chance of succeeding unless there was a strong opposition to the ANC.
In his 14 years as leader, he grew the party from 1.7 percent to 16 percent – a truly remarkable achievement by any standard.
Another profound moment came in 2006 when Helen Zille ran for mayor of Cape Town and won enough votes to cobble together a seven-party coalition government in the City of Cape Town.
This was the first time in a democratic South Africa that the ANC had been voted out of power.
A year later, Helen Zille became the leader of the DA and declared that the DA was no longer just a party of opposition, but a party of government.
In her eight years at the helm of the DA, she doubled the party’s vote to more than 4 million at the last election.
And the DA won two provincial elections in the Western Cape with an outright majority. If the DA story were one day written as a trilogy, parts 1 and 2 would be about Tony and Helen’s leadership respectively: how the DA became the official opposition and then a party of government.
Part 3 of the DA story still needs to be written. I want it to be the story of how the DA began challenging for power at a national level, finally bringing an end to the ANC’s stranglehold on our politics.
If I am elected leader of the DA on May 10, I will work day and night to make this a reality.
When I ran for Gauteng premier last year, we covered 50 000km in our campaign bus, meeting with people in every community in that province. I chatted to informal traders in Alex, to business people in Soweto and suburbanites in Sandton.
We visited the Apartheid Museum, the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park.
During that campaign it became clear that people in our country of all races and backgrounds share many of the same values. They want the freedom to make their own choices about the life they want to live. And they want the power to improve their lives because freedom means nothing without opportunities.
These are universal values.
They transcend race and socio-economic circumstances.
They are the DA’s values.
Our challenge is to make an authentic connection with a new generation of voters on the basis of shared values, not race. This is why I am committed to fighting against populists who use racial mobilisation to divide our people. While others trade on the divisions of the past, I will position the DA as the party of tomorrow.
If I am elected to lead the DA, I will put education, entrepreneurship and empowerment at the heart of the DA’s plans to grow the economy and create jobs.
It is a fact that, in general, black children still do not have the same access to a quality education as white children. This is a tragedy that no South African should ever accept. We must equip all our children to compete on an equal footing in the global economy.
And yes, we must support measures that redress the legacy of past injustices. It is in every South African’s interest that we do so.
But this doesn’t mean that we support the ANC’s approach to Black Economic Empowerment and Affirmative Action.
The challenge for the DA is to forge a new non-racialism.
We must recognise that race shaped our identities and opportunities, but we mustn’t allow ourselves to stay trapped in the past. Our end goal must be to transcend race so that all may be truly free, both socially and economically.
The surest way to do this is by growing the economy at a rate fast enough to start creating jobs. It has been said that if South Africa wants to create 5 million new jobs, we need 1 million new small businesses. I want the DA to become the champion of small business, the party with the best ideas and the best policies to make South Africa a “start-up” nation.
We will reform BEE to make it truly broad based, so that it benefits small, businesses instead of those who have been empowered already.
We will ramp up infrastructure investment, delivering the critical infrastructure our economy needs to thrive again. We will slash unnecessary red tape to make it easier to start, run and grow a business. And we will trade more with the rest of Africa – still our greatest, and most underused, economic growth opportunity.
These are exciting times to be part of the DA. I believe we will emerge from our federal congress on the May 10 stronger and more united than ever before, ready to start writing a new chapter in our nation’s history.
* Mmusi Maimane MP is leader of the DA in Parliament and candidate for DA federal leader.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Pretoria News