A few months ago, at the height of the irrational pursuit to rid the City of Patricia de Lille as mayor, some details were leaked from the DA's federal executive meeting.
The leaks clearly stated that De Lille had to go to make way for Bonginkosi Madikizela, the current leader of the DA in the province.
It had emerged from that meeting that the DA had commissioned a survey by an independent body on both Madikizela and Alan Winde’s chances of winning the provincial electoral vote.
The survey came back negative for Madikizela (in that the DA could lose power in the province if they presented him as the face of their premiership campaign) and slightly above 50% for Winde.
Since this survey was deemed independent, Madikizela had no choice but to accept the findings of the survey.
It was apparent that the DA did not really have a De Lille problem, but a Madikizela problem.
Madikizela was, for all intents and purposes, "the rightful heir to the premiership" as the provincial leader of the DA, but he was deemed unsellable to the broader electorate as the premier.
The question then for the DA was what to do with Madikizela. The next best alternative for the party was the mayorship of the City of Cape Town.
This would clearly be acceptable to Madikizela because Cape Town is the centre of power in the Western Cape.
Also, 60% of the Western Cape population lives in Cape Town and so is the budget allocation. This would also be safe for the DA, because the City of Cape Town is not up for election, at least until 2021.
Madikizela has been an MEC since 2009, and it's unlikely that he still has an appetite to remain an MEC.
His valiant fight to be the leader of the DA in the province can't have been done for altruistic reasons, but with the hope of rising above MEC status into the premiership.
Pushing De Lille out to make way for Madikizela was then a way to save both the party and the provincial government.
But the way the DA handled De Lille's exit and the leak that Madikizela would be her replacement left a bitter public taste and that project was abandoned.
De Lille herself went public to lament this Madikizela project which led to terrorising her for no apparent reason.
Choosing Winde seems to solve the potential loss of electoral victory in the province, but it does not solve the Madikizela problem.
What makes the problem even more complicated is that Madikizela has shown great loyalty to the party, especially the white cabal over and against fellow black party leaders.
When Mbali Ntuli, former DA youth leader in KwaZulu-Natal, MPL in KZN and overall vibrant young leader liked a Facebook post which criticised Helen Zille, it was Madikizela who laid a charge against her with the DA's federal executive council.
After Zille's offensive colonial tweets, Madikizela, as her leader in the province, did nothing.
When De Lille resigned as leader of the DA in the province, clearly pushed over the edge, Madikizela, then De Lille’s deputy, was only happy to jump into her post without ever questioning this treatment of De Lille or black women.
Madikizela has been subservient and complicit and this should have come with the reward of the premiership.
What is clear, however, is that the Western Cape is the last stronghold of the DA’s old white cabal and if they were to finally have a black leader or make the premiership post democratic within the party, there may never be another white leader in the province.
De Lille was seen as pliant and complicit in the retaining of white privilege using the black vote for a while until she later proved difficult to control.
The DA’s white cabal is not ready to risk that again. Madikizela was a perfect stooge for the retaining of white privilege in the City.
DA leaders don't come across as biased and don't actively preserve white interests as Winde did. When the province was on the verge of running out of water, Winde defended farmers' ownership of private dams and keeping the water supply only for themselves.
The City was facing Armageddon and farmers could bring the required relief to the province by releasing some of their water reserves, with Winde on the side of the farmers.
It is the farmers themselves who ultimately saw the light and released thousands of litres for the people and Day Zero was avoided.
The poor, the farmworkers and black people are not on Winde’s radar.
He will always be on the side of the owners of the means of production, largely and mostly white, and the rest of us be damned.
As the ANC, we cannot allow him to win. We cannot allow the DA to return to power. It would be a sad day for the people.
* Yonela Diko is the ANC Western Cape spokesperson.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.